Thousands of zombies invade downtown Denver

One of the undead souls roaming the city streets (more photos below)

In 2009, popular culture is saturated with the undead. The film Zombieland opened at number one in its first week in theaters, but it is only the most recent in a series of wildly successful zombie-themed movies, video games and comic books to capture the American imagination. The idea of an infectious state of non-quite-deadness-- of a conversion of living flesh to brain-ravenous, glassy-eyed and single-minded swarming masses-- has an appeal to the inhabitants of early-millennial America. The film that may best explain the reason for this comes from across the pond-- in the British black comedy Shaun of the Dead, the titular hero has trouble at first differentiating the zombie masses from the normal state of those he interacts with on a daily basis.

In recent years, this zombie-obsession has manifested itself in public spectacles across the country-- "Zombie Crawls" in which participants gather in shredded clothing, peeling theatrical makeup, and buckets of fake blood, to rampage a crowded business district. On Saturday night Denver hosted its own Zombie Crawl, ensuring that, for one night, the bodies stumbling and moaning through the downtown streets were more likely to be sporting festering wounds than Ed Hardy t-shirts. The event kicked off at Skyline Park (map) as participants spread out onto the 16th Street Mall, mobbing the Mall Ride shuttle and clawing at the windows of local bars and restaurants.

Over two-thousand zombies of all ages attended the event, each expressing their own unique take on the undead. Also in attendance were gun-toting zombie hunters and hapless non-zombies who marked themselves with a duct-tape "X," indicating a willingness to be a zombie "victim." As the slow-moving crowd filled the downtown streets with groans and shrieks they were met with a mixed reaction by the living-- some amusement, some horror, and some simple annoyance (especially by those drivers trying to navigate zombie-clogged intersections.) Later that night as the bars started to empty, it became much harder, a la Shaun of the Dead, to differentiate the zombie-crawlers from the rest of the crowd.