Fear the Walking Dead seems to finally be finding its legs as the second season of The Walking Dead spin-off show rushes towards a conclusion. Last night’s episode featured the kind of huge zombie horde showdown normally reserved for season finales, with hundreds of the undead chasing Madison down a pier in an effort by the survivors to drop them off the end and suck them away into the ocean.
Entertainment Weekly talked to showrunner Dave Erickson about the scene and how Fear the Walking Dead threw so many walkers at us this week.
“It was a combination of stunts and then heavy VFX,” Erickson explained. “I think we tripled or quadrupled the number of dead on the pier in post. And then usually when a stunt person jumps from that height they go feet first, but we had a number of stunt people who actually fell in zombie style at awkward angles and I think there were some very painful belly flops on the way down.”
“The pier is just outside of the Rosarito Beach Hotel, which is where I and most of the cast and crew stay when we’re down there, so for a stretch of time a lot of us were just rolling out of bed in the morning and going to work. I’ve always wanted to find a way to use that, and we figured out a way.”
That practically sounds like a vacation: waking up in the hotel and then going to take a nice dip in the ocean. Not so nice: that dip involved a 20-foot drop and some poor landings in the water. But they say true art often involves suffering, and perhaps that’s what makes this scene one of our favorites yet in the series. Let’s hope things continue to get worse for all the living on Fear the Walking Dead so we get more of this!