Creepiest TWD Zombie Was a Wes Craven Nod (And a Pure Nightmare Fuel)
The Walking Dead creators keep spoiling zombie enthusiasts with all kinds of terrifying-looking zombies at various stages of decay, and there's no stopping them.
We have the fungi walker with mushrooms growing all over his body, a disgusting bloated well zombie at Hershel's farm, the pale swamp walker with bulging eyes and the hungry melted asphalt zombies. Go to Reddit and you will find plenty of threads which look like 'the scariest-TWD-zombie-ever contest'.
But probably one of the creepiest walkers was featured all the way back in Season 9, and it is a spider zombie, the looks of which were enough to put any person with arachnophobia out of sleep for days. It looks like the undead is a nod to the 1981 horror movie Deadly Blessing.
In his 2018 interview, A New Beginning episode director Greg Nicotero told Screen Rant about shooting Season 9 and this particular nightmarish spider moment, which was a tribute to the famous slasher film.
"When we were designing the shot, originally it was like, 'Okay, a bunch of spiders come out of the eye.' And I was like, 'No, they've got to come out of the nose, come out of the mouth, and then you've got to have, like, the mama spider come out.' So not only is it the little ones, but then out of the mouth – which is very Wes Craven… my Deadly Blessing homage, the part where the spider comes out of the mouth," the special effects make-up artist turned director revealed.
This spider zombie features in the episode's opening scenes, which shows Rick leading a group to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. to get some vital supplies.
"[The spiders] were CGI," Nicotero went on to say. "I was at one point like, 'there was this movie called The Believers, where they had the spiders coming out of Helen Shaver's face," said the director who finds the flick very terrifying.
Nicotero recalls how a voodoo priest touches the girl's face and a big boil pops up. At a certain moment the boil explodes. It was done with the help of a prosthetic with a tube and the make-up artists had a funnel with spiders in it.
He said a friend of his took the funnel off and blew in the tube so that "the spiders went all over her face." Greg Nicotero admitted he was scared to do this as it was his biggest fear. Luckily the team said it would be too expensive, so the idea was dropped after all.
AMC's The Walking Dead series premiered in October 2010. The last ever season 11, which consists of 24 episodes, will conclude on November 20, 2022.