Behind the scenes of 'The Walking Dead's' chilling Season 7 premiere

This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 7 premiere.

Fans are still recovering from Monday’s Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead as they mourned the loss of two of the show’s main characters.

While the scene that saw Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) get whacked to death by Negan’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) barbed wire bat was easily the most intense death scene ever, how the film crew actually achieved the brutal scene may just be more impressive.

Executive producer Greg Nicotero told reporters in a conference call earlier this week he wanted this series to live up to the graphicness of Robert Kirkman's original Walking Dead comic - and boy, did it ever!

"It’s intense and a lot of people that read the comic books and read the graphic novel, these moments have been ingrained in their brain," he said.

When he first read issue 100, Greg said what struck him was that “it was horrifically graphic and senseless and brutal, and I wanted to try to capture those moments."

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Greg said Negan’s savage actions were specifically designed to emphasize what a serious villain he is as he wipes out Glenn, as he does in the comic.

“By showing the extent of what Negan is capable of doing because that drives so much of where the series is going from here on in, and the opportunity to introduce all the new worlds," Greg said.

You might have noticed the scene was mainly filmed from Rick’s perspective (Andrew Lincoln). This was intentional as the producers wanted you to see Negan from Rick’s eyes as the he tries to crack him.

"The episode is 100 percent designed for you to go on this journey with Rick and start thinking, as he did, about what happened. When he starts reliving it, it’s the beginning of him being broken, and by the end of the episode, that’s where he ends up," he said.

The producer revealed the death scenes were the most difficult to film, as the actors needed to maintain their character’s heightened sense of fear for hours on end.

"The emotion was there because the actors are so talented and so dialed in and I really feel like Andy Lincoln gave the performance of the series in this episode. As the director it was up to me to drag these people into this deep, dark place and it was not the most pleasant experience. When we wrapped the episode I felt as shellshocked as some of the characters in dealing with that," he said.

"The death scenes were definitely challenging to shoot, but… I think we were a little more focused on how to to make it look as authentic as possible. Because those quick snippets will remain in the audience’s and our characters’ minds for several seasons and months and years to come."

The crew successfully achieved the chilling scene not only because of the direction they took, but because of the incredible special effects, layers of makeup and prosthetics that transformed the characters’ into bloody victims.

"The deaths were very difficult to film… we had multiple stage prosthetics and multiple makeups on both characters," he said, speaking of Glenn and Abraham.

"With Steven, we built multiple versions of that prosthetic where the eyeball popped out and then when he’s on the ground and the head is crushed, we actually dug a hole and put Steven’s face down into the ground and covered the back of his head with this kind of turtleneck crushed head, so that you could see his real hands twitching and moving as he started pumping blood," Greg said.

However, the best prop for Greg was the barbed wire bat and the spitting blood from the characters’ heads.

"The most significant thing was the bat that I designed that had a reservoir of blood, and how we were able to get the hits to look explosive as opposed to just blood dribbling."

According to showrunner Scott Gimple, the crew had plans to kill Glenn and Abraham for two years, he revealed on the TV show Talking Dead.

While saying bye to two of the series’ beloved characters in one episode was shocking to say the least, the producers couldn’t be happier how the premiere turned out, despite what Twitter users had to say.

"It’s not the deaths that really catapult you… But truthfully, it’s those moments after, it’s when the shock wears off and Rick is broken, the pure and true emotion happens in the last couple acts,” he said.

“To be able to elicit the emotion that I can from these actors, to me, that’s the success of the episode."

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