The Walking Dead Season 10: cast and crew on zombies, plot twists, gore and horror

On a warm August morning on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, a few zombies – their clothes tattered, hair matted and teeth yellowed – throw punches at humans. Around them is a high corrugated steel wall; beneath their bare feet, scorched grass and unkempt weeds. A few feet away, director Greg Nicotero yells “cut!”

The Walking Dead, a long-standing TV series with a borderline obsessive following, is shooting its 10th season; the US premiere is on October 6. Fans are waiting to find out what happens after season nine ended with a bloodbath in a blizzard.

“There’s some spectacular stuff I’m excited about people seeing,” says Angela Kang, the series’ producer and writer. “We’re always trying to find ways to show new kinds of environmental threats and different kinds of obstacles in the world.”

The Walking Dead franchise began life in 2003 as a black-and-white graphic novel created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore, set in a world inspired by the zombie films of George Romero, such as Night of the Living Dead.

The Walking Dead kicked off in 2010 with an Atlanta policeman, Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln), who wakes up after a coma from a gunshot wound to discover that the apocalypse has happened, and the world is overrun by zombies (referred to in the story as ‘walkers’.) In the intervening years, the series has seen a revolving door of characters – so much so, that entire walls in a conference room at one of the production studios is lined with photos of cast members that have been killed off.

“We’re so tied to these actors who play these roles that it’s hard for us, and it makes us very sad [when they die on the show].” Kang says. “This has never really been a show about one person’s story. It’s a collective, and it’s about how they work together. Even as we lose characters it mirrors what’s happening in the story. They step up and rally around each other.”

This season will see the introduction of new characters, including Gamma – played by Thora Birch – and Dante, played by Juan Javier Cardenas; Kang says both bring “a really interesting interplay to the season.”

Some of the show is filmed in Senoia, 35 minutes south of Atlanta, a pretty and quaint neighbourhood that has seen property prices triple on the back of the Walking Dead attention. Visitors can sign up for walking tours, shop at The Woodbury, packed to the rafters with its Walking Dead related merchandise.

Kang, naturally, is asked endlessly about what awaits the show’s key characters – Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), his partner Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride), Michonne Hawthorne (Danai Gurira). It has already been revealed that Gurira will be leaving the show during the season, but of course Kang can’t reveal how.

“It’s very ‘spoilery’,” says Kang. “So much of it is cool and fresh. And we can’t say any part of it without spoiling it at all.”

The Whisperers, a splinter group that formed in season nine as a gathering of humans pretending to be zombies, were responsible for the massacre in the last season’s finale.

“You have different people now, so there’s new people pulling the rabbit out of the hat,” says Reedus, whose character has survived since the show’s earliest days. “So it’s a different trick. They constantly change the story line … there’s a lot of paranoia playing this season.”

For Season 10, Reedus says, audiences can expect to see “a lot of story lines that are criss-crossing and a lot of people in those story lines that aren’t trusting each other.

“And Daryl is cleaning up a lot of mess. He and Carol’s relationship is full of friction this year. She’s kind of on her own path, and she’s creating some situations that put everyone in danger, and I’m constantly cleaning up that mess.”

Routine mutilations and decapitations notwithstanding, Kang says that the enduring appeal of the series and everything in its universe – the spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead, the video games and an upcoming film franchise – can be credited to the essentially human dynamics in the show.

“The world of our people continues to expand over time,” says Kang. “It started with a story about a man who wakes up to a world that’s ended. And it spreads to an entire community. It shows that people can start to reform civilisation.

“Our people are trying to hold on to the values of their civilisation and exploring the idea of their fledgling democracy and the value of their humanity beyond survival of the fittest.”

Kang is aware of the lure of the gore factor of the show; it is not for the squeamish, with heads being placed on spikes and endless zombies being speared in the brain. Still, she subscribes to the theory that there is something energising about watching a good, old-fashioned horror film or TV show.

“Ultimately, the best horror has a kind of hopefulness to it, because it highlights our hidden strengths and reserves of strengths we have when we are faced with our nightmares,” she says.

The show allows viewers to explore really deeply scary true-life situations in a way that they have a little bit of remove, an element of fantasy and fun, the producer adds, “it’s like a nightmare and a dream where you get to work out your fantasies.”

“The big fun of The Walking Dead is that it’s a character drama that’s wrapped in zombies,” says Kang.

Walking Dead Season 10 on Now TV (Fox channel 518), October 7 at 11.30am, 12.30pm and 9pm (Hong Kong time)