The Walking Dead's sixth season kicked off with the most walkers in any single episode, but when the show returns on Sunday, that previous record of around 300 zombies will be greatly surpassed by the legion of living dead invading Alexandria. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer and special effects makeup guru Greg Nicotero discussed directing the walker-packed mid-season six premiere.
Speaking with EW's Dalton Ross, Nicotero talked about how Episode 609, aka "No Way Out", is an "unprecedented" entry in the series:
"And episode 9, basically, takes all of these various storylines and slams everything together in an epic man against the undead battle that is unprecedented in the history of The Walking Dead."
Nicotero went on to discuss how the mid-season six premiere will feature the highest number of walkers and kills in the show's history:
"The record that we had established in episode 1 of season 6 will already be broken in this episode in regards to the number of walkers and the number of kills. It’s the action movie version of The Walking Dead.
With reshoots and with additional photography and things, I think we were over 1,300 walkers for [the] episode."
Episode 609's nighttime setting was also touched upon by Nicotero, who really pushed for "No Way Out" to be filmed at night to lend the episode an atmosphere akin to Night of the Living Dead:
"When you spend eight episodes of the show seeing the walkers advancing on Alexandria in broad daylight, I felt that it was very important to introduce a bit of the genre element of the spooky, nighttime, boogeyman-coming-out-of-the-dark, Night-of-the-Living-Dead sort of vibe and feeling.
...So we had to make a lot of concessions because lighting big zombie crowd scenes at night — those kinds of scenarios are difficult and expensive. So I basically gave up a day of shooting to guarantee that we would have our money in the budget to shoot at night."
The Walking Dead Season 6's second half premieres Sunday, February 14th on AMC. Stay tuned to Daily Dead for more updates, and to read Ross' full interview with Greg Nicotero, visit:
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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