By “The Walking Dead,” one of cable television’s scariest and most popular shows is coming to Universal Studios, and The Daily 49er got a behind the scenes look at what it takes to bring this nail-biting series to life.
“The Walking Dead: Dead Inside” is a new maze at Universal Studios Hollywood which aims to put park guests directly into the zombie apocalypse and see if they can survive.
Fans of the show or the extremely popular comic book series will immediately recognize the locations depicted in the new maze. The hospital where main character Rick Grimes wakes up from his coma is the first section of the maze, and the iconic hospital door with the words “Don’t Open, Dead Inside,” can be seen on the way through the halls.
The characters from the television show do not make many appearances in the maze, which was a deliberate decision by creative director John Murdy.
“The idea is that you are the survivors,” Murdy said. “If a character shows up with a gun saying ‘I’m a cop’ it’s not going to be as scary.”
A few characters from the show will make a cameo at one point in the maze, but if you’re not looking carefully, you may miss them.
“They’ll look a lot like the walkers but the difference will be that they’re carrying axes,” Murdy said.
The choice of which scenes from the show to feature was an exciting one for Murdy and the rest of the creative team.
“It’s like a greatest hits album of scares,” Murdy said.
Another scene involving a zombie walker devouring a deer carcass took a lot more work than expected.
“You can’t just go online and say ‘I need a dead deer carcass with three arrows in it and its throat ripped out,'” Art Director Chris Williams said. “We ended up attaching an actual taxidermied deer head to a fiberglass deer body.”
Everything in the maze was built by hand, even some of the more elaborate structures such as a giant tank with a dead soldier hanging out of it. Fans of the show will recognize the scene, which is so impressive it may distract visitors from the performers hiding in the shadows waiting to scare the pants off of them.
“You have to hit them in their peripheral vision,” Williams said. “That way they don’t see it coming until it’s too late.”
The maze requires close to 42 performers in full makeup at one time. Hundreds of facial prosthetics are needed just for this maze alone. Considering that the actors also have to take breaks just like any other job, this production takes a lot of work.
“On the show the makeup takes four hours. We only have 20 minutes,” Murdy said. “We also have to train every actor, which can get a bit crazy. By the end of this week, we’ll look like the walking dead.”
“The Walking Dead: Dead Inside” opens on Sept. 21 and runs until October 31.
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