It’s well known by now that special effects supervisor Greg Nicotero is trying to make the zombies in The Walking Dead look as real as possible, which means that the zombies are a little more decomposed after each season. After two years of decomposition, the walkers look absolutely revolting. Based on science, we may even be able to predict the ending of The Walking Dead based on the walkers’ decomposition rates (let’s just hope it’s an upbeat ending, as Robert Kirkman has suggested).
The decomposition of the zombies has gotten so bad, that this zombie in the sixth season premiere got me wondering.
That walker is almost literally nothing but flesh and bone. How much more can these zombies decompose before there’s nothing left but a skeleton? Are we looking at a future The Walking Dead where the walkers look like this:
No, we are not, according to Greg Nicotero.
“The only thing you’ll never see is a Ray Harryhausen[-inspired], perfectly clean skeleton walking around because, obviously, there’s no muscle,” he told Tech Insider.
“We still try to keep to the reality of [needing] muscle to move the bone to move the body, but it’s just something that we continue to push every season with new sculptures and pushing the elements of what we can.
“Every season we take advantage of the advancement of our timeline and the advancement of our story and it’s definitely something that we try to push in terms of more skeletal sloughing off skin, missing noses, exposed ribs, exposed organs … all that stuff. Anything we can do to just further and continually suggest that these are walking, emaciated, decomposing corpses that have been wandering around in the sun, wandering around in the rain, wandering around in the elements for almost two years now.”
How does Nicotero manage to make the zombies look further decomposed without completely pulling off their flesh? Moss is one way:
Sewer zombies is another.
In other words, Nicotero has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, although I do look forward to that season 10 zombie whose muscle tissue completely disintegrates right before a kill and it falls into a pile of dusty bones.
(Via Tech Insider)
