Nobody said surviving a zombie apocalypse was going to be a walk in the park, but this is just sadistic. The video above, first posted by appropriately named YouTuber ‘Wacky Weirdo’ in September 2016, compiles all the imagined deaths in Rick’s dream sequence from The Walking Dead‘s season 7 premiere. These all come courtesy of a baseball bat to the noggin, which causes a fountain of blood to cascade from each character’s head.
Pretty much every major player in the show gets a thorough bonking, the full lineup being Chandler Riggs, Ross Marquand, Josh McDermitt, Norman Reedus, Danai Gurira, Sonequa Martin-Green and Christian Serratos. If you’ll cast your minds back to late 2016, you’ll remember it being particular bloodthirsty, with Abraham and Glenn both receiving a cruel serving of Negan’s barbed wire n’ baseball bat powered fury. Even by The Walking Dead standards, the scene was pretty gross.
The theory goes that each of these deaths were shot to throw spoiler-hungry fans off the scent and to obscure who would really die in the episode. I reckon it was just because the prop used to produce the effect sounds really cool: a bat rigged by effects expert (and executive producer) Greg Nicotero that was stuffed with blood bags. Who wouldn’t want to take a swipe from that? If you look closely, some of these actors even seem to be smiling in spite of themselves.
God only knows what the upcoming season 8 will do to top this. So far, each year has gently cranked up the violence in an effort to maintain audience interest, to the point where some viewers complained that the show was going too far. My opinion: if you’re watching a zombie series and complaining there’s too much violence, you’re missing the point.
Season 8 of The Walking Dead lurches onto screens later this year.
