'Walking Dead's' Greg Nicotero sculpts zombie scourge

CHATSWORTH, Calif. — The sign in the non-descript industrial-park building’s window hints that it’s hardly cookie-cutter inside. Instead of Open or Closed, it says: Sorry, We’re Dead.

Dead, indeed, as evidenced in the reception area, where replicas of Michonne’s jawless, armless zombie escorts from The Walking Dead serve as life-sized (but lifeless) greeters at KNB EFX Group, a wonderful workplace of horrors overseen by special-effects makeup maestro Greg Nicotero.

A rock star among zealous genre fans, Nicotero retains a fan's enthusiasm after a three-decade career that includes the films Hitchcock, The Green Mile, Sin City and The Hateful Eight and TV shows Fear the Walking Dead, Into the Badlands, Breaking Bad and the upcoming Preacher, all on AMC.  (Nicotero directs Walking Dead's midseason return Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT).

"We work in a genre where people have a keen loyalty and dedication," he says. "It was the same dedication I had when I used to read Famous Monsters magazine and watch monster movies on Super 8."

That devotion is apparent in the building, a museum's worth of lifelike, textured sculptures of KNB creations — the Bicycle Girl and Well Walker zombies from Walking Dead; Alfred Hitchcock and the mummified Psycho mom from Hitchcock; and a minotaur from The Chronicles of Narnia — and figures admired by Nicotero and his colleagues: Jaws the shark and his three Ahabs; Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot; the Wicked Witch of the West; Wolfmanand Ghostbusters' Slimer.

Nicotero, 52, made a fortunate connection as a teen, befriending fellow Pittsburgh resident and Night of the Living Dead zombie guru George Romero and eventually going to work for him and and special-effects makeup master Tom Savini on 1985's Day of the Dead. After forming KNB with Howard Berger and Robert Kurtzman in 1988, Nicotero has worked with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Frank Darabont and Robert Rodriguez.

"I've had the best film school experience on set," Nicotero says, including the revival of Uma Thurman's character in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and the electrocution of Michael Jeter's character in Darabont's The Green Mile.

Walking Dead, by dint of detail and the sheer number of TV episodes, has brought special-effects makeup to a new level, he says.

After the pilot featured Bicycle Girl, "There was a debate as to whether it was an animatronic puppet, whether we had dug a hole and hid her legs, or whether the legs were removed digitally. I was excited about the fact there was debate about it," Nicotero says. "Nothing like that had been done on television before."

Nicotero, also an executive producer, describes Sunday's episode as a culmination, picking up as legions of walkers swarm the broken fortress of Alexandria; Daryl, Sasha and Abraham meet Negan's Saviors; and Glenn tries to save his pregnant wife, Maggie.

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"You're never going to survive unless you band together as a group. That's the one aspect Rick has struggled with this season," he says. "The episode tees us up for this larger world that we're going to experience going forward."

Nicotero and his team have pushed walker numbers higher over the seasons: More than 1,200 appear in Sunday's episode, which was shot at night.

"Every time I say we broke the record, we seem to do it again," he says. . "One of the genre conventions is nighttime, with fog and a little moonlight, and you don’t know what’s coming out of the darkness."

In KNB's warehouse shop, stacked bins are an archive of prosthetics for more than 180 "hero" walkers that have been featured in close-ups. After so many variations, from dismembered to waterlogged to burning, Nicotero and his team seek new possibilities.

"We’re still coming up with some kind of crazy zombies," he says. This season, "we had walkers who were in the sewer. We started removing body parts. We had a walker that didn't have a nose."

Future options? Nicotero muses. "We haven't done frozen zombies."