By snoadmin
Halloween will be coming to Long Beach a few days early this year. This Saturday, hundreds of zombies will be invading the Marina Green, Shoreline Village and Rainbow Harbor area of downtown for the fifth annual Long Beach Zombie Walk.
This year’s walk is different than the past four years in many ways, the most drastic being that patrons will have to buy tickets for the first time.
“In the past few years the walk has grown so large, we knew we couldn’t do it again this year without charging, but we wanted to make sure it was worthwhile to our guests,” said Logan Crow, founder of Long Beach Cinematheque, the group organizing the event.
To do so, the group organized something called a “zombie passport,” which serves as a ticket to both the event and discounts at stores and restaurants all around town. Some of these places include Fingerprints, the Laugh Factory and the Aquarium of the Pacific.
If that is not enough incentive to purchase the $15 ticket, then the lineup of the actual event should be. This year there will be a full zombie music festival leading up to the walk itself, with three stages of music, a food truck village and a beer garden.
“We wanted a full festival feel, so we contacted a mutant-themed band called the Radioactive Chickenheads, and they helped us get together a group of zombie and horror bands who will be performing on the Zombie and House of Brains stages,” Crow said.
The other stage will be called the “Resistance” stage and will be headlined by popular local indie rock bands such as Bella Novela and The Dovelles. Visitors will have a choice between remaining a survivor at the Resistance stage or to join the dead at the Zombie and House of Brains stages.
For the 21 and over crowd, there will be wristbands handed out which allow you to take your alcoholic beverages anywhere you want while inside the festival area. This will be helpful because there is no doubt that a few drinks will help anybody act like the undead.
For the horror fans, there will also be a haunted walk-through attraction called a Terror Truck, which will make visitors feel like they’re being buried alive. This is obviously not for the faint of heart but should be fun for people who want to test their nerves.
At 7 p.m., there will be a massive “Thriller” flash mob as part of a yearly event called “Thrill the World,” which attempts to organize the world’s largest simultaneous dance to Michael Jackson’s Halloween hit.
Of course, there is also the walk itself. Immediately after the “Thriller” dance, the zombified crowd will be marching through Rainbow Harbor to the beats of DJ Memesy.
This event has quickly become a hugely popular Halloween tradition in the Long Beach area, and if this year is any indication, it will continue to grow.
“It was a matter of starting something and seeing it grow organically to a size where you have to either run away from it or change it,” Crow said. “If it keeps growing, we’ll keep changing with it.”
