‘The Walking Dead’ is doing a bang-up job of making people afraid of Zombies. Somewhere along the way, they seem to have decided that was not sufficient, and that they should terrify people about other harmless and natural elements of society.

It seems for Season 2 they’ve settled on farms:

David Boyd, The Walking Dead’s Season 1 Cinematographer describes putting on the Director’s hat for Season 2 and explains what Hershel’s farmhouse has in common with a crocodile.

…

Q: From a photography standpoint, what horror opportunities does Hershel’s farmhouse offer?

A: You know I’ve grown to think of these structures — the house and the barn — as anthropomorphic. They have spirits, is how I’ve approached photographing them. You look at the house and I try to make that thing look vicious. I try to give it eyes and a nose and see what expression it might be feeling. And Greg Melton designed a barn that you’d swear is alive. It’s got two hayloft windows up above for eyes, there’s a little central thing to pull hay in that looks like a nose and the barn doors themselves are a mouth. And by God I make sure the farmhouse looks like it’s alive. I’ll give the upstairs windows a little glimmer as if this thing is lifting its eyelids, and looking out like a crocodile.

Q: What does that make the barn?

A: That’s something else. What would that be? A rattlesnake.

As a small point of background, I spent a big chunk of my childhood living on farms. Both sets of my grandparents are farmers, living on small farms perhaps not unlike the one being created (as a prop it seems) for ‘The Walking Dead’. Farms themselves can be somewhat inherently unsettling. The buildings are often old, very utilitarian and full of mysterious functions, sharp objects, heavy machinery and even harmful chemicals. That’s more or less the nature of the beast.

Compounding all that perfectly reasonable caution-inducing material is of course the human fear of the dark, the unknown, of being separated from civilization, from immediate help and safety and rescue. Neither of my grandparents’ farms were terribly distant from neighbors; that’s not how Indiana farmland is laid out, the houses are along small roads facing one another and the bulk of the farmland stretches out behind, so that you live on the edge of your property. It’s actually pretty sensible in that regard.

Still, you’re a lot lonelier, and the nights are a lot quieter, and that’s with the power on and constant communication available with the outside world.

So ‘The Walking Dead’ didn’t set itself any particularly huge challenges here. Farms are already a bit creepy; they want to make people lose bladder control just driving past them. Delightful! Because what we need most is more terror in the everyday lives of regular people.

For shame, ‘Walking Dead’, for shame.

Tags: Robert Kirkman, Social Justice, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, August 19th, 2011 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.