Imagine the scene if you will: It’s a stormy night and the once overcast clouds pass over the cemetery like an ominous blanket of dread. You find yourself running and running but oh no you trip on a gravestone sticking out of the ground, or at least what you thought was a gravestone. Whatever you tripped on makes a grab for your leg, but you manage to slip free. However, by the time you can get up, you’re surrounded by the undead, zombies.
Now students at SF State probably noticed (unless their head was in some sort of hole underground from preemptive fear) that their campus on Oct. 19, 2o11 was swarmed by a horde of the undead. Led by a mysterious and kooky doctor, these blood-covered zombies made their way all around the campus, attacking those who ran from them and generally yelling “brains” at every possible opportunity.
Zombie Jonathan Riley contemplates the apocalypse
But fear not outside world these were not fact zombies but rather just improvisers being silly. Oct. 19 marked the fourth annual Improv Nation Zombie mob, and drew in over 50 participants, improvisers and non-improvisers alike.
The Zombie Mob is a form of advertisement Improv Nation does for its shows (In a future blog i will break down the structure of a show and how Improv Nation advertises,) as it has two shows on both the 21 and 26 of October.
The zombie mob started off with a fair-sized group of improvisers already as zombies, that way there was a sizeable group from the get-go and they seemed more intimidating. This group prowled the campus for willing participants to become a part of the mob. No, this does not mean that like actual zombies they would attack you and eat your brains. To become a part of the mob you had to be a willing participant who had put an obvious duct tape X on their person. Once zombies saw that X then they would catch that person, cover them in fake blood and that victim joins the march.
The attack hit SF State approximately at 10 a.m. according to some of the first victims.
But students on campus had nothing to fear for behind the scenes was a group so brave that they would put their lives on line to protect SF State from this threat. WOMBAT (Women and Men Battling Against The undead) served as a counter-agent against the massive horde that swarmed all throughout campus. A group of 8, armed to the teeth (Nerf guns) made a valiant effort starting at 12:30 p.m. to shoot down this horde with invisible bullets (If someone actually shot darts then campus would be littered with them and we would never get them back.)
WOMBAT prepared for battle, guns blazing.
I represented one eighth of the group and led my own squadron of four into the fray. Zombies and hunters made their way across the entire campus from Mary Ward and Mary Park student housing, all the way back up to 19th and Holloway. The whole process was a prolonged game of cat and mouse between the zombies and the hunters, we would shoot them down and then five minutes later they would be back up and we would be forced to shoot down the same zombies again. Always on the move, WOMBAT had to watch its back because although some of the zombies were slow (as they’re supposed to be,) some zombies were sprinters (darn you 28 days later!) and forced us to run in order to not be overrun.
This went on until approximately 1:50 when that kooky doctor (Travis Northup, leader of Improv Nation) told the hunters that there were two innocent individuals in Malcolm X Plaza that needed saving. The event was over at two so as a group we figured this meant that we had to die. Surprisingly up until that point all eight of us had lived to tell the tale.
Long story short, we did not succeed (there’s a bit of a joke the hunters have among themselves about having an intricate and impressive back story when in the end their venture is doomed to fail by default.) When all of us were turned into zombies and smeared with fake blood(less fun if you have a beard) the doctor began to fight his way through the mob in an attempt to escape, but was ultimately brought down and turned like everyone else.
To mark the end of the day all of the zombies did the thriller dance, which played off of a PA system on the Malcolm X Plaza stage. Whether some people think the whole thing is silly, from smiling faces in the crowd you can tell at least some find it funny or a refreshing change of pace. Improv Nation does lots of silly things on campus to distinguish themselves, but always with the motive of promoting comedy and having a good time with the SF State campus.
This time the zombie horde was dealt with and dispersed, but who knows maybe next time SF State won’t be so darn lucky.
Peace after zombie-war
The DeVine Improvisation 