This summer, AMC will embark on an intriguing new venture with Fear the Walking Dead, a prequel/companion series to their top rated hit The Walking Dead. While it seems like a good gamble, there’s no telling just how audiences will react to the series. I’m guessing most of The Walking Dead’s fans will flock to it initially, but is there such a thing as too much zombie mayhem? We’ll find out.
Thankfully, most of The Walking Dead’s creative team will be on board the companion series. One such person is Greg Nicotero, TWD’s executive producer, frequent director and make-up supervisor. Melty (that’s a site) caught up with Nicotero recently and got him to spill his guts a little regarding the new show, specifically concerning the new walkers, how this new series differs from the old, and whether or not the “how” of the walker virus is explained.
On whether or not the location (L.A.) will have an effect on the look of the walkers:
Fear the Walking Dead happens almost before our show even premiered. One thing we play up on the show is the environment and how that plays on the walkers. In Georgia, it’s very humid and sunny, so we take that into consideration. Los Angeles, it’s a lot more dry climate, so we have had conversations about what that would do to the look of the walkers.”
Will we learn how this outbreak started?
I would say it’s not necessarily important how. What’s important in the spinoff is, how people react to it. It really is a fascinating statement on current society because we get most of our information from our iPads and our phones, so there have been things that have been happening in recent years.. when you hear stories like that, when you hear about some guy who attacked someone and bit their face off, imagining how we reacted to that news story at the time. Even in the United States, there was a nurse who was working in Africa and came back to the United States and refused to go into quarantine. I think about stories like that and go, ‘Wow, maybe that could’ve been the beginning.’ In a TV show like Fear the Walking Dead, you get to ask those same questions.”
On how the characters in Fear the Walking Dead differ from our protagonists in the original show:
The main difference in Fear the Walking Dead is, we’re with families at the beginning of it, so clearly that’s one of the main emotional aspects. Going after your children to protect them, or going after your ex-wife and your child who’s with another parent. All these kinds of things that all pop up at the moment when things start to unravel, like, who do you protect and what extent do you go to to protect them?”
We’ll have even more questions answered when Fear the Walking Dead airs on AMC this summer.
Fear the Walking Dead teaser