‘The Walking Dead’ season 4 spoilers: Greg Nicotero on upping the ante

Is “The Walking Dead’s” upcoming season 4 premiere going to be absolutely insane? Based on what one of the show’s newly-minted executive producers is saying now, it certainly sounds like it just from the standpoint of having all sorts of amazing zombie carnage.

Greg Nicotero comes into his position as director for the premiere with an interesting perspective; not only is he an executive producer this year, but he has been a key player in the effects department since the very beginning. Therefore, you know an episode directed by him is going to contain almost every deadly (or un-deadly, if you appreciate good puns) bell and whistle to impress the audience.

Speaking as a part of a new blog post on AMC, Nicotero described just everything that he is throwing into the episode:

“In the first episode this season, one of the guys in my crew was like, ‘You did every gag that you ever did in three years of ‘The Walking Dead’ in one episode.’ We had walkers. We had mummified corpses. We had puppets. We had zombie bites… There was even a couple of gags that we came up with on the fly — there was a couple of sculptures that my guys in Los Angeles had done and I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a great walker.’ Where people are like, ‘What are the iconic walkers for season four going to be?’ I’m like, ‘Well, you’ll just have to see!'”

The struggle for Nicotero and for the show as a whole is going to be in some ways continuing to find something new and exciting to do. While we consider this show to be above all a character study with zombies included, if you fail to create the shock value that viewers want, there could the complaints. Just look at how some people disliked the “Game of Thrones” finale from earlier this year, which was mostly because it went for a more subtle approach after the Red Wedding.

For those of you hungering for more “Walking Dead” scoop like a zombie for human flesh, don’t worry: The season 4 preview weekend is coming soon, and we have more details for you on this very subject here.

Photo: AMC