‘Walking Dead’: Second season begins tonight

Associated Press

SENOIA, Ga.

Just down the road from a tiny country church in rural Georgia, the apocalypse has already arrived.

A band of scrappy survivors is fighting the undead, camping in the woods in hopes of outrunning the hordes of zombies roaming the world.

Few of them have made it, and at any moment they could be eaten alive and turned into one of the monsters that haunt them day and night.

It’s just another day on the set of “The Walking Dead,” the hit AMC series that starts its second season tonight at 9 p.m. with 13 horrifying new episodes.

Based on the popular comic book of the same name by writer Robert Kirkman, the show is about life after the zombie apocalypse.

Last season introduced Rick Grimes, a small-town sheriff’s deputy played by British actor Andrew Lincoln, who woke up from a coma in the hospital to find his town overrun by flesh-eating monsters and his wife and son missing.

He eventually stumbles upon his family, along with his best friend Shane Walsh (played by Jon Bernthal) and other survivors, at a campground outside the city.

“The show is not about how gory we can make it,” said co-executive producer Greg Nicotero, the show’s special effects makeup guru who also directs this season.

“We want it to be shocking. We want to remind the audience of the world we’re in — that world is brutal and savage and raw. But it’s also about survival.”

The characters spend each episode learning the tricks of surviving the undead, like using rotting carcasses to mask the smell of the living.

“Dead” began six months of filming in and around Atlanta in June.

The first season ended with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta blowing up and leaving the group with little hope of finding a cure to the virus that creates the zombies.

The new season opens with the survivors, led by Rick and Shane, heading off to Fort Benning, Ga., but getting snagged along the way as a member of the group disappears and another is injured.

Enter new character Hershel, a farmer, and his family and friends, to help the group as they look for respite from the hell that has become their new reality.