Zombie Walk Organizer Thinks Saturday's Parade Will Be Dead-On

No longer just the currency of the goth culture, zombies are everywhere.

Kids like zombies and so do their grandparents. Zombie devotees wear white collars, blue collars and black leather studded collars. It’s getting so you can’t swing a bag of bones in this town without hitting something zombie.

“Zombies are hot,” confirms Val Air Ballroom Manager Chewi Lockhart, who’s joined forces with the Historic Valley Junction Foundation and West Des Moines Chamber of Commerce to sponsor the city’s first foray into the netherworld with Saturday afternoon’s Zombie Walk.

(Umm, wouldn’t that be “zombies are cold,” as in the cold and partially decomposing walking dead?)

The free 1-mile trek starts at 5:30 p.m. at Valley Junction’s Railroad Park, located in the 100 block of Fifth Street at Railroad Avenue. From there, the parade continues down Fifth Street to Vine Sreet and over to Fourth Street to the Val Air. Doors for the Zombie Prom, a ticketed event, open at 6:30 p.m. 

The city of West Des Moines is providing shuttle service for zombies who want to walk in the parade and attend the prom at the Val Air, 301 Ashworth Road. Shuttles will begin departing from the Val Air at 4 p.m. so those attending the prom will be near their vehicles when it’s over.

You could say Lockhart was green – a moldy, gruesome Halloween green – with envy last year when the Des Moines Social Club landed the zombie gig for its festival of the dead. He was working with a promoter in Texas to do a similar event, but didn’t want to compete with the downtown organization. He turned his club into a tomb for vampires instead.

With the Social Club without a permanent home this year, Lockhart says he “swooped in” (grave robbing?) and worked with the promoter – are you ready for this? – Fangs for Nothing Productions to move the event to West Des Moines.

With the zombie parade, Lockhart thinks West Des Moines’ could be the biggest, and certainly the baddest, zombie event around this year – bigger than the zombie walk when Zombie Burgers (no, they’re not made with real zombies) opened a couple months ago, and there were 300 zombies then; and bigger than the annual Des Moines Zombie Walk benefiting Central Iowa Shelter and Services, and that attracts an annual crowd of 700 zombies.

So, exactly how many zombies are we talking about?

Lockhart can’t say for sure, but he’s received tons of e-mails and phone calls about the walk.

“Zombies seem to have a life of their own,” Valley Junction Foundation Director Jim Miller deadpans. “I know that Chewi has high expectations that the street will be full of zombies Saturday.”

One reason? Tyler Mane is the parade’s grand marshal.

Mane, for the uninitiated, is the king of zombies, a movie star zombie, one of the ones responsible for turning zombies into pop culture icons. A mountain of a man, he’s been scaring the bejesus out of moviegoers since he appeared as the mask-wearing, knife-wielding psychopath Michael Myers in Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake in 2007.

Expect lots of zombie hi-jinks, says Lockhart, at 6 feet, 9 inches tall a mountain of a man himself. He and his staff will be dressed as paramilitary police with “Reanimation Control Task Unit” insignias on their uniforms – “a branch of the military assigned to corral and control zombies,” Lockhart says.

Mane will crown a zombie king and queen. And guys, if you don’t have a date, Lockhart will provide you with one.

Just don’t expect her to have a face.