Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2012 | Page 16

12 Popular Culture Review clothing that people would wear in different walks of life while they are engaged in different sorts of human activities—and they paint their faces like zombies and smear themselves with blood. The point is that this is less an act of fantasy than it is everyone acting out his or her necessary and ultimate fate. And it is interesting to think about this phenomenon not as an alternative Halloween, but as an inverse Halloween. That is, zombie walks don’t always occur in October. They take place all throughout the year. But more than this, if we think of Halloween as a time to put on a costume and become something radically other, then the zombie walk is quite the opposite. One of the reasons that zombies are frightening in the movies is precisely because they do not wear scary costumes. They have on the clothing of everyday people because they are everyday people. They are plumbers and businessmen and professors and dancers and shoppers and cab drivers and theoretical physicists and all the rest. Of course, when we realize this—when we see that the zombie walk is something that we can both dress up for and not dress up for at the same time—we also realize that our everyday clothes are already costumes. When we go throughout our day in our so-called real lives, we are playing parts and adopting roles. This is what it means to be a person: we are constantly performing our identity. And clothing is one way of costuming for that performance. When I teach classes at my university, for instance, I wear a jacket and tie. It means something to my students to see me in a jacket and tie. It provides context to the words that I speak and helps establish such moments in my fractured identity: I am an academic. It would be strange, for instance, if each evening after teaching, I were to take a shower and prepare to get ready for sleep, putting on a suit and tie again before crawling into bed. One of the things we realize about ourselves from the inverse-Halloween presentation of the zombie is that it is possible to inhabit our clothes—and by extension, our roles— in a zombified manner. There is very little that separates us from the zombie. To become this monster we needn’t grow hair everywhere like a werewolf; we needn’t sprout fangs and do the other magical things that a vampire does; we don’t grow or shrink or change species or mutate as some monsters do. Zombies are special because to become one all we have to do is die (which we will do someday) and then stay around (which we will do someday for those who love us). Or be dead in some way already (a state with which we are, all no doubt, familiar). When we take images from popular culture and turn them into zombie versions of the same, we thus expose something about the culture that was dead—and frightening—to begin with. There are, thus, zombie Barbies, zombie Hello Kitty, and even images of a zombie Mona Lisa. And during zombie walks, participants sometimes choose to dress up first as a character from popular culture and then turn that character into a zombie. Star Wars characters are quite popular (with zombie Stormtroopers and Ewoks being the costumes of choice), as well as zombified corporate mascots (one hasn’t really lived—or died—until one has been terrified by a zombie Ronald McDonald stalking the streets).