Movies
Set Report Part 1: Bringing Kirkman’s ‘The Walking Dead’ to Life
Hands down the most anticipated horror project of 2010 is AMC TV’s The Walking Dead, a new series that’s set to premiere this coming October. Bloody Disgusting was lucky enough to spend a day on the set in Atlanta, Georgia to witness the great Frank Darabont (The Mist) filming the pilot episode. Adapted from Robert Kirkman’s astounding Image comic franchise, the project is set among a group of zombie survivors of an apocalypse who are led by a police officer, Rick Grimes, in search of a safe place to live. Each week over the next month we’ll be unrolling a new piece that’ll take you dear readers behind-the-scenes of what could be the horror event of the year. If “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men” weren’t enough, are you willing to become one of “The Walking Dead”?
PREVIEW | PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 (new piece each week)
Zombies have enjoyed quite a resurgence over the past decade, from the emergence of speedy zombies in DAWN OF THE DEAD and 28 DAYS LATER (to the chagrin of some zombie purists) and on to the reemergence of zombie godfather George A. Romero with three new DEAD films to cap off the aughts. But for true flesh cravers, a few movies a year simply isn’t enough. If all goes well, longtime zombie lover Frank Darabont hopes to deliver your next dosage of undead on a weekly basis.
Based on the long-running comic by Robert Kirkman, THE WALKING DEAD will debut during AMC’s Fearfest this October. The critically acclaimed network hopes to see DEAD’s hero Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) landing Emmy nods alongside Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) this time next year. They also plan to set some new standards for the level of acceptable gore on television before all is said and done.
Along with Lincoln as Grimes, DEAD’s cast includes Jon Bernthal as Shane, Sarah Wayne Callies as Lori, Laurie Holden as Andrea and Emma Bell as Amy. Darabont will serve as executive producer as well as writer and director of the pilot; Kirkman will exec producer along with Gale Anne Hurd; and makeup master Greg Nicotero will make the zombies look, well, horrific. And if the first images we’ve seen so far are any indication, his work will be beyond anything else we’ve previously seen on television.
BLOODY-DISGUSTING spent a day sweltering on the Atlanta sets during production of the pilot episode. Over the course of our visit, we spoke to Darabont, Lincoln, Bernthal, Kirkman, Hurd and Nicotero. We got some background on the series’ development, bringing the production to Atlanta and what zombie school is all about. We even got to see a few zombies in the flesh and flip through some eerie, blood-soaked stills from production.
Part 1: Bringing Kirkman’s Walking Dead to Life
Like many projects these days, it all started with a trip to the comic shop. “He picked it up in a comic shop because somebody had told him it was a good zombie book and he loves all things zombie,” Kirkman says of Darabont’s initial discovery of the WALKING DEAD books. “He really enjoyed it and started asking around town and Hollywood to see what was going on with it and he found his way to my manager. That was a long time ago.”
Darabont first struck a deal up with NBC, but it wasn’t meant to be. “They were very excited about the idea of doing a zombie show until I handed them a zombie script where zombies were actually doing zombie shit,” laughs Darabont. “And so, after that I shopped it around and got a lot of doors slammed in my face is the truth of it. It languished for a bit, as things do in Hollywood.”
Enter Gale Anne Hurd. “I’d heard about it,” Hurd tells press. “When I first read the book, I thought, ‘This would be a great film’ and boy was I wrong. It’s a much better TV series. Fast forward, I knew that Frank had initially developed it for NBC, which to me seemed like an odd pairing for this. Then I heard it wasn’t going forward at NBC, so I talked to Frank.”
“Gale was tremendously instrumental in jump-starting it at a point where it felt like it was languishing,” says Darabont. “I’d gotten turned down enough times, which is no reflection on the material, but no matter what you’re trying to sell in Hollywood, you’re Willy Loman and it’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN. You’re out there trying to sell shit that nobody wants. Even if it’s good shit.”
DEAD is the first work of Kirkman’s to be adapted and, considering the pedigree attached, he’s pretty pleased with the way things have gone. “I was telling Gale the other day, ‘This is the first thing I’ve had adapted and I have no sense of what this is actually like because Frank is the director, Gale Anne Hurd is the producer,” says Kirkman. “The stuff that AMC is going to put on air is crazy. They keep showing me things and I’m like, you’re not doing that. They rip a horse open and there’s just spaghetti coming out. They actually have things that you see.”
Though the adaptation is by no means a frame-for-frame WATCHMEN-style translation, Kirkman says DEAD is very faithful to his original work and, in some cases, might even improve on his ideas. “Reading that pilot was just a revelation,” says Kirkman. “It’s extremely faithful. There are things that are so much like the comic, I can’t really remember the nuance of what’s different and what’s not from the comic. He’s definitely being more faithful than I expected and everything that he’s changing is brilliant. I couldn’t be happier. I think the fans of the book are going to just love it.”
Darabont wrote the pilot episode and will also direct. Five other directors will then take the reigns for the initial six-episode run. “We have six different directors,” confirms Hurd. “We haven’t announced who they are yet. Frank can’t direct them all because obviously we have a very tight post production schedule. But he will be here on set and as executive producer, which is the case with most show runners, for every episode. The biggest problem was to say, ‘Frank, we cannot clone you and you can’t where all these hats.’”
“I have to put my pilot through the editing and post process,” adds Darabont. “Plus I’ve got to get back to L.A. and kind of ride heard on the writers generating the subsequent episodes. I’ve written the first two. I’ve got four scripts yet to come in and time is getting short. My intention is not to be an absentee landlord. I love this thing and I really want to keep my hand very much in the process. I don’t want to be one of those guys who gets a show set up, directs the pilot and then buggers off and is never heard from again.”
Darabont wrote the first two episodes. And Kirkman himself will pen Episode 4. “He’s terrific,” says Hurd of Kirkman’s script work. “For a first-timer, all those years writing comic books was great training. We also have Chic Eglee who most recently came from DEXTER and before that THE SHIELD and DARK ANGEL. And also Jack LoGiudice who came to us from SONS OF ANARCHY and Adam Fierro, who actually wrote the episode of THE SHIELD that Frank directed. And Glen Mazzara, who’s also from THE SHIELD.”
If the series succeeds, Season Two will be AMC’s normal 13-episode order. Darabont says it’s likely he’ll return to write and direct some of those episodes as well. Despite confidence that the series will be well received, Darabont says he’s not getting ahead of himself. The most important thing now is to deliver the best six episodes possible. From what we’ve seen so far, WALKING DEAD should be a real treat for horror fans.
I first heard about The Mandela Catalogue through a couple of nephews who were obsessed with the ARG’s sinister mythology. It was only after watching Wendigoon’s in-depth analysis of the series that I realized just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
In fact, I’d already been exposed to the nightmarish visuals of Alex Kister’s YouTube creation for years at that point without even realizing that it was the origin of several viral “cursed images” and spooky memes that had leaked into the wider internet – with this viral element actually being a part of the Catalogue’s overarching narrative.
Flash-forward to 2026 and the unprecedented success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has led to Hollywood betting on horrific internet properties with existing fanbases, which means that Kister’s unique hybrid of both religious and analog horror is finally headed to the big screen with a script written by Kister himself alongside Tyler Clifton.
While this news shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing success of The Mandela Catalogue (both myself and Wendigoon having previously predicted that the series would inevitably make the jump to theaters one day), plenty of horror fans are likely confused as to why so many folks are excited for what appears to be a Hollywood adaptation of a series of creepy .jpeg images under a VHS filter.
With that in mind, today I’d like to invite fellow readers to accompany me as I explore the origins of Alex Kister’s viral hit and attempt to explain exactly why we should all be excited about the Mandela Catalogue adaptation!
From High School Writing Project to Internet Horror Phenomenon
The first seeds of The Mandela Catalogue were sown when Kister was still in high school and developed a writing project subverting religious tropes in a world where biblical history had been altered by demonic forces. A little while later, Kister came across an analog horror contest on Reddit and decided to adapt his ideas into a standalone video where he would edit a religious kids’ cartoon –The Beginner’s Bible: The Nativity, to be specific- into something far creepier. This is how the iconic Overthrone video was born, with this viral short film taking on a life of its own as fans demanded more eerie content from Kister.
Though the video was originally meant to be a one-and-done sort of affair, with Kister actually regretting some of its primitive visuals and considering the editing amateurish and “YouTube-Poop-like” when compared to his current standards, fan reaction and free time during the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the (then) seventeen-year-old filmmaker to continue producing content set in this same world. The Mandela Catalogue name was inspired by the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, as the series would slowly begin to explore the subtle horror of alternate histories.
Inspired by existential dread brought on by extended periods of quarantine as well as a personal crisis of faith, Kister continued to expand his alternate timeline where the rise of Christianity had been prevented by what was presumably the Devil disguised as the Archangel Gabriel. This alternate course of fictional events led to the existence of certain paranormal anomalies that had come to be accepted as “normal” by the 1990s, which is why most of the series’ supernatural horror is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner.
Most of this background information and religious lore is delivered by increasingly cryptic broadcasts and in-universe PSAs, as well as the occasional found footage video, that often have to be decoded by clever viewers. Of course, it’s the consistently disturbing imagery that made the series so popular – much of which was originally created by Kister on a smartphone!
The Alternates: Horror’s Most Unsettling Modern Monsters
The show’s early episodes mostly take place within the fictional Mandela County in Wisconsin and depict life in a world where demonic entities are capable of using media to enter our reality. This process usually involves scaring victims into killing themselves and then repurposing their bodies as horrific doppelgangers referred to as “Alternates”. This terrifying phenomenon has become so common that local police already have specialized procedures in place to deal with the issue, though this usually consists of simply ignoring calls for help so as to avoid spreading so-called “Metaphysical Awareness Disorder” any further.
Over time, Kister would expand this mythology and incorporate different kinds of Alternates into the mix, though the story never stopped deconstructing religious concepts. The series’ second volume exponentially increased both video quality and the overall narrative scope as we began to follow the lives of characters who had already grown up in this dystopian hellscape where the government is forced to prohibit religion, television, and even mirrors in the hopes of mitigating the damage done by the ongoing invasion of otherworldly entities.
The really interesting part comes into play when you realize exactly how the Alternates make use of scary media in order to spread their demonic influence, with the analog horror of it all being a diegetic part of the story and something of a memetic trap orchestrated by the false Gabriel.
I particularly appreciate how some characters begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with their version of reality and that things weren’t meant to play out this way, especially when Mark utters the haunting line “who have I been praying to all this time?” That’s why I think The Mandela Catalogue is an effective piece of religious horror even if you don’t subscribe to the Christian worldview, as the mere idea of a world where evil has already won is a universally terrifying concept in and of itself. Not only that, but the series’ uncanny analog imagery alone is already worth the price of admission, as you’ve likely already noticed by looking at the pictures accompanying this article.
Why The Feature Adaptation Could Be Horror’s Next Big Success
It’s actually been a whole year since Kister first announced that he had been working on a feature-length screenplay for a Mandela Catalogue movie since 2022, with his proposed story following an ensemble of high-school graduates who uncover a supernatural conspiracy after the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student. This premise sounds similar to narrative elements present in the series’ second volume, but I’m pretty sure that Kister is going to go the Kane Parsons route and make the movie more of a spin-off than a re-imagining of its source material.
While notable Hollywood producers like Aaron B. Koontz, Scott Stuber, and Steven Spielberg himself are backing the upcoming project, I feel like there’s no one better to adapt this deeply personal exploration of faith and the dark side of communication than the person who first came up with it. That’s why I can’t wait to see Kister’s work on the big screen, as I have a feeling that this young filmmaker is the next one on the list about to make cinematic history – especially since this is clearly a passion project that has been in the works for years at this point!
That being said, there’s always a chance that the film could end up unleashing a fresh wave of Alternate incursions, but I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.
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