The only reasonable thing to do when you see a zombie—if you don’t have a large-caliber weapon, a flamethrower or a bazooka handy, that is—is to run.
Countless zombie flicks have been built on the premise of shambling, scraping, rotting undead creatures pursuing their brain-carrying prey: us. See a zombie, you better get out of the way. As in now, lest you become a meal.
Pop culture’s love affair with these deteriorating-but-still-deadly creatures has waxed and waned since director George Romero first brought them to the big screen with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. And with the recent, ahem, runaway success of AMC’s The Walking Dead, pop culture seems to have zombies on the brain again.
So much so, in fact, that you can now run away from zombies in the real world. Well, sort of.
For runners who are sick and tired of “normal” 5K races, an organization called Run for Your Lives has added a bit of undead spice to the proceedings. These races, which are currently scheduled at 11 different locations around the country, feature a traditional 5K course, a dozen different obstacles to be overcome and zombies … played by actors who are dressed to “kill.”
Run for Your Lives co-creator explained how the races work in Entertainment Weekly, “All of our runners have a belt with three flags, and the zombies goal is to pull flags. For the runners, the point is to finish the entire course with the best time while keeping at least one of their flags.”
You might think this sounds like something only a few horror-hardened souls would be interested in. But you’d be dead wrong. It’s a measure of zombies’ significant and ongoing cultural influence that 10,000 people signed up for the privilege of being pursued by the faux undead at the inaugural Run for Your Lives race in Darlington, Md., last October.
Personally, I don’t know quite whether to laugh or recoil in horror from this bizarre intersection of pop culture and the real world. I’m probably inclined to do the former, while at the same time noting that this odd story once again illustrates—albeit in a very strange way—the power of movies, images and ideas to capture our imagination.
Or maybe just capture our brains.
Recent Comments