Janet Blackmon Morgan/The Sun News

Even with his eyes appearing to be gouged out, Jeff Bracey (left) applies makeup to Jessica Fountaine for the first Zombie Walk beginning at The Clubhouse in Myrtle Beach on Saturday. Folks gathered at the bar, dressed like zombies, and walked a few blocks down Ocean Boulevard and back to the bar.

Ocean Boulevard wailed under waves of the undead Saturday afternoon, but the beach city survived its first zombie attack.

The Myrtle Beach Zombie Walk - part guerilla theater, part fundraiser for the American Cancer Society - took its inspiration from similar events in larger cities around the country and the world, said Chastity Pharr, who planned Saturday's event after attending one last year in Atlanta.

"A lot of people into this counter-culture thing live around here, and they were just starving for it," said Josh Griswold, a tattoo artist who helped organize the walk. "It just made sense."

Before the walk, the undead on the deck of The Clubhouse bar mixed peacefully with the living, some sipping from plastic fundraiser cups. Artists from local horror-movie makers Kluckin Films provided zombie transformations, painting decaying teeth on rotted-out cheeks.

"Can I have some blood?" asked 16-year-old Lindsay Jackson of Myrtle Beach, her face powder-pale and bruised.

Artist Jeff Bracey used a thin paintbrush to bloody Jackson's mouth, a staple of the zombie getup. Zombies are messy eaters, it seems.

"Eating blood - you've got to eat your people to stay alive," Jackson said. "Or to stay zombified, I guess."

Ethan Edge, a 16-year-old from Myrtle Beach, sported a rotting, gaping wound on his bare chest - the work of the Kluckin artists. His tiger-striped mohawk, he said, was his own work.

Nearby, a man with a long gash in his head snapped pictures of two likewise injured but smiling women.

"To put on makeup, it's kind of freeing," Bracey said. "You can do stuff you wouldn't normally do."

Some costumes represented their own mini-story of zombie carnage. Graphic designer Matt Bahr and his daughters, 7 and 3, all dressed in what he called their "Sunday best," then ripped the clothes and spattered them with fake blood, pretending to be a family attacked by zombies on their way to church.

"It's fun, kind of a way to cut loose," Bahr said. "You take what's extremely disgusting and embrace it."

His little girls love zombies, he said. They watched the zombie spoof "Return of the Living Dead" that morning before joining the horde.

"They're inside, eating something," he said, then shrugged and smiled. "Flesh."

Part of the evening's alcohol sales will be donated to the cancer society, and zombies who made donations themselves had a chance to win prizes. Finding a charity willing to take money raised by the undead was surprisingly hard at first, said organizer Tara Brooke.

"A lot of people didn't call us back," Brooke said. "People think it's evil, but it's not. It's kind of like a Relay for Life for the younger crowd."

Just before the walk began, organizers gathered the horde and laid out two sets of rules. First, obey the law: no jaywalking, no harassing or touching passers-by. Second, act like a zombie: moan and shuffle.

With a chorus of groans, they set off. As the 80 or so zombies lurched their way down the boulevard, tourists Lynn and Lace Jackson of Charlotte couldn't control their laughter as their 5- and 6-year-old daughters scurried to hide behind them.

"Look at y'all, all scared," Lynn said, still laughing, then turned to another bystander. "Is that some kind of show they're putting on? They're creative. They're neat."

The block-long horde elicited similar responses during its hourlong march. Workers and tourists hung out of shopfronts, their loud laughs ringing out above the zombies' moans.

Police recorded no complaints about the ghouls, said Myrtle Beach Police Sgt. Janet Arrington, and no humans were actually eaten.

"They just walked around and pretended they were zombies," Arrington said. "They were great."

After the march, the party was expected to go to 2 a.m., with six bands playing punk rock for the living dead. It would be a long night, organizers admitted, complaining of sunburns and swollen ankles beneath their rotting flesh.

Tara Brooke | Zombie Walk organizer

Source:  MyrtleBeachOnline