Walking Dead Spin-Off Will Debut A Completely Different Zombie
The Walking Dead: Dead City will introduce a new and terrifying kind of zombie to the franchise.
The Walking Dead franchise is expanding again with The Walking Dead: Dead City, whose story takes place two years after the end of the original Walking Dead series. In this continuation, audiences will see Lauren Cohan’s Maggie and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan come to Manhattan, a totally different landscape with totally different zombies. And according to Collider’s interview with Chief Content Officer Scott M. Gimple, those zombies “quite possibly will make you throw up.”
The new show brings an all-new kind of walkers, and some of those walkers are quite gruesome. “There is a mind-bendingly horrific walker coming up that I wasn’t on set for,” Gimple went on, “and I’m glad I wasn’t. I got to experience the horrific magic at home, and it is magic.”
Although we will have to wait until the show’s premiere this summer to find out just how gross this zombie will be, we do know that The Walking Dead: Dead City will be using the big city as a character (and a threat) in and of itself. While the original Walking Dead series began with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) trapped inside a tank in Atlanta, Georgia, most of the show took place in the wilderness.
The characters were able to run through open spaces and down open roads and camp out in the woods – something they won’t be able to do in The Walking Dead: Dead City. New York opens things up for a whole new set of challenges and a whole new set of threats. “Just environmentally and architecturally, there are so many new ways that we can experience walkers that you couldn’t have [before],” said showrunner Eli Jorne.
He cites the “verticality” of the city as something that will add to the suspense, because if walkers can end up in high rises, they can end up anywhere.
According to the official series synopsis from AMC, The Walking Dead: Dead City sees Maggie and Negan form a “tenuous alliance” as they venture into Manhattan, a city that has been isolated since the beginning of the zombie outbreak. For this reason, zombies have been free to change, grow, and evolve, almost completely uninterrupted by people who have the means to hunt them down and stop them.
But walkers aren’t the only things they have to fight against. There is also a U.S. Marshal with a dark past, a dangerous killer, and Maggie and Negan’s own traumatic pasts to contend with. According to rumors unconfirmed by AMC’s official site, the pair is also striving to get back Hershel, Maggie’s son, after he is kidnapped and brought to Manhattan.
The Walking Dead: Dead City is the fourth spin-off series created from The Walking Dead series, following Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, and Tales of the Walking Dead. Dead City, though, is the first of these spin-offs to be a direct continuation of the main series. The character of Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) is also reported to be getting his own spin-off series this year as well, with both the show and the filming taking place in France.
The Walking Dead: Dead City will have six episodes in its first season and is projected to premiere in June 2023. If Scott M. Gimple’s advice is to be believed, you may want to keep a trash can handy for when the walkers show up, just in case.
