When fans see Fear The Walking Dead, they are going to be yelling at the TV “Don’t do that!” or “The head, the head, aim for the brain.” Society doesn’t know what to make of the “infected” as they are known in this show as they haven’t determined what the problem is: is it a virus, a hallucination, a bad drug trip? Consider also that the undead have not been decaying for very long, so other than glassy eyes and the iconic rasp and stagger, they don’t look that odd.
As Dave Erikson explains, “If someone is behaving that way, you don’t go and grab a bomb here and grab the gun. You want to try to understand and help. You want to call 911.” It makes it very easy to see with that mindset how all the first responders could have fallen victim in the early days of the crisis.
Not to worry though, these newly minted zombies are plenty scary. Cliff Curtis is a self-described scaredy cat. “I was on set and this dude was in my face it was freaking me out,” he said. “The make-up was so real. It’s not the lighting or some kind of CGI thing. It’s like there’s a guy standing in front of you and it’s hard to look. For me. I don’t know, maybe Rick Grimes would deal differently, but I’m like, whoa! That is… I need a break because it’s really intense.”
Everyone has their own way of dealing with the the undead. Elizabeth Rodriguez, who plays Curtis’ ex-wife Liza Ortiz, had a unique coping mechanism off camera so she could deal with the horror on screen. “I saw my first walker, because it is so traumatic, I tend to go for full on clown, to the other side. I become like really like, ‘this is amazing. So scary.’ I just sort of like invaded the person’s space and I was like, ‘oh my god, I want to kiss you’ because it was so absurd. And I became like a little bit of the Shaun of the Dead. That’s where I go. So I go, ‘oh, my god, this is so creepy.’ That’s what happens with me, just because it’s so amazing. It could really traumatize you, so I go into, let’s take it to the other side of clowniness.”
All-in-all Fear the Walking Dead shows a lot of promise as a spin-off/prequel series. Tune in on August 23 on AMC at 9:00 ET/8:00 CT and check it out for yourself.
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