RESORT TAKEN OVER BY ZOMBIES was a headline on the main TV news – with gripping visuals of pleasant streets swarming with pallid beings dripping gore.

I should explain. My town, Sitges, runs a film festival in early October, specialising in fantasy cinema – horror, SF, monster films of all kinds. Over the last two or three years, it has become the custom for fans to turn up, on the last Friday of the festival, in full monster make-up. This year, the festival has made the whole affair official, providing an formal route, and a massive make-up studio in the Palacio Miramar, a normally elegant gallery space overlooking the sea. And the specified theme was Zombies, with posters everywhere advertising the Zombie Walk.

It worked very well. When we reached the centre of town, the Calle Major was heaving with people, and the procession of truly hideous-looking zombies was wending its way slowly through the crowds. Some people had obviously put a huge effort into getting the effects right. Blood spattered over your clothes was the minimum – ghastly pallor, apparently missing eyes, even skull bones poking out through the skin, were everywhere. To say nothing of the props – butchers cleavers, bloody bits of corpse, whole arms and legs being waved around, and a remarkable number of people with knives rammed through their skulls. And the real aficionados were well into the part, staggering hungrily up to innocent bystanders, muttering 'Food...food', or staring fixedly at children hiding behind their parents, delighted with fright.

The whole affair was like Carnaval, but played with a single theme. Everyone was enjoying the joke, the fantasy, the fun of 'lets pretend'. The Walk ended down on the Paseo Maritimo, where a big sound stage was playing VERY LOUD MUSIC, and everyone was settling down to a good long night of fun under the appropriately full moon.

A couple of thoughts:

1. One of the things that I find boring about myself is that I don't do fancy dress. I admire the way that all of these people cheerfully get into the spirit of this weird fantasy, have fun themselves, and give entertainment to everyone else … but I wouldn't dream of taking part. Why? An over-rigid sense of my own dignity ? A fear of not doing it well, and ending up looking merely tacky ? Or simply the boredom of getting dressed up in something uncomfortable, and then having to spend hours playing the role ? No idea … but I reckon the world is divided into those who do fancy dress, and those who definitely don't. Where do you stand, dear reader?

2. Why are zombies in fashion ? A recent elaborate newspaper feature (El Pais magazine, 9 October 2011) reviewed the way that the zombie formula has come back into fashion over recent years. Specifically, a TV series The Walking Dead (2010), a brand new and highly successful computer game Dead Island (2011), and the big-budget film World War Z (to be released in 2012). In a Time interview, the writer of the latter, Max Brooks, speculates that in times of great insecurity (see Financial Crisis, etc) human beings want and need apocalyptic stories about normality collapsing, and how to survive. Is this why hundreds of party-going zombies came to Sitges? Again, no idea – but if you're young, with an uncertain future, under-employed or unemployed, maybe you either howl with rage or howl with laughter. Being a zombie lets you do both at the same time …