Editorials
‘The Walking Dead’ Set Visit Preview: The Bloodiest Show Ever!
Oh yes, there will be blood. AMC has made some pretty impressive headway in the television world in recent years, going from primarily broadcasting old movies to competing with the cutting edge of dramatic television on channels like HBO, Showtime and FX. And while “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” broke ground in terms of language and sex, their next series The Walking Dead promises to bring the gore in a big, big way. And from what we saw during our recent visit to the Atlanta set, this may well be the bloodiest show ever seen on television.
When the first zombie image from set circulated last month, portraying the rotting corpse of a woman reaching out towards camera, the collective hearts of zombie fans across the nation went aflutter. Courtesy of FX maestro Greg Nicotero, the work looks as good as anything we’ve seen on a big budget feature production. But Robert Kirkman, who created the original comic, tells us the image only shows half of what we’ll ultimately see on the show. “Just wait until you see below the waste,” explains a giddy Kirkman. “Below the waste, she’s just a pelvis with a dragging femur. She’s just dragging herself around and it is just horrendous-looking.”
THE WALKING DEAD’s director, Frank Darabont, may be best known for dramatic work like SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, but he’s a horror geek from way back who has long-since dreamed of getting his hands on some zombies. A lifelong Romero fan, Darabont promises that the series will hold little back in comparison to a horror feature. “We can’t say fuck,” says Darabont with a laugh. “I don’t know that if I were doing a feature I’d be doing anything differently. You can’t say fuck but you can shoot a zombie in the head at point blank range. I love this business.”
Darabont has been trying to produce THE WALKING DEAD show for five-plus years. At one point the show was being developed for NBC. “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,” says Darabont. “It’s one of those things where the network says, `Oh yeah, we want to stretch the envelope’ until they realize that they’re actually looking at a stretched envelope and they go, `Woah, no, let’s do CSI some more.’”
“I’m certainly not trying to rip them down, but they’re a network and we could never have done this show the way it needed to be done there.”
Along with makeup legend and zombie aficionado Greg Nicotero, who is often seen on set hauling large buckets of fake blood, Darabont is setting out to test the bounds of television gore. “Yesterday Greg was up past his elbows. He was just absolutely covered with blood.”
The two worked previously on 2007’s THE MIST. “The real hardcore geek stuff that we grew up loving, we haven’t really gotten a chance to do that much,” says Darabont. “We’re having the time of our lives together.”
Nicotero says Darabont’s enthusiasm is contagious: “We did the first take and Frank was like, `It’s zombie day, it’s zombie day!’ Frank really loves the genre and is so passionate about it.”
The day before our visit, Nicotero prepped 150 zombies for the biggest shooting day so far. “It’s funny, because I thought when we did LAND OF THE DEAD, we had 60 zombies a night. It was just brutal. And then of course our 150 day in our summer heat [here].”
During our visit in early June, the Atlanta sets were hitting record temperatures well over 100 degrees with the humidity index. Darabont, who could often be spotted on set with a towel on his head, described it as a sauna. “You don’t get used to the heat,” says the director. “I’ve never had clothes stick to me like this in my life.” Luckily the fun of the production seems to overwhelm the brutal heat.
Just outside the Atlanta Zoo, the day’s shoot was at an unassuming house in downtown Atlanta. The scene takes place early in the story when Rick (Andrew Lincoln) first comes home from the hospital. He finds his house abandoned and heads outside for a moment of reflection. A little boy (Adrian Kali Turner) sneaks up behind Rick and, mistaking him for a zombie, knocks him unconscious with a shovel. “Dad!” the boy screams. “I got the sonba bitch!”
A tall, lanky zombie in a tattered, dirty black suit approaches and the father (Lennie James) steps in and shoots him dead with a pistol. The scene is more of a set-up of things to come rather than the larger set pieces shot the day before.
For anyone still feeling skeptical about the level of gore AMC will permit on TV, Kirkman admits even he’s been shocked. “The stuff that AMC is going to put on air is crazy,” he says. “They keep showing me things and I’m like, you’re not doing that.”
During the previous day’s shoot, Rick wanders into an abandoned downtown Atlanta looking for signs of life. Instead, he comes across a mob of hungry zombies. He manages to escape, but his horse isn’t so fortunate. “They rip a horse open and there’s just spaghetti coming out,” says Kirkman. “They actually have things that you see.”
“It was fantastic,” Nicotero says of the horse scene. “You see the pale, discolored hands going in and then coming out red.”
As further evidence, we are shown pictures of the horse disembowelment. The shots are, in a word, brutal. In one overhead image, a crowd of zombies devour the horse as a pool of blood forms around them. In the appetizing close-up, the zombies tear innards out of the horse and prepare for the feast, blood covering their hands and mouths.
We were shown a few additional images, such as a shadowy staircase shot of Rick after he first wakes up in the hospital. The image showcases the gritty, dark look of the series, which is being shot on Super-16mm film stock. Aside from the horse shots, the other gory image is of a dead nurse that looks to have been one zombie’s late night snack. Her body is totally massacred, blood streaked and splattered all around her, a dark pool around her corpse. Some of her ribs are exposed and all that remains of one leg is a bloody stump. Did I mention they showed us these images right after lunch?
After a single day on set, we are sufficiently impressed with what we’ve seen, if even a little shocked. Sure, we’re a little skeptical as to whether all the gooey gory goodness we saw on set will actually make it to air, but Darabont, producer Gale Ann Hurd and the rest of the team we spoke to on set insisted that what you see is what you get. They intend to push the envelope to the limit. And hey, we’d love to see them get away with it.
We’ll have more from the set of THE WALKING DEAD coming soon. The series will premiere on AMC as part of their Fearfest this October.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
You must be logged in to post a comment.