Zombie Shopping Mall – A Real-Life “Dawn of the Dead” Experience

If you’ve always wondered it must be like to actually experience a zombie apocalypse, then Zombie Shopping Mall is just the thing for you. You’ll be briefed and armed by a special police unit and pitted against a horde of zombies in a creepy condemned mall. Sounds awesome, yes?

Remember the Zombie Boot Camp we featured a while ago? It was a very popular event organized by the guys at Wish.co.uk, an English website offering people the chance to fulfill their wildest dreams. The unusual training course allowed zombie fans to acquire all the necessary skills to survive a living-dead epidemic and test them in a specially designed environment, located in Droitwich, Britain. Following the success of the Zombie Boot Camp, the people at Wish have taken things one step further and created the Zombie Shopping Mall, a bone-chilling experience that takes place in a condemned mall filled with brain-eating zombies.


Photo: Wish.co.uk

Believe it or not, there are a lot of people out that would kill for the opportunity to fight zombies in real life. Tickets for the Zombie Boot Camp were sold out in a matter of days, even though they were a hefty $90. But in order to offer a realistic “Dawn of the Dead” experience, you need the right kind of setting. That’s why this time, Wish.co.uk has rented a condemned shopping mall in Reading, where would-be zombie apocalypse survivors can best show their undead head-bashing techniques. According to the organizers, Zombie Shopping Mall is like your favorite zombie movie come to life.

Photo: Wish.co.uk

So what really happens during this creepy event? It all starts with a briefing by the Police Special Zombie Bashing Unit. They’ll give you all the details about the ongoing zombie apocalypse going on in the town of Reading, and about how you have to try and fix things. Then they’ll arm you with a variety of weapons fit for an undead hunter and send you into the condemned mall along with a whole group of other like-minded zombie enthusiasts. And that’s when the real nightmare begins… With only limited ammo for your air-soft guns, and scarce opportunities to refill your magazines, you’ll need speed and quick thinking in order to survive this 2-2.5-hour long experience that unfolds in real time. There will apparently be “loads of zombies” inside the mall, definitely more than one person can handle without help from his team.

Photo: Wish.co.uk

One thing you don’t need to be worried about is having your brains eaten by zombies. There will be no excessive violence during the Zombie Shopping Mall experience, although the zombies will jump you, try to hold you down and murmur “braaains” in your ear. Still there will be no real fighting and participants are not allowed to bring their own weapons. Because the event in physical in nature, zombie hunters will need to have a reasonable level of fitness in order to have a chance of survival.

Because the Reading shopping mall has been condemned, there is no way to know how long the Zombie Shopping Mall experience will be available for. The months of March and April have already been fully booked, but there are still a few spots available for May and June, with July being your safest bet for availability. When the date of the demolition will be set, the offer will be withdrawn from sale. To take part in this real-life zombie movie, you’ll need to fork out £119 ($190). I wouldn’t do it for free, but for a real zombie fan I’m pretty sure that’s pocket change.

Posted in Events, News        Tags: , , , , ,