Season six of The Walking Dead will contain more zombies than ever before

THE sixth season of The Walking Dead has started and the special effects make-up designer has warned there will be record amounts of blood and guts.

The most gruesome series ever created

IF you’ve watched the season six premiere of The Walking Dead, you would have noticed the episode had zombies; a lot of zombies.

Executive producer, special effects makeup designer and occasional director Greg Nicotero said the episode contained so many ghastly characters it set a new record for the survival horror series.

“We shot more zombies than we ever had in any episode. I believe it was almost a thousand people in makeup, with 12 makeup artists, in a nine-day episode,” he told the National Post.

“There were times when the make-up artists never even left the trailer. They’d start at four in the morning, do make-up all day, and right when they’d finish their last person some of the first people they’d made up were coming into the trailer for clean-up.”

Mr Nicotero said the cornerstone scene showing thousands of walkers trapped in a giant quarry was the reason for the largest group of zombies ever assembled for the show.

“The quarry scene was designed with a big scale in mind,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

“But I can definitely tell you there will probably be an episode in this season where we break that record.”

A sample of the 1000 extras made up as the undead in the first episode of season 6.

Having worked on the series since its debut in 2010, Mr Nicotero has been constantly mindful in evolving the way the zombies are represented on screen.

“I would never want the zombies to feel like they looked in Season 1, because in Season 1 we were six weeks into the fall of society and now we’re about two years in,” he told the National Post.

“It’s like a rotting pumpkin. You can put a pumpkin outside and two months later it’s just a puddle of goo.”

Mr Nicotero estimates that in the past three years The Walking Dead had used just under 6000 litres of fake blood, however he claims the first episode of season 6 was so enormous the amount of blood used easily surpassed all of those years combined.

The meticulous detail of the ambitious project was easy for the 52-year-old to justify because it made the experience as visual and cinematic as possible.

Although, he admits when people don’t watch the program on a television or a cinema, the detail is lost and this makes him a little jaded.

“I cry a little bit when I think about people watching it on their iPads or a phone,” he said.