Frank Darabont, the writer-director behind the movie versions of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile is now masterminding the zombie apocalypse with his new television series, The Walking Dead, which is set to debut on AMC on Halloween night.
Adapted from Robert Kirkman’s graphic novels, Walking Dead follows a band of survivors struggling to retain their humanity in a nightmarish world overrun by the undead. While it might seem at odds with the prestige pictures for which he’s so widely known, Darabont insists that the show is allowing him the opportunity to marry that A-list sensibility with his inner geek.
“My earliest memories are of watching the great Universal monster movies when they were in television syndication in about 1965 — I’ve always loved the cinema or the literature of the fantastic, it’s always been my special bent,” Darabont, 51, says in a great feature in the L.A. Times. “Having made those more mainstream dramatic films, people are surprised to know that I can converse in the secret geek language.”
You can catch the full feature here: The Walking Dead
