Night of the Living Dead is being screened in the vacant lot. Well, actually, a bizarre, homebrew rendition of Night of the Living Dead called Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is being screened. It’s a pastiche of different forms of animation used to recreate the movie. “Reanimated uses a lot of different styles, including sock-puppets, the Half Life 2 video game engine, and Claymation,” says Perri Naccarato, who is sporting a fake Terminator 2 style pump action shot gun and screening the movie with the help of Zach Liverman.
It’s nice to see that love endures despite the undead rising to feast upon the flesh of the living. There’s a very sweet, very dead couple shuffling around, making convincing zombie noises. They are (were?) Janick Szablinsky and Ashley Rose. Rose is ecstatic about the event, and proud of her zombified hell-hole of a town. “The Zombie Walk is a great event, and another reason why Saugerties is the greatest town to live in,” she says. Then she takes Janick’s hand and folds back into character
It’s fun to be a bystander, but I can’t help but shake the completely irrational paranoia that if there were ever a time for the zombie uprising to happen, it would be during a zombie walk. Sometimes it’s difficult not to take a swing at creatures that jump out at you in the dark of night who, in another setting, would definitely be trying to eat your skin. It’s against human nature to not attack zombies.
At 9 o’clock, Tyrannosaurus Rocks plays in Donlon Auditorium, above the firehouse. They call it a tribute to Zomstock. According to Tyrannosaurus Rocks, Zomstock was a hell of a show. Zombie Mitchell played, as well Zombie Hendrix and Zombie, Stills and Nash. The band even commissioned a banner that reads “Zomstock: Peace, Love, and Zombies.” Band members rattle off short and clever accounts of the fake festival between songs. The show is charming and refreshingly not spooky, but the concert is the site of a tragedy greater than the imaginary death and reanimation of hundreds of Saugertesians: a few friends of the band and I are the only people in the audience.
I try not to think about it, but Saugerties is designed for a zombie-related disaster. The streets are narrow. The main way out of town is hard to drive through without burned out husks of cars blocking and hordes of undead hanging around it. The glass-windowed storefronts will only provide shelter for so long. Everyone and their mother will be trying to make it to the river to avoid traffic. Maybe we should regard the Zombie Walk less as a cool and gory family event, but as a disaster contingency plan. Or maybe we should just think about it as another cool, distinctly Saugerties community event.
The scene is great. The dead shuffle about in the friendly cold and sometimes hit up a bar if they need a pick-me-up, the upper-middle and lower-high school crowd is out in force, teasing participants and secretly wishing they’d thrown together a costume, and the more conservative older set are wandering around looking at their feet, half astonished and half confused by this awesomely macabre and bafflingly loved exercise. No one isn’t having fun; the undead may scowl, but the living smile and point and snap photos. Things, like Yeats said, are falling apart, and we couldn’t be happier about it.
