Tag: United Monster Talent Agency

Does Nikki Finke know about this?

Just a bit of post-Halloween cheer directed in high style by Greg Nicotero with some fun cameos by Frank Darabont, Eli Roth, and comedy writer/stand-up comic Dana Gould as the Wolf Man. As you can read in the interview with Nicotero we posted Saturday, he’s the effects maestro responsible for the gore and what not on AMC and Frank Darabont’s “The Walking Dead,” which may be responsible for my either fleeing from the show out of my notorious squeamishness or becoming an alcoholic regular viewer. Fortunately, our own Jason Zingale is able to watch the thing stone cold sober, I believe, and just started blogging the show regularly.

As AICN’s Quint notes, Nicotero — whose responsible for all kinds of brilliant effects work in all kinds of movies and now on television — is the real deal when it comes to geekitude. We salute him.

A chat with Greg Nicotero, make-up and effects wizard of “The Walking Dead”

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With 124 make-up credits and 64 effects credits to his name so far, Greg Nicotero is one of the busiest and most respected make-up and effects professionals in Hollywood. Originally inspired to take up special effects after seeing “Jaws,” he broke into the business working for the legendary gore-effects maestro Tom Savini on zombie-master George Romero’s 1985 splatter opus, “Day of the Dead. ”

A few years later, Nicotero had decamped from Romero’s Pittsburgh’s to show-biz’s Los Angeles and formed the multi-award winning KNB Efx Group with friends Robert Kurtzman and Howard Berger. Aside from his intimate involvement in such effects heavy films as “Sin City,” “Kill Bill,” “Minority Report,” “Serenity,” “Spiderman 3” and, yes, “Ray,” Nicotero has also branched out into directing, helming the second unit on Frank Darabont’s “The Mist” and making his own short subject, a funny and endearing homage to several generations of classic movie monsters, “United Monster Talent Agency.”

When I met with Nicotero and last Summer’s Comic-Con, however, it was to promote the already highly buzzed new AMC series, “The Walking Dead,” which reunites Nicotero with writer-director Darabont in an adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s Eisner Award-winning comic book series. Premiering Halloween night, the show will be taking a more dramatic look at the cannibal zombie mythos originally created by George Romero in his 1968 “Night of the Living Dead,” combining slow-moving zombies with the kind of in-depth characterization and complex yarn-spinning that’s making the onetime “vast wasteland” of television into something more like the last refuge of classical storytelling.

There’s only one problem. I’m kind of scared to actually watch the thing. You see, much as I admire the craft of someone like Greg Nicotero, I’m not exactly the usual gorehound media-fan for whom the more, and more realistic, cinematic gore he can create, the better. There was no point in hiding it.

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