Ghouls rule

Leigh-Anne Hunter meets a modern-day Frankenstein who turns regular folks into monsters

Dawn Williams hugs me, then slips out a scalpel. They call her Dawn of the Dead. She turns humans into zombies. I'm next.

"Let's give you some horrible fingernails, like you've been rummaging inside someone's intestines," she says. "You can use anything in your kitchen. "Rice is great for maggots."

The pub is swarming with living dead lookalikes, here for tonight's zombie pub crawl. Cheerleader zombies. Lycra-clad zombies doing stretches. And one zombie in a kilt.

"I've had 100 humans waiting to be turned into zombies," says Williams, slipping fake teeth into a victim's mouth. "Can you talk?" He says: "Yeth."

We're drilled before being unleashed on Greenside. Melville's pubs wouldn't let us in. "This is South Africa, so safety first," says the leader. "Use your brains." The crowd moans: "Brains!"

People peer at the shuffling horde from behind high gates as we invade the 'burbs, gripping torches and plastic limbs. I feel powerful, and slightly itchy from the cornflakes on my chest. Williams whispers, wide-eyed: "It's the zombie apocalypse. The whole world's gone crazy over dead people."

Many trace today's zombie mania to George Romero's '60s classic, Night of the Living Dead. One diehard zombie fan spent days holed up at home, studying every frame. "To me, zombies are the ultimate horror creature," he says, misty-eyed. His ex-girlfriend told him: "Either the zombies go, or I do."

A slew of zombie films followed. "Did you say The Walking Dead? It's, like, my show," gushes a fan of the series, now in its fourth season, where zombies walk on leashes.

When it premiered, Williams dressed people up as zombies and took them to McDonald's. Since then, private requests have streamed in. "Someone called me and said: 'Hello. Is that Dawn of the Dead?' I burst out laughing." The name stuck. The zombies were a delightful surprise."

Williams, 47, is the bubbly Mary Poppins of the zombie world. A single mom, she worked in sales for 25 years before enrolling in make-up and special-effects school three years ago. "It had always been my dream, but I was anxious. Would I be able to make a living?"

She can hardly keep up with demand. "I've turned all sorts of people into zombies."

She remembers trembling one night as she tiptoed through a dark hospital rented for an ad agency's year-end party. "They ordered blood for 10 zombies. I made them seven litres." As the screams echoed through the corridors, she thought: "Oh, yay!"

When we first met months ago, she was powdering Bafana Bafana football star Siphiwe Tshabalala's nose for a TV show. Now she's transformed me into a pigtailed monster.

"As a make-up artist, I wanted variety: a bride on Saturday and a zombie on Sunday." Or a zombie bride. Charlie, who's hired Williams for her wedding, says: "My fiancé and I are huge zombie fans. We like to be scared."

Al, another client and a pharmacist, starts growling at random people after his makeover: "It's the most amazing release," he says. "You really become a zombie."

Full-blown zombification lasts an hour and costs R850, but Williams can tailor-make your undead look. "Hell, if you just want a scratch, I can do it for R50 and throw in sunken eyes."

She makes her own prosthetics and always has extra. "You never know, someone might call and need rotting brains for tomorrow."

Some clients fume if she doesn't know a film character. "There are people who take zombies very seriously. Every zombie has a story. You have to think, how did they die? This zombie died of a broken heart." She shows me a gangrenous mould.

The lithe flesh-eaters in the recent blockbuster, World War Z, have some traditionalists seething.

"Who's ever heard of a sprinting zombie?" I overhear someone say. Another retorts: "Look dude, you get your slow zombies and your psycho zombies, OK?"

Williams teamed up with zombie events planner, Carol Willis. They're called Duo of the Dead. "The zombie phenomenon has exploded in South Africa," says Willis, who has organised everything from zombie runs to zombie tag, popular overseas along with zombie proms, pageants, you name it.

She's planning a February run called, "My Bloody Valentine". Her zombie paraphernalia (T-shirts read, "Great minds taste alike") are a hit.

When it comes to other horror character makeovers, Williams has to give some clients a pep talk: "You look nothing like Beetlejuice. You're a fat, middle-aged man." But with zombies, her most popular dress-up request, the hard part is knowing when to stop. "I want every zombie to be gruesome."

She has a product that turns eyeballs black. "It blinds you for a few seconds, but it's completely safe."

Later, at Williams's picket-fenced Westdene home, where she lives with her cat, we drink tea on her balcony. I'm still in my zombie make-up. I couldn't bring myself to remove it. Life seems so boring as a human.

"The zombies are dear to me," she says. "They've changed my life. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. I can't believe I can make money from this." Have you ever been a zombie? I ask. "No. But I've been Dracula." She smiles, and skips off to water her roses.

• Catch the Durban zombie run on November 30. Visit Zombie Run South Africa on Facebook.

ZOMBIE HISTORY

Author Amy Wilentz traces the concept back to 17th century Haiti, where a slave's only escape from the harsh life under French rule was often suicide, through which they believed they could return to Africa. But the fear of turning into a zombie was thought a fate worse than slavery. The only antidote? Salt.

Wade Davis, Harvard ethnobotanist and author of The Serpent and the Rainbow, says the word "zombie" likely comes from the Kongo word "nzambi", or "spirit of a dead person". He claims to have met zombies in Haiti. They're said to be fed a hallucinogenic drug known as "zombie cucumber" by voodoo priests and used for manual labour.

ZOMBIES VS VAMPIRES

It turns out the two may be kin. A zombie, some say, is a vampire with a lobotomy. Matt Mogk, a zombologist and head of the Zombie Research Society in the US, whose motto is "What you don't know can eat you", says the modern zombie was inspired by Richard Matheson's vampire novel I Am Legend.

HOW TO KILL A ZOMBIE

"Use your head: cut off theirs," says Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide. "Zombies reflect our anxieties in these crazy, scary times."

Mathematicians worked out that if a zombie infection broke out in a city of 500 000 people, they'd be outnumbered in three days.

One woman I spoke to is building a bunker. "It could be a big joke," she says, "but why take a chance?" She could just buy a few packets of salt.