Hunting for Brains In Hollywood

Hollywood’s first zombie mob shuffles out of the gates of hell and into the arms of the Lord.

by Lucinda Michele Knapp

The disheveled man limped anxiously across the intersection of Hollywood and Vine with a hunted gaze on his face. His tourist’s Hawaiian shirt and Bermudas were scuffed and smeared, grime coating his legs and arms. At the corner, he suddenly tripped, fell, struggled scrabbling at the sidewalk, and screamed in horror as a crowd of zombies bore down on him—in seconds he vanished utterly, obscured by the ravenous mob. Only his screams were audible.

It really happened. And then I parked my car. more…

Out of seemingly nowhere, raised from the boneyards of the Internet, about 200 Angelenos dressed as zombies (some have estimated 300) appeared at the corner of Hollywood and Vine Saturday night. Why? For fun. As a joke. Because it’s good to fuck with the culture. And because it’s not often you have the protection of a zombie mob to allow you to freely spray blood all over the Hollywood sidewalk anymore (you could do that all by your lonesome in the eighties and no one would care, but in the new, sterile H’wood, you need a ravenous mob of brain-hungry freaks at your back to keep the cops at a safe distance when you’re smearing the backlit bubblegum-pink exterior of Geisha House with gore).

Flash mobs have been assembling for many years now, but this is the first zombie mob to assault Hollywood’s newly steam-cleaned sidewalks. I went because, as a veteran of many a Santa Con, I was hoping for a more menacing juxtaposition of pop culture vs. fuckos willing to give it the finger. Santa is just so hard to hate, and when two hundred Santas stage a die-in at Hollywood and Highland, shutting down the traffic in all directions, it’s merely amusing, charming. But if a mob of zombies could do it, the message could potentially be so much clearer.

Zombies.

In Hollywood.

Get it?

As the huge crowd began to string itself out along the boulevard, a punk rock zombie with a rotting left cheek smooshed himself up against the glass front of Kung Pao Kitty, staring at the diners who giggled nervously. “Mmmmmmmraaah,” he enunciated, and smeared slowly east, then stumbled on. The manager rushed out enraged, waving her hands in the air, yelling with great sputtering indignation, “Ooh, great, thanks, VERY FUNNY! Who’s gonna get back here and clean this?!”

Memo to humorless Kung Pao Kitty manager: you are, bitch.*

In fact, this was indicative of much of the response received. Workers and visitors to the happy new Hollywood don’t want their experience smeared, grimed, tweaked or otherwise complicated, thankyouverymuch. Blame it on the high rents and the high prices, because after forking over twenty bucks to get into a club, a hundred on drinks, five hundred on your suit, watch and shoes (a modest estimate) and untold thousands on your Beemer, you won’t find it very amusing when a man and woman dressed as bride and groom zombies come lurching towards your petite blonde date’s open car door.

The young woman in the passenger seat struggled mightily as her car door stuck on the curb, desperately trying to haul it closed before the zombies could overtake the car; as the gore-drooling crowd noticed this perfect opportunity and stumbled towards her she made an exasperated face at them all, mouthing “Oh PLEASE,” with nothing but irritation at the mob. The right and just laws of nature no longer hold sway in Hollywood if this woman is allowed to get her car door closed unmolested—it’s too perfect of a B-movie flick cliché; and yet she is, and she does, and they motor off, probably bitching the whole way about how much traffic there is and how the wild-caught ahi wasn’t as fresh tonight. How? How did we just let them go without at least spraying a little spittle on their receding rearview window? How is this possible?

Because we all feel so fucking guilty.

We don’t want to upset people.

We want to be sensitive.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy, really: most folks who are drawn to this sort of art-protest-prank are sensitive, thoughtful souls themselves. Plunk them in a situation where their job is to make people uncomfortable, and they themselves get uncomfortable. Apologetic. You don’t often find raging assholes with no sense of social responsibility taking part in a sophisticated, culturally-thoughtful prank. It ended up being the most well-behaved mob I’ve ever seen.

The punk rock zombies did the best job, because in them dwelt a preexisting sense of Fuck You; an anarchic righteousness, a passion for the vitality entropy can bring. They spilled into the street, clawed at the windows of Starbucks, raced into and out of businesses, patronized the bars and generally raised hell. One limped on a single crutch, a victim of a foreign war, his countless piercings blending in with the gook on his face; a purple-mohawked guy looked straight out of Repo Man (except for being dead); a pink dread-hawked girl pirouetted laughing between cars, twirling a busted green parasol and spitting broken teeth into storefronts, her summer sundress flowers spattered with gore. A biker crew yelled after the girls in their tattered dresses, “Dead girls are hot!” Faux-hawked hipster zombies sauntered like dead dandies, their pervasive ennui needing no tweaks to get into character.

A zombie In-N-Out employee staggered down Sunset with an eyeball popped onto the end of his medium drink; as the crowd approached the glowing, holy lights of In-N-Out by Hollywood High, a muttering chant raised: “In-N-Out! In-N-Out!” and the crowd, which had swelled to over 200, shambled towards L.A.’s own best purveyor of ground meat.

When the mob surrounded the tiny little building the seething, bloodied crowd parted, ushering in the In-N-Out zombie, who stalked through the crowd like a tipsy bride down the aisle. Young female zombies tittered with glee as he entered In-N-Out, and the hapless patrons froze as he moaned with great theatrical effect “My paycheck! My paycheck!” and menaced various customers frozen in shock, before slowly pivoting and exiting, yelling “I’m NEVER working here again!” Stunned In-N-Out visitors stared, giggled, or froze and ignored us in their discomfort.

This was, in fact, the most fascinating coping tool I encountered all night: the silent ignorers. They barreled forward on their path through the crowd, be damned if they’d flinch or make eye contact; if we’d obstructed their way I think they might have struck out, hit us, to get through. People like this terrify me.

It was a night ripe with observations on humanity, actually. I came alone, because all my friends were either in other cities for the weekend, or were at the Eagle Rock Music Festival, or the LA Weekly thing downtown, or were stuck at the Brewery Artwalk. It fell to me alone to join the zombie ranks for the night.

When I do stuff like this I consider it a great chance to meet new people. You’re aligned in a common, rebellious cause, the sort that welds disparate souls together in a sense of camaraderie. You’re staying together for safety—a lone zombie is a zombie in trouble. You share opinions, beliefs, about the way society works. You’re all covered in sticky fake blood.

But I found camaraderie that night markedly absent. Friendly gestures were rebuffed. Conversations fell flat. Gazes were averted. I expected it of the mod hipster zombies I saw, but not of the other folks. People had come with a partner, or a small crew of friends, and weren’t open to chatting, or even laughing together. It was sad.

In L.A., you don’t have to be a zombie for people to be afraid of you: you just have to be a stranger.

You can’t really blame people. It’s a big, full city, and a scary one even in the best of times when there are no ravenous crowds of filthy people mobbing the sidewalks. When people you don’t know turn to you to talk, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark if you guessed they were insane. Or wanted fifty cents. Or wanted you to invest in their new screenplay. So we cling to our friends, our lovers, and avert the eyes of strangers. It’s how we cope. We get by. Our worlds stay small, but they stay safe.

As the mob gathered itself post In-N-Out and headed north up La Brea back to Hollywood, I noticed a few people posting signs for a random, zombie-themed website I won’t mention here (they already got enough press). When I got home I checked it out and it seems to belong to one Leif Gantvoort (can that possibly be a real name?), who’s an actor with a production company in L.A. way to go, Leif. It’s nice to see the small fry taking the “viral marketing” cue from the bigger corporations and applying their own special brand of cynicism to what could have been so much nicer if it were just left as pure experience. Each time I saw another sign tacked to a palm tree, I worried that we’d all been assembled by some company as just a piece of their youth culture target marketing machine. It tainted my enjoyment of the event. Was I here under false pretenses? Was I a dupe? Was I a mindless, crowd-following, easily-led, unthinking…zombie?

Sigh.

We trickled, particulate, through the crowd in front of the Chinese theatre, sending nervous tourists into the arms of their loved ones and creeped-out clubgoers from the Midwest, out for their first stupid night in L.A., into the corners of the glass front of the Virgin Megastore. Street performers stared dumbstruck, then gamely returned to playing battered guitars through min-amps. The slo-mo Michael Jackson look alike on his milk crate stood unmoving (surprise). We regrouped on the corner of Hollywood and Highland in front of the Gap.

I was depressed none of us “fell into the Gap.” The whole march showed a marked reluctance to push the boundaries into any sort of strong cultural commentary. For a start, though, it was good. Most of these people had never contributed to a public prank before, had never read an Adbusters or heard of the Cacophony Society (or Discordianism, or the seminal Church of the SubGenius). Just the fact that they were willing to tweak the public norms this much was a good sign.

Then, as we stood at the corner, a chorus of holy voices drifted to us from an indeterminate source. The traffic slowed. The crowd stood still in shock. Across the street from us at the southeast corner of Hollywood and Highland was a small, severe crowd dressed in black and white, probably numbering about thirty. Men, women and children in the plain, rigid religious garb of evangelical Christians, stared at us; mutual jaws dropped on both sides of the street as each group found themselves faced with the most brilliant opportunity to accomplish their individual aims that night. The steadfast Church of God missionaries rocked on their heels, plainly terrified at the sin and debauchery surrounding them. They’d come to save to souls of Hollywood—to the most accursed street corner on the planet, the root of evil—

—and now a ravenous crowd of degenerate zombies was amassing across the street from them.

The younger zombies stared in anxiety at having to traverse this guilt-mongering obstacle to their unfettered anarchic joy; the more irony-minded thinkers among us shrieked with laughter, stricken with a sudden (and poetic) belief in God, at the appearance of such a happy coincidence. Across the street from us, the small children quaked but held their ground. Their little faces were buoyed by their faith, by their parents who thrust them forward—singing their hymns even louder, even more stridently, into the paths of passerby—and by the steadfast bravery that children possess. I found myself raging at the parents for putting their children into this situation, at eight p.m. on a Saturday night in Hollywood; but then again, after our ravenous crowd had passed, leaving the Evangelicals [mostly] unmolested and unbloodied, did the children exult at having weathered the storm of sin? Did they feel triumphant, having stood strong against the raging tide of entropy and irony and blood and guts and unfocused ennui? Would they continue on in their lives, stronger in their faith in a God who protected them against all comers, no matter how horrific?

Did they thank their God for this opportunity?

I know I did.

For future zombifications, visit http://www.zombiewalk.com/

* Not immune to a sense of social responsibility myself, I cannot believe I just wrote that; and at the time had to restrain myself from apologetically going back to Windex her window. ~sigh.~