"Fear the Walking Dead" won't be all about the scare. Although the show will dwell most on its apocalyptic edge, with even a horror-inducing tagline that says "fear begins here" to solidify the premise, showrunner Dave Erickson emphasizes that the spinoff is "ultimately" a family drama.
"One of the things that Robert [Kirkman] and I discussed from the very beginning was, we're starting a little earlier in the apocalypse," Erickson told Entertainment Weekly, which also shared three dramatic shots of three of the characters.
"And what that allowed us to do in the pilot and Season 1 is establish our core family, establish the problems and the conflicts that they have, and really let that be the initial world that we live in," the showrunner went on to say.
Going back to the new photos, the characters portrayed by Alycia Debnam-Carey, Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis in "Fear the Walking Dead" were shown in the images as they look intensely into the distance, as if sensing something horrible is racing through their direction.
Dickens plays the role of Alicia's mother Madison while Curtis is high school teacher and Madison's boyfriend Travis. Debnam-Carrey plays the role of the go-getter Alicia. Nick, who wasn't' shown in any of the images, is Alicia's brother who dropped out of school and became a drug addict.
"Fear the Walking Dead" will revolve around the complicated lives of the group. "We layer in the onset of the apocalypse, we layer in our first walkers, but it's really an effort to exacerbate the problems that already exist with Kim Dickens' character and Cliff Curtis' character and their sort of dysfunctional blended family. It's really filtering the apocalypse through that," Erickson explains.
While "Fear the Walking Dead" will reveal the horrors that took place as Rick was nailed to the hospital bed by a coma. While it won't get into explaining what caused the zombie epidemic, the show will reveal who the first victims are.
"Fear the Walking Dead" will premiere in August. A specific date is yet to be released.
