Zombies are people too. Munya Vomo spoke to the brains behind Fear the Walking Dead
|||Zombies are people too. Munya Vomo spoke to the brains behind Fear the Walking Dead
When the idea of a prequel to the hit show The Walking Dead came about, most folk thought creator Robert Kirkman and his team of writers were just being greedy. Yet it was not a bad idea at all.
The series starts in a time when the world is plagued by zombies so the prequel, Fear the Walking Dead, tells us just how it all started.
Starring Kim Dickens (Sons of Anarchy, House of Cards) and Cliff Curtis (Training Day, Colombiana), viewers get insight into how the zombie apocalypse started. The first season did fairly well and the second debuts on our screens next month.
We caught up with the show’s executive producer, Dave Erickson, who shared what season two has to offer.
“Speaking with lots of people – the actors, the producers and some viewers – they all agree that the way we approached the story means you don’t need any prior knowledge of the comics or the other series,” said Erickson.
“But we’ve structured it in such a way that if you are a fan of the original graphic novels and you watch The Walking Dead, you’ll immediately recognise the mythology and you’ll see how the stories are layered. But you’ll also appreciate the different approach that Fear takes; the different point of view it has,” he said.
If you watched the first season of Fear the Walking Dead then you will know that it does not tie in with The Walking Dead as far as the characters go and Erickson explained why.
“For season one, we talked quite a lot about the idea that we were covering the time frame in which Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) was in his coma at the very outset of The Walking Dead. Viewers were getting a window on what he missed. But if you actually look at the breakdown of season one of Fear the Walking Dead, it wasn’t a case of ending on a final frame in the finale from which you could have cut to Georgia just as Rick was about to wake up. If you look at the timing, we’re actually still shy of that point by a couple of weeks,” he explained.
“That’s what’s great about heading into season two. Our blended family now has to work out exactly how bad things are. How far has this spread? Is it something that’s taking over the entire country? The entire world? That puts them in a really interesting position,” he teased.
And this is why the show will work. You don’t need to have watched the other title or read the comics as Fear the Walking Dead works as a standalone show.
To prove that they are truly dedicated, the team behind this show have even got the zombies’ details right, where they are not as decayed as we see in The Walking Dead.
“We’re a little bit further along in season two so they’ll have decayed a bit more and atrophied a little. And there are other factors and elements. We’re in salt water in the ocean and under a baking-hot sun. So you’ll see a progression in their appearance, but fundamentally they have recently become walkers and it’s very difficult to put one of them down. That takes its toll emotionally. We’re actually humanising the dead, and we want to continue to show the weight and pressure that puts on our characters when they have to dispatch these ‘people’,” he said.
The fact that these zombies are derived from infected people makes it hard for some people to detach their emotions and that makes for some good stories.
“Some of our characters still want to recognise the walkers as having some degree of humanity left and, perhaps, some intelligence or understanding. We had our first zombie horde at the end of the last season and we’ll definitely have lots more walkers in this season. But we still want to hold on to the idea that Robert established – we never want the dead to become just ‘cannon fodder’. I think that adds a real perspective to the storytelling that we can explore. So, even if they look more gross, we want to hold on to their human qualities,” said Erickson.
Fear the Walking Dead premieres on April 11 at 8pm on AMC. Catch it on DStv on channel 140 and StarSat on channel 115 too.
Catch the season 1 marathon starting on April 10.