The festival's own rules are refreshingly specific about what counts as a costume: you must be "wearing some kind of zombie makeup or mask," and the minimum bar is "marks of stitches or red blood." Beyond that minimum, Davis takes it a lot further, and has a whole cottage industry built around helping people do exactly that.
Three easy steps
Back in August 2019, festival director Aaron Wedra published "Becoming a Zombie: 3 Easy Steps," the closest thing this event has to a founding style guide. Cut asymmetrical holes into old clothes. Decorate the bike with chains, cobwebs and plastic spiders, or spray paint an old frame green or silver. Save makeup for last. That same post introduced Nicole Garcia, then ten years old, who offered $2 to $5 face-painting looks, a voodoo doll, a "bike accident bleeding zombie," a lab mutant, having learned the craft three years earlier at the Jelly Belly factory.
The professionals
Rina Fuller, of Colorful Creations by Rina, is the festival's own "Mother of All Zombies," a volunteer professional makeup artist who has done the sponsor photoshoots, appeared on Good Day Sacramento, painted the recurring "Groana Lisa" performance character, run the morning-of makeup station at the Odd Fellows Lodge, and staffed the free makeup table at the Zombie Ball. Sassafras Beauty, run by Danielle Crane, pushed a "green foundation" look in 2021 under the tagline "beautiful zombies," which is a nice bit of branding for a look most people would otherwise call unflattering.
For costume pieces and props, Bohème Hip Used Clothing, now Bohème Clothing & Gifts at 409 3rd St, sponsors the Zombie Ball and supplies a good chunk of what people wear to it.
They'll be hunting for best costumes... bwahahahahahaha!
The contest itself
Costume prizes have run at "25-plus" for most of the festival's history, with the 2026 home page now advertising "50-plus prizes." Past hauls have included Yoloberry Yogurt gift cards, Walking Dead posters, boxes of classic Halloween cereal, Walking Dead-branded wine and Voodoo Ranger IPA for the adults, glow-in-the-dark T-shirts worth $20, family axe-throwing kits and Upper Crust gift cards. Judging is handled by what the festival calls its "secret zombie judges," who, per the site's own copy, will be "hunting for best costumes... bwahahahahahaha." Rules require costumes to stay clear of bike chains and pedals while riding, and helmets are required for anyone under 18. See current prizes on the Costume Contest event page.
Thriller, twice a decade
Mirror Image Dance Company, founded in 2009 by Marlaina Spivey with assistant director Jaclyn Frantz, staged a full Thriller flash mob at the very first festival in 2019, complete with a free public rehearsal that October and step-by-step tutorial videos posted online. The company brought Thriller back to the skate park in 2021 and ran another flash mob in 2022, before shifting focus to an annual Trunk-or-Treat, sensory-friendly and scheduled early in the day, by 2024.
The best-costume highlight reel across the years reads like a fever dream in the best way: giant seven-foot zombies chasing delighted kids, a Bigfoot sighting caught on camera by Stewart Savage, "kids, pets, families... all zombified," zombies on stilts, Noise Violation's pirate-meets-Halloween marching uniforms, a Red Carpet Showcase full of "Zombies, Aliens, Witches," and family-friendly Zombie Drag Queens back in 2021. And at both afterparties, a costume still earns you something: say "BRAINS!" at Steve's Pizza, or just wear one to Woodstock's, and a free soft drink shows up either way.
Costumes as a shared language
What stands out across seven years of these photos is how little the costumes repeat. A festival this size could easily settle into a uniform, plain zombie makeup and torn t-shirts, and call it a day. Instead the crowd treats "zombie" as a starting prompt rather than a strict rule: skeletons in full detail, a family in matching football jerseys reanimated for the occasion, kids dressed as cartoon characters standing next to a rider in a full undead groom's tuxedo. The rules only require the minimum, stitches or blood, a mask that looks risen from the dead, so everything past that is pure Davis improvisation.
That range is also what makes the costume contest genuinely hard to judge, and probably why the festival leans so hard into the "secret zombie judges" bit rather than a public voting system. There is no obvious metric for comparing a ten-year-old's $2 face paint against a Bohème-sourced formalwear zombie, so the judges just have to know it when they see it.
Ready to build a look? See our full FAQ for costume rules and makeup minimums, or check the current contest prizes before you commit to a bit.
