2012 Toronto Zombie Walk

 

Thursday Morning, October 18, I flew to Toronto to experience the Tenth Annual Toronto Zombie Walk, A Decade of Decay, the most popular such event anywhere in the world.

On Saturday at around noon, the group of 10,000 zombies gathered in Nathan Phillips "Scare" across the street from the old mayor's building and the new municipal building--and the Sheraton Centre Hotel, the Walk's official hotel in which I stayed.  In fact, I got the last room in the hotel block.

Thursday evening, I walked to the harbor and returned there Friday morning to take a harbor boat tour.  As the photographs indicate, fog dominated that part of the day, but I enjoyed the ride and the bracing lake air. 

After walking back to the hotel, around a half-hour walk, I took the subway to the ROM, The Royal Ontario Museum, and an excellent place to wander for a few hours.

The dinosaur exhibition--with creatures from Africa, Madagascar, and Argentina--is tremendous, and you will find plenty of photographs on the photography link for the first two days of my visit.

But while Toronto, emerging in the preceding photograph from the fog, is a beautiful city, the chance to experience the Zombie Walk drew me there.

And with around 10,000 zombies in attendance, finding interesting photographs does not require a great deal of work!

The second and third sets of images from the day, approximately 200 photographs, focus on the events from around noon until three, when the official march began.

I enjoyed plenty of conversations with people throughout the day, including the two Toronto police officers the zombies attack in the preceding photograph.

The pre-walk events included various prizes for the outfits and featured a Moan Zone station for zombies to record their moans for an upcoming live play production of Night of the Living Dead organized by Grand Marshals of the Tenth Annual Walk, John Russo and Russ Streiner, both long associated with Zombie fare.

The final set of photographs--208 of them--chronicle the actual Zombie walk, over 5km of foot-dragging moans, that included an imaginative and impressive group of zombie-loving folks, around 10,000 of them, from what I understand.

The images also feature some of the post-walk events, including the Montreal based band, The Brains, psychobilly horror punk.  You can listen to some of their music on line, and I recorded a couple numbers that I will eventually post here.
 
Over the next couple days, I will add at least three videos, two from the walk and a third with music.

Zombie Walk Video Part One:


 

Zombie Walk Video Part Two:




Some Zombie Music, including Montreal's The Brains: