Zombie Walk held Wednesday to raise money for station
Dripping with blood and walking with a ragged swagger, more than 100 undead monks, nuns, robots and witches rose on Halloween night to feast.
But these music-loving brain eaters weren’t scanning the horizon for human flesh. It turns out that the massive milky-eyed herd making up the third annual Zombie Walk was in the mood for a meaty Southwestern spread at Moe’s.
The event is hosted each year by USC’s student-run radio station WUSC-FM to raise awareness and money (and the undead) for the station.
“Each year we are responsible for coming up with a $13,000 budget by ourselves,” said Kate Appelbaum, a second-year broadcast journalism student and the public affairs director for WUSC. “All I really spent was just a couple of bucks for makeup. We even got the USCPD to escort us for free.”
Appearances of the “walkers” ranged from traditional zombie chic, with scars and bloody mouths and faces, to animals, TV characters and even a zombie soldier who’d gone AWOL years ago.
Kalyn Oyer, a second-year journalism student, took a creative approach to her outfit for the big day by pairing an old, dark Native American dress with striking facial markings of blood and decay.
With all of the gore on display at the Russell House, the group began to trudge down Greene Street.
“Imagine people walking slowly, creepily—maybe something like ‘The Walking Dead,’” Oyer said.
Unlike prior years, when the undead army started its march at Russell House and ended at a party in Five Points, the zombies paraded around campus this year before ending at Moe’s for an evening feast and a percent night benefitting WUSC.
“When Halloween occurs on a Wednesday night, a party in Five Points just may not be the best decision,” said Calvin Koon-Stack, a fourth-year English student and the station manager for WUSC. “Our goal is really just to go around campus and emphasize publicity [for WUSC].”
The zombies congregated in front of Russell House, where they applied blood and made finishing touches to their respective ensembles before they set off. The blood, made from corn starch, cocoa powder and red food coloring, is just as edible but not as delicious as human blood.
Amber Brown, a first-year English student, heard that in case the mob decided to attack, the “zombie escape plan” from USC was for all students on campus to report the bottom floor of Thomas Cooper library.
However, Carman Fowler, a first-year criminology student, disagreed.
“There would be no where to push the zombies out if we were on the bottom floor. It would be most logical to go to the top so we could push them out of windows,” she said.
“It’s not as dorky as people think it is to be prepared for a zombie apocalypse. You have Ph.D. professors doing research on this topic,” said Fowler. “Find me a bike, a gun and a Walmart and I’m good to go.”