We got a chance to view the very first footage from AMC's The Walking Dead and it's pretty frightening. Its gritty realism is taken directly from the graphic novels. Also, Bear McCreary was unveiled as the show's new composer!


Here's what we saw:

Opening with crows picking at an animal, it's immediately obvious that this is gonna be a damn creepy ride.


Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) is on the job. We see the sheriff's deputy before he's shot and trapped inside the hospital of nightmares.

His brain flips through a barrage of snapshots from his past life and what we assume is the state of the current world outside before he pops awake. Rick falls out of his bed and enters a hallway where the sterility has been marred by blood and body parts. He looks up, and there's the pic we've seen of the poorly worded door holding out zombies: "Don't open. Dead inside."

Our hero stumbles outside and encounters a slew of covered dead bodies behind the hospital. Here it gets jumpy. We see Rick searching his empty house for his family, and chatting with Lennie James' Tyrese while trying to wrap his mind around the truth of what is going on in their corner of the world.


"You know about the dead people, right?" Tyrese asks Rick. "It's not the dead ones you have to worry bout, it's the walkings."

And he points our hero toward Atlanta, shuffling him out the door and warning him to shoot anything, no matter how hard that may soon seem.


There's some "filler" (by which I mean awesome footage) of Rick kicking ass and killing zombies, stringing up a non-zombiefied man and facing down a tiny adorable little zombie girl in a pink bathrobe as she clutches her Teddy and heads toward him.

Shot on Super 16, in what Frank Darabont endearingly describes as "film grain creepy" zombie style, the grit is the most striking part of the footage. It embraces the underlying graphic novel roots and exemplifies the messy deaths we're gonna get to see.


We get a glimpse at Rick's family, struggling in Atlanta as the zombies infect that town too. They're trying to warn people to stay away exactly as we see Rick on his horse riding down the desolate interstate toward the city.

The footage ends with Rick warding off one zombie, then a couple, then a few and finally trapping himself inside a tank in downtown Atlanta with a horde closing in on him.


Definitely a lack of blood and guts, but as the showrunners tell it, the footage shown is misleading and cleaned up all because Comic-Con is a family show.

Good thing AMC is a cable network, because all I want is blood and gory, gory deaths.