The Night We Broadcast a Zombie Virus Over the Airwaves
A pirate radio station, a Super 8 film, and how a community spreads
We made a zombie film about a virus transmitted through radio waves. At the time, it felt like a joke. Looking back, it feels more like a documentary.
It started as a way to get people involved.
At Free Radio Williamsburg, we didn’t just want listeners — we wanted participants. So we came up with an idea: a Super 8 science fiction film about a signal that infects people.
The premise was simple. A broadcast goes out. Something in the frequency changes. People begin to transform. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just enough to notice.
We shot it on the rooftop beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. The trains rattled overhead. The antenna stood just a few feet away, quietly doing its job. Some of the actors had never been in a film before. Some of them were musicians. Some of them had just wandered into the station a few nights earlier and stayed.
That was how things worked. You showed up — and then you were part of it. At some point, the line between the film and the station started to blur. The actors became DJs. The DJs started bringing friends. Musicians showed up with instruments and stayed to record.
One night, we turned the studio into a recording space and tracked the soundtrack live — free jazz, improvised, unpredictable. The kind of music that didn’t have a home on traditional radio. Now it did.
There was a moment — not during filming, but sometime after — when I realized what we had actually made. It wasn’t a movie. It was a system.
The “virus” wasn’t fictional. It was a metaphor for the way ideas spread.
A broadcast → a gathering → a collaboration → another broadcast. No platform. No algorithm. No central hub. Just people, moving through space, carrying something with them.
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At the same time, the larger media landscape was moving in the opposite direction. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, ownership of radio stations began consolidating rapidly. Companies like Clear Channel Communications were standardizing playlists, centralizing control, scaling distribution.
They were optimizing reach. We were optimizing connection. Our signal barely traveled. But the idea did.
Someone would come to a party, hear something unexpected, and bring that energy somewhere else. Another apartment. Another rooftop. Another city.
We started lending out the transmitter. “Mobile radio,” we called it. A station without a fixed location. A broadcast that could happen anywhere.
One night, a friend hosted a free jazz show in his living room. We set up the transmitter and let it run. The music spilled out into the neighborhood — unannounced, unlicensed, untraceable. People walking down the street had no idea what they were hearing. But it was there.
In the air. Live! What was it? The incredible free jazz ensemble called Other Dimensions in Music featuring bassist William Parker, tenor saxophonist Sabir Mateen, alto saxophonist/trumpet/flute Danie Carter and Rashid Bakr on drums transmitting live from the record label owner’s living room.
That’s what made radio different. Not the content. The condition.
Years later, I found myself working in early streaming media. We were compressing video, optimizing bandwidth, tracking views. The same basic questions — how to reach people, how to share something — were now being answered with data.
The signal got cleaner. The system got smarter. The distribution got bigger. But it stopped feeling like a virus. In pirate radio, you couldn’t measure the spread. You could only feel it in the rooms that filled up and throughthe people who came back. In the way something small turned into something larger without anyone quite knowing how.
We made a zombie film about a signal that changed people. We thought we were telling a story. What we were really doing was describing what was already happening.
This is part of Pirate Frequencies, a project about free radio, creative communities, and the strange, analog origins of the digital world we now live in.
