I nearly missed out on The Walking Dead. You shouldn’t

I’m ashamed to say it took me a while to watch an episode of The Walking Dead, the fifth season of which has just begun. I was put off by the zombies. Too sophomoric, as far as I was concerned, only one notch above vampires. I’d stick with more grown-up fare, like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

I changed my mind after seeing The Mist, a forgotten horror film directed by Frank Darabont, the developer of The Walking Dead. I’m not a fan of The Shawshank Redemption, Darabont’s most famous film — all that heavy-handed Christian symbolism — but The Mist is a solid B-movie. It’s about a group of ordinary townsfolk trapped in a supermarket by giant squid-like monsters. These monsters are no less silly than zombies, but the film isn’t about them. It’s about the human beings they are trying to kill and the lengths those people will go to in order to survive. It explores the age-old question of whether our sense of right and wrong is integral to who we are or just a luxury that we’re happy to dispense with in the face of adversity.

I realised that the same was probably true of The Walking Dead and decided to give it a try. Episode one starts fairly predictably, with the protagonist coming round from a coma and discovering he’s living in a post-apocalyptic zombie dystopia, but it’s enlivened by a series of action sequences, each more audacious than the last. Clearly that’s one of the advantages of the zombie genre — every time there’s a lull in the proceedings, you can inject a bit of excitement by having the creatures appear from nowhere and launch a frenzied attack. The first episode ends with our hero marooned in a tank in the middle of Atlanta and, by then, I was cursing myself that I hadn’t discovered The Walking Dead sooner.