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Zombie Awareness Month

A pop-culture observance throughout May celebrating zombie fiction and using the zombie apocalypse as a tongue-in-cheek hook for real disaster preparedness.

Saturday
1–31
May 2027
Last updated February 11, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar Team
Have an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEAll of May
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYFun
SUBCATEGORYParanormal
ORIGIN

Institutional Initiative

FOUNDING ENTITY
Zombie Research Society
FIRST OBSERVED
2007
“The Zombie Research Society named May in 2007 and gave the month a gray ribbon.
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

How a fictional plague became a preparedness pitch.

The Zombie Research Society, an organization founded in 2007 by author and zombie expert Matt Mogk, established the month of May as Zombie Awareness Month in 2007 and chose a gray ribbon as its symbol. May was picked partly because, in the group's words, a number of notable zombie films are set in May.

Read ZRS Originvia Zombie Research Society
INTRO

The month a make-believe plague got real preparedness done

In May 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention borrowed the zombie apocalypse to talk about emergency kits. The joke landed harder than anyone expected. About nine minutes after the first promotional tweet, the surge of readers knocked the agency's server offline.

It kept climbing from there. The post drew more than 60,000 views an hour and passed 4.8 million views in two years, against the 1,000 to 3,000 a normal CDC blog entry got. A federal health agency had stumbled into the most-read thing it would publish, by pretending the undead were coming.

That stunt rode a culture already in place. Every May, fans of zombie fiction mark Zombie Awareness Month, a tongue-in-cheek observance that treats the apocalypse as a friendly excuse to actually pack a go-bag.

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ORIGINS

Zombie Awareness Month history

INTRODUCTION

The word zombie arrived in English long before the multiplex did. It traces to Haitian and Caribbean voodoo, where it named a reanimated corpse made to serve a master, not a sprinting horde with an appetite. The flesh-eating monster most people picture today is younger than that root by centuries.

That modern figure has a clear birthday. George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead fixed the template of the slow, hungry, reanimated dead, and the decades of fiction that followed built an entire genre on it. By the 2000s, zombies were less a horror niche than a shared cultural language.

CHAPTER 01

A society for a problem that does not exist

Into that language stepped the Zombie Research Society, a group that treats an "inevitable" zombie pandemic as a straight-faced premise. It keeps an advisory board it describes as academics, scientists, and survivalists, and defines a zombie, deadpan, as a relentlessly aggressive human driven by a biological infection. The bit only works because it is played completely seriously.

CHAPTER 02

Why May, and why a gray ribbon

When the Society set the dates, it deliberately skipped October to keep zombies clear of Halloween. May, it argued, suited the genre because a number of notable zombie films are set in the month, and because spring's hope and renewal play against apocalyptic dread.

The symbol came down to a color nobody had claimed. Founder Matt Mogk explained that red ribbons alone already had dozens of organizations, so gray was open. "We think of it as rotting flesh," he told an interviewer, "which is much more grey than green anyway."

CHAPTER 03

The CDC borrows the metaphor

The biggest moment in this story was not the Society's. In May 2011, health communicator Maggie Silver wrote a CDC blog post that smuggled a genuine emergency-kit checklist inside a zombie scenario, posted under preparedness director Dr. Ali S. Khan. His pitch: prep for zombies and you are ready for a hurricane too.

It went off like a bomb. The traffic crashed the CDC site, the agency leaned in with a free graphic novel that October, and the zombie-as-preparedness metaphor reached an audience no straight advisory ever had. The Society had named the month; the government, separately, proved the joke could move people.

CHAPTER 04

A month built on a contradiction

The observance lives in the gap between fun and readiness. Mogk himself took the preparedness side seriously and did not view the month purely as a party, even as the wider campaign reads as good zombie-flavored mischief. That tension, celebrate the fiction or rehearse the disaster, is the whole point of the gray ribbon.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Romero defines the modern zombie

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead set the template for the flesh-eating, reanimated corpse that later fiction would run with.

May named Zombie Awareness Month

The newly founded Zombie Research Society declared May the observance and adopted the gray ribbon as its symbol.

CDC posts the zombie guide

The CDC published Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse on its Public Health Matters Blog, framing real emergency advice around an undead outbreak.

CDC releases a graphic novel

Following the post's success, the CDC put out a free 40-page graphic novel, Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic, with a real family checklist.

Mogk explains the gray ribbon

Founder Matt Mogk gave a detailed interview on the ribbon's meaning and the campaign's twin goal of celebration and preparation.

CDC post passes 4.8 million views

By April the zombie blog entry had logged more than 4.8 million total views, dwarfing the blog's usual traffic.

BY THE NUMBERS

Zombie Awareness Month by the Numbers

2007
Zombie Awareness Month founded
~9 min
CDC site crash after first tweet
4.8M
Views of CDC zombie post by 2013
+1,143%
CDC prep-site traffic rise in 2011
40 pages
CDC zombie preparedness graphic novel

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love Zombie Awareness Month

PREPAREDNESS

The undead pitch did what dry advisories never could.

The zombie framing turned a checklist of water, food, and an emergency plan into something people actually clicked on. The CDC's own tagline promised that prepping for zombies leaves you ready for a real emergency.

REACH

A niche bit that traveled internationally

The Zombie Research Society says the month has become internationally recognized, carried by gray ribbons, conventions, and a #ZombieAwarenessMonth hashtag. It claims members and followers numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

SYMBOL

A ribbon that means the shadows

The gray ribbon is the month's compact mascot, picked for a color no other cause had taken. The Society says it signifies the shadows that lurk behind the light of day.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate Zombie Awareness Month

EDITOR'S PICK

Watch a foundational zombie film

Cue up a genre landmark like Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the film that shaped the modern zombie. It is the source material the whole observance riffs on.

BUILD

Build a real emergency kit

Pack the supplies the CDC actually recommends: water at one gallon per person per day, non-perishable food, medications, and basic tools. The zombie excuse gets you a kit that works for a real storm.

WEAR

Wear the gray ribbon

Pin on the month's gray ribbon, the symbol the Zombie Research Society adopted in 2007. It is the simplest way to mark May and start a conversation.

JOIN

Join a zombie walk

Find a local zombie walk and shamble through town in costume with other fans. These charitable, costumed gatherings are a staple of how the month gets celebrated.

READ

Read the CDC's zombie graphic novel

Download the free 40-page Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic from the CDC's archive. It follows a family through an outbreak while walking you through an actual readiness checklist.
Answer

It runs the entire month of May, from May 1 through May 31. The Zombie Research Society chose May rather than October.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

9sources
4primary records
5independently dated
Primary records
Zombie Research Society2011
Zombie Awareness Month: May 1st - May 31st
The founding group's own page on the May observance, the gray ribbon, and its meaning.
View source
Zombie Research Society
About Us
The Society's mission, its 2007 founding by Matt Mogk, and its definition of a zombie.
View source
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention2011-05-16
Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse (archived blog post)
The original 2011 CDC post pairing a zombie scenario with a real emergency-kit checklist.
View source
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention2011-10
Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic
The CDC's free 40-page emergency-preparedness graphic novel released in October 2011.
View source
Additional coverage
Daily Dead2012-08-07
Exclusive Interview with Zombie Research Society's Matt Mogk
Founder Matt Mogk on the gray ribbon and the campaign's celebrate-and-prepare purpose.
View source
USC Annenberg
How a fictional zombie invasion helped CDC promote emergency preparedness
Case study with the CDC campaign's hard metrics: server crash, view counts, traffic surge.
View source
The Washington Post2011-05-20
Zombie apocalypse a coup for CDC emergency team
Contemporaneous reporting that the CDC site crashed under roughly 30,000 simultaneous readers.
View source
Wikipedia
Zombie Awareness Month
Overview of the 2007 founding, the May rationale, and the celebrate-versus-prepare tension.
View source
Wikipedia
Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse
Account of the CDC post, its authorship, and the 4.8 million view milestone.
View source
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