Blood may ooze from the rotten, decaying flesh of Greg Nicotero's zombies on AMC's “The Walking Dead,” but it's not the gore that drew the McCandless native into the horror-entertainment industry. It was the creativity and intelligence behind the guts.
“I was never really that attracted to the gore aspect of it,” says Nicotero, 51, who lives in Los Angeles. “I was more attracted to the technical expertise that it took to create something: How do they build a 25-foot shark? How do they make a zombie's head explode? How do they make the suit from the ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon?'
“I was really just brought into it more (from) the mystery of special effects.”
But Nicotero doesn't deny enjoying the blood and guts, a hallmark of “The Walking Dead,” the cult TV series that will resume its fifth season Feb. 8.
Nicotero is a lifelong monster enthusiast, who, as a kid, loved painting monster models and reading monster magazines.
“Gore is fun,” he says. “When you blow somebody's head off and it explodes into a shower of fake blood ... doing those kinds of effects are fun and challenging. You never know which way the blood is going to flow. ... It's always a little bit of the guessing game.”
Nicotero, a 1981 graduate of Sewickley Academy, directed the Feb. 8 episode, which continues where the Season 5's eighth episode left off in the fall, following the death of one of the main characters. He is executive producer of the AMC series and the mastermind behind the look of the zombies, which, in the show, are called “walkers.”
Nicotero credits his hometown for his opportunities.
He's worked with Pittsburgh horror legends like George Romero of “Night of the Living Dead” fame and Tom Savini, whose directing credits include “Tales from the Darkside” and the 1990 remake of “Night of the Living Dead.”
Nicotero got his first horror job in the 1980s on the local set of Romero's “Day of the Dead.”
“I kind of jumped from Pittsburgh to New York to L.A.,” Nicotero recalls. “Within a year, I found myself working on ‘Aliens.' ”
He loves the Pittsburgh area, where his parents still live in his childhood home in McCandless.
“I was able to find Hollywood right in my backyard ... and able to turn a hobby into a profession,” he says. “I can't say enough good things about Pittsburgh.”
During the past three decades, Nicotero has amassed major film and television credits as a makeup and special-effects artist, including many non-horror shows like “The Pacific,” “Water for Elephants” and “Oz the Great and Powerful.” His scary-movie credits include “Masters of Horror,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,” 2005's “The Amityville Horror,” “Scream” and “Scream 2,” “Misery” and “Creepshow 2.”
As for his current show, Nicotero's challenge is making the walkers gorier and gorier. After all, it's been five seasons since the zombie apocalypse happened in the show's first year in 2010.
“Every season, we have a slight passage of time,” he says. “We purposely design those makeups so that (walkers) look like they're more and more decayed, with more bone showing and missing teeth.
“This season, we have a lot of characters where noses are rotted off. Every season, we try to push the makeup a little bit further, so we get the sense that these rotting corpses are continuing to decompose. It's like putting a pumpkin in the sun.”
Nicotero and his makeup team use many methods and ingredients to create the walker look, with latex being a key tool. They sculpt new prosthetics each season starting with molded clay. They fit each walker with custom-made contact lenses and dentures. The production crew films each episode over an eight-day period, which is “actually pretty quick, considering the number of characters we have and number of actions we do,” Nicotero says. The makeup crew spends about an hour and a half creating each key walker.
Adam Bryant, executive editor of TVGuide.com, says Nicotero's zombie artistry is impressive.
“The thing about Greg — what he's done is really interesting in that he doesn't give you the same zombie twice, which is an incredible feat,” Bryant says. “The longer the show goes on, he's paying tribute to the fact that these rotting corpses ... get more and more disturbing and more and more disgusting.”
But what makes “The Walking Dead” such a major hit and cultural phenomenon, even among people who otherwise aren't gore fans? Bryant says the show, ultimately, is not about the undead but about the human characters, “trying to wrestle with trying to stay alive themselves.”
“It's about the living dead, but it's really about the living,” Bryant says. “The human beings can often be more monstrous than the zombies.”
Fans can expect an even bleaker and harsher show in this second half of the season, Nicotero says.
Nicotero — who also will be an executive producer in a spinoff show coming soon from AMC — says the relatable characters in “The Walking Dead” draw in many fans, even though sometimes beloved characters, like Beth Greene in the fall, get killed off in the script.
“I always feel like there's somebody for everyone when you watch the show ... in terms of identifying with the characters you can follow,” he says. “I always use the analogy of a mad scientist's three ingredients: great storytelling, great characters and great monsters. It's a very delicate balance.
“We spend a lot of time making sure that we keep those in balance. ... I think that we've found a really good balance.”
Nicotero's chosen profession and success come as no surprise to Jim Cavalier, who served as head of Sewickley Academy's Senior School from 1963 to '92. Cavalier, 87, recalls Nicotero working on a film for a class project.
“I think he was a very imaginative and very independent-minded young guy,” says the Glen Osborne resident.
Teenagers are “always ready to go along with whatever the fad is at the time, and Greg was not that kind of a guy,” Cavalier says, adding that Nicotero was a “very pleasant guy” with a lot of friends.
“He was out there ready to move on his own,” he says. “He had his own feelings for what he liked and what he wanted to do.”
Kellie B. Gormly is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at kgormly@tribweb.com or 412-320-7824.
