Image Credit: AMCThere are people who believe zombies should only walk. And there are people who believe they can run around like steroid-injecting track stars. Then, there’s Frank Darabont, executive producer of the new AMC zombie show The Walking Dead, who believes both aforementioned groups are full of hooey. “Well, it depends on the zombie’s mood,” says the Shawshank Redemption director. “If they’ve recently fed, they’re a little less interested, a little more shutdown. Other times, they’re riled to a predatory state and can get a little faster.” So, they’re mostly walking — but sometimes they jog in the manner of an arthritic grandmother? “Yes, exactly,” laughs the filmmaker, who also directed the Walking Dead pilot, which debuts, appropriately, on Halloween. “This all goes back, by the way, to the original Night of the Living Dead. The Internet adherence to zombies never running clearly ignores the first 10 minutes of that movie. Because the first zombie you see is pretty spry. He’s obviously rather hungry and worked up.”
Darabont was in junior high when he first saw George A. Romero’s 1968 tale of bloodthirsty, reanimated corpses and the bickering band of still-breathing humans they besiege — a low budget black-and-white gore fest that invented the modern-day zombie horror genre. “I remember it vividly,” says Darabont. “It was 1974, and it came to one of the revival houses in L.A. My friends and I were very affected by it.” Darabont’s fellow Walking Dead executive producer Gale Anne Hurd (Aliens, The Abyss) says that she first saw Night of the Living Dead “through my fingers. I’m pretty sure I had to leave the room quite a few times. I’m one of those people who is highly suggestible. I do tend to believe, after I’ve seen something, that zombies are about to exist and somehow they’re going to come find me first. I’ve had therapy for this. [Laughs] But I’ve seen it a number of times and it really holds up.”
