Journal Zero

Red, White, and Dead attendees: your Night Zero photos are here!

Last week, the Seattle zombie community brought in the holidays with a tremendous undead groan, the shuffle of rotting feet echoing throughout the Fremont neighborhood. It was the first annual “Red, White, and Dead” celebration, organized by the Fremont Outdoor Movies, Seattle Zombie Walk, and of course, the team here at Night Zero.

It was a hot summer Friday, and most people had holiday because of the 4th landing on the weekend. We started setting up the twin movie lots well before noon, in preparation for an event we couldn’t possibly be prepared for. Even though the official event didn’t begin until 6:00pm, there were zombies showing up as early as 3:00, excited and ready to go. By five, there were over a thousand people in line. The queue for registration ran for four city blocks.

Why registration? For the glory. There were many facets to the July 3rd festivities in addition to the zombie walks, including the Night Zero makeup, photo  and survival safety booths, horror writer S.G. Browne, a Michael Jackson tribute Thriller dance, and at the end of the night, Shaun of the Dead projected onto two giant screens, but the biggest and most ambitious part of all was our ultimate goal: to break the Guinness World Record for largest zombie gathering.

There were two Guinness Records on the book, an “official” record (which requires a documented and certified tally) and an “unofficial” record, which is approximated based on photo and video evidence. The official recordholder was Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania, with 1,341 documented zombies. The unofficial record holder is Grand Rapids, Michigan, with an estimated 3370 zombies. For our event, we had a dozen lanes of registration lines for first count, and preprinted nametags for a second count.

And how did we do? The registration lists, supervised by two signed notaries, tally up at 3,848 zombies. The nametag tally totals 4,277 zombies. Unofficial estimates from the news media suggest that we had upwards of 6,000 attendees throughout the day. But no matter how you look at it, one thing is undisputed: Seattle is the World Record holder, and probably will be for some time.

In addition to the hundreds of photos taken at the Night Zero booth, there are thousands of photos on Flickr from the event, and a good time can be had just browsing them all. Below are some of our favorites.