‘The Walking Dead’ Season 9 Opening Credits Receive Radical Change

When viewers tune in for Season Nine of AMC‘s The Walking Dead, the first thing they see may be a big change from the status quo.

For eight seasons, the opening credits on cable’s biggest drama have been more or less the same, give or take specific images or names: the music, imagery, and pacing of the titles has remained consistent even while the world of the series changed dramatically from year to year. The biggest difference, of course, was the constant aging and decaying of the titles — something that fans already knew was going to reverse course this year now that relative peace has been restored to Alexandria following “All Out War.”

The new credits are a lot more fast-paced, colorful, and stylish, giving a more hopeful feeling to the proceedings even while it keeps its creepy and horror-tinged feel.

“So, this might’ve been even more than a year ago when Scott Gimple was talking about his new role on moving forward and his wish for me to be the showrunner and all of that,” executive producer Angela Kang told EW. “One of the things he just mentioned was that the first eight seasons feel like they’re part of a chapter of the story, and it really lines up with the chapter and the comics. And he said, ‘You might want to think about whether or not you want to do new main titles. Like, a completely different look and feel from what it’s been.’ And I loved that idea.”

Kang said that items of significance to the characters are “hidden” away throughout the credits, but longtime comic book fans will likely be excited to see something else: a walker shambling its way toward a windmill.

“It’s one of the most iconic images from the comic book, is the windmill that’s in Alexandria,” Kang said. “And so, we just loved that as an image because it takes a lot of human ingenuity to figure out in the apocalypse how to build a windmill. And it’s also like they’re figuring out how to use renewable power, and all this stuff. So, we just love that as a symbol of some of the things that they’re trying to do this season, the way that they’re trying to rebuild everything. But also, we just wanted to always have that reminder that as much as they build, the dead are always there, always coming. And so, it just felt like that was true of the world of The Walking Dead. So we loved that as part of their pitch to end the sequence before we go to titles.”

The Walking Dead returns for its ninth season on October 7, 2018.