Greg Nicotero has seen his fair share of challenges working on AMC's The Walking Dead as the show's special effects makeup coordinator. Nicotero, who worked under the likes of George Romero and Tom Savini, has always ensured that The Walking Dead focuses more on cinematic realism than the gorehound movies that popularized the zombie genre. In doing so, he has struck a balance between disturbing, post-apocalyptic decay and the gore you can literally taste as the skin stretches.

However, Season 9 presented a new challenge for the veteran artist in the form of the Whisperers -- a cult of people who emulate the zombified walkers by wearing their skin as masks. Their practices sound Arkham crazy, but it turns out walker camouflage comes with its fair share of advantages. Because the Whisperers can move among the walkers undetected, they can use the creatures as cover and mount attacks unlike anything the show's survivors have ever faced.

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Last fall, CBR got the chance to hear Nicotero speak at length about designing the weird blend between walker and human that the Whisperers represent, revealing details about the makeup effects that invoke the specific type of fear Alpha and her group inspire. The fact that the actors are wearing masks as opposed to prosthetics was a major difference:

It’s probably the closest we’ll ever come to a John Carpenter Halloween movie. Because Walkers, their faces move. The idea that we’ve spent decades watching Texas chainsaw massacre, Halloween where it’s this faceless killer and the face doesn’t move, so you can not judge any kind of emotion. So every time we shoot with a group of them, it's like, I look at them -- 'this is f---ing weird, man,' they're just looking at you and their faces aren’t moving and their eyes aren’t moving.

It’s tricky because the way they were drawn in the comic books, they were trying to emulate that sort of sagging skin. So they all looked melting ... And I was like, I don’t want them to look melted and I don’t want them to look like Leatherface either, so the trick is you gotta preserve kinda the bone structure of the skull. Even though, theoretically, the bone structure wouldn’t be there because they’re flaying the skin off. But when you look at the masks, you can see that we maintain that kinda deep eye socket because I wanted … the brow to stick out enough to put a shadow over the eyes. So, when you look at the faces, everything’s in shadow, so you get nothing there.

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One similarity between the comic book version of the Whisperers and Nicotero’s is the texturization. As fans witnessed in the December midseason teaser that featured Samantha Morton’s Alpha sewing a Whisperer mask, the skin is pockmarked and damaged. Nicotero went on to point how subtle adjustments in the mask sculpture gave the Whisperers depth and personality:

I wanted to over-texture everything, so all the sculptures are really over-textured and really shriveled looking. And a lot of rot and decay. So, it’s just one thing that we’ve been really pushing with the masks is to have them feel a little different. Even changing the shape of the eyes. Some of the eyes, you kinda just angle the shape of the outside of the eyes, and they look a little sad. But then you combine that with the fact that you can’t see into the eyes or into the mouth, and it’s kinda creepy. How many recent movies have had the masked killer that that’s what scares people? You can’t bargain with them because they’re soulless, they’re humorless and now we have a group of people that… they’re wearing dead f---ing skin.

Eventually, Nicotero got down the heart of the Whisperers' belief system, which actually calls back to the dystopic vision of Washington, D.C. from the season premiere. They’re likely the closest The Walking Dead’s ever going to get to a post-apocalyptic drama in the style of Mad Max, as the Whisperers are probably the group that has moved the furthest from civilization of anyone the survivors have yet encountered -- and that includes Terminus:

They’ve abandoned the way of the life that we all believe in. It’s interesting when you think about Walking Dead and you think about the fact that they’re fighting desperately to preserve society. And at some point it’s like that society that we knew probably will never exist again, what is the next order? And the Whisperers have a very unique perspective. And that’s, I think, you know, what our group is dealing with. There’s a lot of water under the bridge. There’s a lot of bad people that now have had the status of villains, they’ve now been brought down a bunch of rungs and other people that have gone up. So, things are all kind of weirdly out of balance.

The Walking Dead returns Sunday, Feb. 10 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC. The series stars Norman Reedus, Danai Gurira, Melissa McBride, Alanna Masterson, Josh McDermitt, Christian Serratos, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Nadia Hilker, Dan Fogler, Angel Theory, Lauren Ridloff and Eleanor Matsuura.