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It’s always difficult to tell what you can expect from a new series based solely on the efforts of its opening episode. Because of that, you won’t find me claiming that The Walking Dead is “the next big thing” on television. However, I will say that Friday night’s premiere (‘Days Gone Bye’) is an exceptional piece of horror, a brilliantly engaging opener and probably one of the most superb pilot episodes I’ve seen in a long while.
It should go without saying that if a show about a post-apocalyptic, zombie-filled existence doesn’t seem like something you’d want to watch, then The Walking Dead probably isn’t for you... With that said, if you are a horror fan, you’ll totally love this. The Walking Dead tells the story of police officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who wakes up from a coma to a world ruled by the dead. It’s an adaptation of the much-loved graphic novels by Robert Kirkman and it has Frank Darrabont (director of The Shawshank Redemption) as its showrunner.
I must admit that I’m no horror aficionado. So whilst it’s obvious that The Walking Dead is very aware of the genre that it fits into, I haven’t seen that many of the zombie films that it pays homage to (although I did notice some 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead references). Thankfully, it’s not important to know that much about horror to know what is and what isn’t scary. The Walking Dead is very frightening, mostly achieving a sense of fear through its overall atmosphere of tension and suspense, rather than with an overload of gore. (Your imagination always produces something far more terrifying than what you’ll see onscreen anyway.)
One of the most effective aspects of The Walking Dead’s first episode is that it succeeds in scaring the viewer on an auditory level too (something that’s important for any horror). The sound design is as close to perfect as I can imagine, with a beautiful score written by Bear McCreary (the man behind the music of Battlestar Galactica and Caprica) and prolonged periods of silence that only add to the tense atmosphere. I don’t mean to suggest that The Walking Dead won’t also appeal to fans of blood-and-guts though, because it most certainly will. The show is often gruesome, and it features multiple slow-motion death scenes (personally, I thought the slo-mo was a little unnecessary), including a little girl (zombified, but still less than 10 years old) being shot in the head. It gets worse too...later in the episode a horse is shown to be ripped apart and devoured by a hungry gang of zombies. This definitely isn’t one for the easily disgusted.
Almost everything about the premiere episode of The Walking Dead is spot-on. The whole thing is very well acted and it really does look amazing. However, it is a TV show, and it’ll only truly succeed when it manages to get the audience emotionally engaged in the moral struggles of its characters - there’s also no way it’ll be able to maintain this level of tension or a pace this slow. For a pilot episode, though, this whet my appetite for more zombies and provided a fantastic introduction to this world. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
A repeat of the first episode of The Walking Dead (‘Days Gone Bye’) airs on FX at 10pm tonight. The series continues on Friday nights at 10pm on FX.
Brains...NOM NOM NOM
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