Zombie Crawl Orlando

In December of 2006, in the employee grill of Orlando's Universal Studios theme park, three friends (Joshua Watford Joshua Mendonca, and Jessi Riese) were relaxing after a day of working the Macy's Holiday Parade. The three have always been fans of things of the "undead". Horror movies, gore, zombies, and the like. The three had worked Universal Studio's Halloween Horror Nights, where they originally met as well. That day in the grill, the three got to joking around about how fun and funny it would be if they did a form of flash mobbing involving zombies. Josh Mendonca suggested doing a "Zombie Shuttle" involving the UCF Shuttle. The idea was tossed about and the three eventually decided to stop the talk and walk the walk. Well, the crawl rather. After a few more weeks of planning sessions, group meetings with co-worker friends Christopher Bowman and Kevin Allen, the date of the very first Zombie Crawl Orlando was set.

On January 3rd 2007, the very first crew of zombies met at Watford's residence to begin the "zombiefication process". A group of professional make-up artists, (most from the make-up artist who do Halloween Horror Nights and other body painting events in Orlando) set up in Watford's kitchen and backyard and painted over 40 zombies. Loads of air-brush paint, laytex wounds, creme gore faces, and gallons of homemade fake blood later, the crew was ready to crawl. They piled into as few cars as possible and "zombie shuttled" to the crawl site, Downtown Orlando. Frightened tourists, 15 camera phones, and one Ginos Pizza later, Zombie Crawl Orlando was a success.

After the success of the first crawl, a few months later the Zombie Crawl Orlando (ZoCo) team, decided to give it another go with a second crawl. May 19th 2007, the make up artists returned to Watford's and the entire process started again. This time the number of zombies jumped to over 50, and the location changed to Downtown Winter Park. The second crawl was even more successful than the first and the ZoCo team was satisfied for a few more months.