Frank Darabont’s Small-Screen Take on ‘The Walking Dead’ Is Official
AMC Officially Picks Up ‘The Walking Dead’
It’s time to pop a bottle or two, zombie fiction lovers. After months of speculation and uncertainty, AMC’s TV-show adaptation of the black and white comic book series The Walking Dead is officially a go, says THR. As was announced back in August, the pilot (and hopefully every subsequent episode after that, assuming the stars remain aligned) will be scripted and directed by Frank Darabont and executive produced by Gale Anne Hurd (whose resume includes the first three Terminator films, Armageddon, The Incredible Hulk).
A program about flesh-eating ghouls might sound like a bizarre pick-up for the network behind Mad Men and Breaking Bad,yet that’s far from the truth. The Walking Dead, launched in 2003 and written by Robert Kirkman, uses a zombie apocalypse as its backdrop, sure, but the focus is always on its still-breathing characters, the main one being a Kentucky police officer named Rick Grimes. And there’s plenty of source material available to sustain a long-running series, with 60 issues having been published to date. As AMC’s Senior VP of Programming Joel Stillverman told Variety: “This is not about zombies popping out of closets… This is a story about survival, and the dynamics of what happens when a group is forced to survive under these circumstances. The world is portrayed in a smart, sophisticated way.”
There’s no better feeling for a horror fan than watching a genre entry directed by an undeniably great filmmaker, a creative mind that normally operates outside of the Chiller Theater circuit. One could trace this rare practice back to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and then flash forward to 2007, when Darabont contributed the year’s most slept-on film of any type, The Mist. As easy as it is to love a guy like Eli Roth’s encyclopedia-like horror knowledge, or feel the enthusiasm toward gore expressed in an Alexandre Aja interview, neither guy has made anything remotely as intricate and emotionally draining as The Mist; no surprise, considering that Darabont previously scored with the dramatic Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. He’s always had a soft spot for the scary stuff, though; his first two notable credits were screenwriting duties on 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors and the following year’s remake of The Blob.
Source: THR’s Heat Vision Blog
Interesting, I like Frank Darabont and I like walking dead. Hope he don't mess this up! should be exciting to see.
[...] Executive producer on the pilot will be Gale Anne Hurd (Terminator 1 thru 3, Armageddon, etc). [...]