A City of Zombies and Zero Fear

I love photographing people when they forget to be polite. The Zombie Parade is exactly that kind of place.

For one night a year, the streets fill with creatures that look like they’ve clawed their way out of the grave. There’s fake blood on the sidewalks, ripped shirts, plastic axes sticking out of heads. From a distance it feels like a horror movie set. Up close, it’s something completely different.

Parents gently adjust their kids’ crooked masks. Friends share lipstick and fake blood, passing small makeup brushes between them like surgical tools. Strangers compliment each other’s wounds: “Wow, your eye looks disgusting, can I take a picture?” It’s gruesome – and incredibly sweet.

As a photographer, I’m usually very aware of people’s boundaries. On a regular day, pointing a camera at someone is a small act of trespassing. You sneak into their bubble, hoping they’ll let you stay there for a second. At the Zombie Parade, the rules flip. People want to be seen. They made an effort, they rehearsed their limp, they perfected the way their head tilts at an impossible angle. They’re performing, and you’re part of the show.

So I walk with my camera between the zombies, and I think about fear.

We grow up learning to be afraid of shadows, strangers, dark alleys. In the parade you get all of that, but wrapped in safety. The growls are fake, the knives are rubber, the eyes behind the dead-looking contact lenses are kind. You can stand face to face with something that looks terrifying, and know – in your bones – that nothing bad is going to happen.

Maybe that’s why everyone is so relaxed. Because for a few hours, fear is something you play with, not something that controls you.

Photographing here is pure joy. The light is messy and dramatic – harsh flashes, coloured streetlamps, deep pockets of darkness. Faces appear suddenly out of the black and then disappear again. I look for the moments when the mask slips: a zombie checking their phone, someone laughing so hard the scars on their makeup crack, a terrifying clown bending down to tie a shoelace for a child.

Those tiny gestures are my favourite kind of horror story: the kind where humanity stubbornly refuses to die.

By the time the parade ends, the fake blood is drying and people start peeling off layers of costume. The monsters slowly become office workers, students, parents again. Streetsweepers arrive and the city goes back to normal. If you passed by an hour later, you’d never guess what walked there.

But my camera remembers – not just the costumes, but the feeling. A whole city practicing fear in a safe space. A reminder that sometimes, the best way to deal with the dark is to invite it out for a walk in the open, give it good lighting, and photograph it from every angle.