STACK #168 Oct 2018

DVD & BD

FEATURE

ability to shoot the zombie yourself, I think that opened up the genre to a whole generation of younger people who didn’t grow up watching Night of the Living Dead  and Dawn of the Dead . “Then there was  28 Days Later , Shaun of the Dead  and the Dawn of the Dead  remake, and all of a sudden the zombie genre was adrenalised. And then  The Walking Dead  put them right in your living room.” Although giving little away regarding the surprises in store in TWD’s eighth season, Nicotero does reveal there has always been a very specific pace to the series’ structure. “The first half of the season always tends to set up where our characters are. It’s like setting up a chessboard. Then in the second half of the season, it’s like boom, boom, boom – things start happening fast and furious. There’s a lot of that happening in the second half [of season eight]. Moves that were set up early in the season begin making sense.” When it comes to creating the multitude of zombie make-ups for TWD, Nicotero says the biggest challenge is time. “It’s not like a movie where you have six months to prep. The scripts come out and you probably have, at the most, two or three weeks to really develop and design something,” he explains. “That’s one of the other reasons my role is so important – I have a very strong vision as to how to execute these effects, so they give me a lot of freedom. “My job is to keep the audience guessing. The minute they say, ‘I know how they did that,’ we’re screwed. You have to keep it fresh and trick them into thinking they saw one thing. That’s how we do it and that’s how magicians do it – it’s misdirection. Whether we’re ripping their skin off, wrapping entrails around a tree, or Winslow with all the spikes crammed in, we want the ‘wow’ factor when audiences watch the episodes.”

GETTING A HEAD

Travelling to locations with gruesome props can result in some strange situations at the airport for a make-up artist. Nicotero recalls a particularly funny incident that occurred during a break in production on The Last Outlaw (1993), involving a replica head of Steve Buscemi with its face blown off. “We were flying back to LA and my friend Gino and I drove to the airport, and when we dropped off the rental car, the fake head was in the trunk wrapped in a black plastic bag with fake blood all

over it. The rental guy said, ‘That’s awesome, can I have it?’ We were late for the flight and had to go, so I said, ‘Yes, just don’t forget it.’ “So we fly back to LA and I get a call the next morning from the production office to say we’d left the head in the trunk of the car. I said, ‘No we didn’t, a guy was going to take it.’ An old lady had rented the car and opened the trunk and found the head in a garbage bag covered in blood. The police came and they cordoned off the area… “That’s just one of a million stories like that.”

• The Walking Dead:

Season 8 is out now

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