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The Tom Zombie Festival

ST. THOMAS AND ELGIN COUNTY, ONTARIO: 2013 – 2015

The first Tom Zombie Festival was 2013. That winter I stood in front of St. Thomas city council and asked them for five thousand dollars, and I told them exactly why I wanted it. The town had been hit hard. Tourism kept getting named as the way back, and nobody could say what the attraction was actually going to be.

ALL WORK
01 — THE STORY, AS WE WROTE IT AT THE TIME

St. Thomas and Elgin County, Ontario

I brought them a festival built on a story we already owned. Not a borrowed franchise, not somebody else's characters. A two-hundred-year-old legend that came out of this ground — Tom Flower and Crow Flower, 1803, a murder, a curse, and a town that has been carrying it ever since. The Legend of Tom Zombie is trademarked and copyrighted by Bizbio because we wrote it, and that is what makes the whole project possible. We did not have to licence an attraction. We had to write one.

The 2013 festival opened to triple the turnout we had predicted and a pile of press we had not. So we did it again, and again. Sharon Lechner came on as event organizer. We grew the thing into a prom, a Halloween tour, a flashmob, a trail, a contest, a ringmaster. Then we reorganised it as a registered not-for-profit, the Tom Zombie Historical Society, so it could outlive any one person's enthusiasm.

Here is what I always come back to, and it is the argument for the whole idea. One festival does a great many jobs at once.

It rents and celebrates local heritage landmarks — the events happen inside buildings that already exist here, and the festival gives people a reason to keep them standing.

It teaches local history. People come for the zombies and leave knowing something about their own county, because the legend is stitched into real events.

It brings money into the region — hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, retail — and pulls visitors in from outside the area.

It pays local artists, actors, musicians and writers, and the Tom Zombie material is there for them to make new work with.

It holds up the people who actually built this place. The legend has indigenous and Black history at its centre, including a poem by a banned African American poet who died in 1848.

And it takes the horror and fantasy genre seriously, which is a real audience and a willing one.

That is a lot of outcomes from one weekend, and it is why I kept at it. It is also why the model was worth building once and can be built again.

The other thing worth saying is how much of it we made ourselves. The festival had no outside agency behind it. We wrote the legend, built the site, designed the posters and the programme, shot the trailers, produced the prom and the tours, and put four photographers on the festival days — myself, Tim Harvey, Martin Stewart and Rene Defayette, with Tony Bondi on the later material. Every frame of the festival that exists, we made or we commissioned.

What the festival gave us as a studio is harder to see but it is just as real. Three festival years. A prom. A Halloween tour. A flashmob. A contest. A ringmaster. A screen treatment. Hours of footage, hundreds of photographs, a whole graphic identity, and a brand we own outright. It made us the studio that can invent an attraction and then run it — not only the one that shows up with a camera and films whatever is already happening.

CREATOR / PRODUCER · BRYAN BAKKER

02 — THE FILMS

The films

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The St. Thomas Tom Zombie Festival - A Festival For You!
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The St. Thomas Tom Zombie Festival - A Festival to Die For!
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The Tom Zombie Historical Society - Chronology
03 — IMAGES

Images

A promotional poster for the Tom Zombie Festival features a blurry, pale face with red eyes and bared teeth partially obscured by green foliage in the foreground, with various text blocks and smaller images advertising events and guests, including a group of people walking down a street, a drum set, and several portraits of individuals in zombie makeup.R
From the Tom Zombie Festival.
Two women are posing for a picture, one with zombie makeup and a leather jacket, and the other with glasses and a black dress, leaning her head on the first woman's shoulder, against a dark background with vertical and horizontal light streaks.R
From the Tom Zombie Festival.
A person in a red and gold ringmaster's coat with white and red face paint is looking up with their right arm raised, standing next to a large, dark, textured object that resembles an elephant's ear and trunk, with a red circular logo containing the text "THE St. THOMAS TZF" in the upper right.R
From the Tom Zombie Festival.
A promotional poster features four individuals, three men and one woman, in a wooded setting, with text overlays advertising an event.R
From the Tom Zombie Festival.
A person in zombie makeup and costume, wearing a striped shirt and denim overalls, stands on grass next to a white corrugated metal wall, with a bell hanging from their right hip and text overlaid on the right side of the image.R
From the Tom Zombie Festival.
A dark silhouette of a person with glowing white eyes and red outlines is reaching forward with one hand, set against a textured background with red splatters and a dark right side.
From the Tom Zombie Festival.
A bright, glowing, ghostly face with an open mouth and visible teeth is depicted on the left, emitting rays of light, while a black circular emblem with a red outline and red text is on the right, set against a dark background with white streaks.R
From the Tom Zombie Festival.