The Walking Dead has served up just about every kind of zombie imaginable at this point, including everything from that well zombie in Season 2 to the mossy zombie in Season 6 to the gloriously disgusting swamp zombies of Season 8. As it turns out, the latest episode featured a kind of reanimated corpse that hasn't turned up on the show before: totally nude. The nude zombie was easy to miss in the episode, but special effects makeup guru/The Walking Dead executive producer Greg Nicotero posted a photo to give a good look:
There we have it! The Walking Dead's first all-nude zombie in all his/her/its glory! All things considered, I'd say that this has to be one of the most disgustingly impressive zombies ever to be created for either The Walking Dead or Fear the Walking Dead. Greg Nicotero's Instagram post proves that the makeup crew managed to go head-to-toe with rotten flesh, and it's pretty much impossible to tell if this person started out as a man or a woman. This zombie also looks so rotten that a stiff breeze could slough half of its dead flesh off, but that didn't happen during its moment in the latest episode.
If you didn't catch this walker in the episode, don't feel bad. It was staggering around the background of a scene that had Dwight and Simon looking for Negan, who had been run off the road by Rick. The point of the scene was the tension between the two men, and there wasn't even much focus on the nude zombie on the peripheral. If you knew the nude zombie was on the way -- and Greg Nicotero did tease earlier this year that such a zombie was on the way -- you might have known to keep an eye out for a corpse wandering around without any clothes. Otherwise, you might not have had any reason to look. This definitely wasn't the Walking Dead nude scene that most of us are probably going to remember, and it wasn't Norman Reedus in the buff this time.
The background appearance means that The Walking Dead can add "nude zombie" to the list of wild walkers that have appeared on the show. According to Greg Nicotero, there's only one kind of zombie that the show really can't do, and the makeup team may be able to pull off just about anything else they can imagine. It's not like there are a lot of rules about zombie biology, and they do have to find new ways to shock, awe, and gross out audiences, which can't be easy in the latter half of the eighth season.
Tune in to AMC on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET for new episodes of The Walking Dead. Fear the Walking Dead will be back soon, and you can catch both the Season 8 finale of The Walking Dead and the Season 4 premiere of the spinoff in theaters next month. For more TV options, take a look at our midseason TV premiere guide and our 2018 Netflix premiere schedule.
