Weekend at Zombies Revisited: ZomBcon Diaries, Part Deux (Photo Gallery)

Saturday, October 30: Celebrity Guests and Horror Screenings Galore

I won't lie. All of the scientific panels holding sway at ZomBcon make for interesting and lively brain food. But the big draw for yours truly (as well as the lion's share of attendees, undead or otherwise) is the galaxy of cult movie fixtures at hand.

Bruce Campbell, a battle-hardened veteran of everything from standard-issue horror cons to Xena conventions (he was a recurring guest star on that Lucy Lawless TV show in the 1990s), delivers advice on "How to Kill a Zombie" at one of ZomBcon's best-attended Undead Labs. Before and after that session, he signs autographs for fans and engages in an amusing Q&A at the Phelps. Sadly, I miss Campbell officiating over a renewal of wedding vows for a horde of the Married Dead. The actor's a total wiseacre, alternately cajoling and kidding attendees with the amusing candor of your smart-alecky older brother. Typical fan-to-actor exchange:

Fan: Are there any movies you regret having done?

Campbell: Not if I get paid [laughs]. If you pay me, your movie's my favorite damned movie ever!

Fan: Will there ever be an Alien Apocalypse 2?

Campbell: There shouldn't have been an Alien Apocalypse 1...

He cements his status as crush to Fangirls everywhere by cutting a dashing figure in a smart red suit jacket. "God, he's so cute!" one buxom Living Dead Girl gushes, rivulets of bloody flesh hanging from her face. "He looks like he's lost weight..."

Also appearing for the duration of the weekend: Character actor Ted Raimi (brother of Evil Dead director Sam), and the three female leads from the original Evil Dead--Teresa Tilly, Ellen Sandweiss, and Betsy Baker. Tilly, Sandweiss, and Baker offer their insights on the sub-genre from a woman's perspective during an entertaining Sunday morning Lab.

Malcolm McDowell gives a great, lengthy talk (well-moderated by writer Mark Rahner) in the Northwest Rooms, covering the actor's entire career from his films with maverick director Lindsay Anderson in the 1960's to his work in A Clockwork Orange to his recent genre efforts. Interestingly, McDowell's never done a zombie film, but his appearances in two Rob Zombie movies--Zombie's remakes of Halloween and Halloween 2, respectively--count, I guess. Plus he's Malcolm frickin' McDowell, for God's sake. Like Campbell, McDowell spends much of ZomBcon signing autographs and pressing the flesh with fans. The free-form mop of brown hair that served as a trademark of his youth has evolved into a shock of white spikiness, but he still works that impish and lethal charm on men, women, and children alike.

McDowell's presence is cause for joy around the nerd campfire, but the die-hard horror geeks are fairly salivating over the presence of George Romero at ZomBcon. It's Romero's first time ever in Seattle, and he attracts hushed reverence and awe from nearly all who come to his table for an autograph and a handshake. I decide to wait until Sunday to meet him.

The movie screenings fly fast and furious today, with an early-morning screening of Romero's Dawn of the Dead introduced by actor Scott Reiniger, Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness presented by Ted Raimi and actor Danny Hicks; and evening show of Romero's third zombie epic Day of the Dead officiated by actors Terry Alexander and John Amplas; and a midnight showing of Fight Club, introduced by the source novel's author Chuck Palahniuk (his forthcoming novel Damned sounds like a pretty straightforward genre effort by Palahniuk standards).

Sunday, October 31: Happy Halloween, A Zombie Walk, An Interview (sort of) with the Don of the Dead, and Hello Kitty...

It's hard to really convey George Romero's importance as a pop culture influence. Romero essentially invented the modern notion of zombies as ravenous gutmunchers, and brought a pronounced socio-political eye to the horror genre with his Living Dead films. I watch Dawn of the Dead, the man's 1978 masterpiece, three times the preceding week, and it's amazing how effective the film remains as a character study, as a funhouse mirror to American consumerism, as a violent action flick, and as a truly horrific vision of a world in literal and metaphoric decay (Zack Snyder's glossy and synthetically downbeat remake, with its sprinting track-star undead hordes, just looks shallow by comparison).

I'm stoked beyond belief to meet the director, and in person he's a genuine, salt-of-the-earth East-coaster, freely sharing stories of his days as a guerrilla filmmaker in Philadelphia onstage and with conventiongoers. He continues to work just outside of the Hollywood machine, partly by choice and partly by budgetary necessity. His latest zombie flick, Survival of the Dead, falls a little short of his hallmark works in the genre, but it earns mad props for possessing a distinctive point of view, albeit in somewhat broader fashion than in the past.

Romero politely declines a request for a full-on interview: He's been burned by fanboy journalism coverage in the past, and is reluctant to have said burning repeated. But my trusty tape recorder happens to be activated while he signs my four-disc deluxe DVD edition of Dawn of the Dead, and I get the following mini-interview with the Don of the Dead.

So is this your first time in Seattle?

Yeah.

How do you like it so far?

What little I've seen of it's been great [laughs]...

So did you have any idea that this little movie you did forty-some years ago [Night of the Living Dead] would wreak all of this havoc on popular culture?

Absolutely not [laughs]; no idea.

Survival of the Dead has the most interesting ending of any of your movies. It's almost totally subverting the sub-genre you created. Do you see it as a coda; an ending to the zombie work?

I hope not. Nobody knows. I'd like to do more, but it depends completely on how well Survival does, when all is said and done. We'll see.

Thank you for coming.

My pleasure.

Today marks ZomBcon's official Zombie Walk, so imaginatively-decked-out undead swarm the convention aisles. Among them: A young woman in a dress made entirely of human faces (in a why-didn't-someone-think-of-this-sooner moment, she stitched together several rubber masks to make the grotesque garment); Luke Skywalker and Han Solo zombies; a Where's Waldo zombie; several undead clergy members; two Starbuck's Barista Zombies; a Snow White zombie; and one undead female victim of, ahem, nipular violence who rouses the biggest amount of buzz from fanboys in attendance. These and many other members of the Undead Club gather outside the Phelps Center, led by Zombie Walk co-organizer Eric Pope to walk en masse through the Metropolitan Market. It's a surreal, literally traffic-stopping scene as unsuspecting Market shoppers rub shoulders with the Undead hordes--and being in the thick of it proves to be a helluva good time.

The last hour or so, much of the crowd drifts to a screening of Day of the Dead, introduced by Romero. I buzz back to the Main Hall to talk zombies and Dario Argento with Mark Rahner, whose comic Rotten sports equal sprinklings of George Romero and Sergio Leone.

A few booths over, local author Timothy W. Long sells two zombie fiction novels. Among the Living sets up a zombie infestation in Seattle proper. "I call it a pre-apocalyptic zombie book," Long explains. "It starts in Queen Anne... It also takes place on the Waterfront, there's a battle on the Ferry, and some zombie fights in Pioneer Square, Quest Field, and Seattle Center...I try to get all the big landmarks." And The Zombie-Wilson Diaries tells the story of a man stranded on a desert island with an attractive (but decidedly flesh-hungry) zombie woman. Long's only been at it fully for two years, and he's already made serious inroads: His forthcoming book's being eyed by a major publisher, and there's even talk of filmmakers sniffing around his works for source material.

5:00--the official end of ZomBcon--rolls around, and appropriately enough, I stumble across the official Zombie Walk booth to talk briefly with Cleo Loftus (aka Cleo Zombie). She and Pope have been organizing Zombie Walks for five years now, and they're the reason that Seattle's Zombie Walks have broken world records. She reminisces fondly about the Walk's humble beginnings as a medium of almost punk expression: One of the earliest events she staged was a zombie feast on a faux-George W. Bush--when the revenants got to his skull, they of course discovered it to be an empty and unworthy meal vessel. The massive scale of the recent Zombie Walks generates mixed feelings in her: She loves how the Walks bring folks together, but expresses understandable ambivalence at how big they've become. "They're almost like family events now," she says. Cleo laments how quickly a pack of ZomBcon zombies sells themselves to the camera crew of a Dorito's commercial as she wraps up mock-barbed wire and packs up a disembodied head.

A VIP party for ZomBcon special guests supposedly awaits at the Northwest Rooms, so I hotfoot my way west in an attempt to freeload my way in. The event looks to be canceled (or not yet underway), but the fates bring me something as wonderfully surreal and strange as any ZomBcon event: A Hello Kitty Infestation.

Sanrio, Inc., it turns out, is celebrating their fiftieth anniversary with a road tour. An uber-macho Dodge Ram truck sports a coat of many cute Sanrio characters, there's a Hello Kitty Smart Car, and two garishly-illustrated trailers coated with everyone's favorite Japanese cartoon feline and her cuter-than-cute Sanrio pals. A cheerful thirty-something woman offers me a biblical-tablet-sized stack of Hello Kitty Halloween Glitter Stickers, and a chance to spin the Hello Kitty Roulette Wheel for a chance at fabulous prizes. I try my hand at the clacking wheel, and win the Grand Prize--A Target Gift Card. Maybe I'll use it to buy a copy of Shaun of the Dead.

[ZomBcon offered an embarrassment of riches, interview-wise: Stay tuned for chats with John Amplas, star of George Romero's underrated 1977 vampire film, Martin; and Scott H. Reiniger, Dawn of the Dead's hot-headed cop, Roger.]