In the seemingly empty city, Rick follows a helicopter flying overhead right into a horde of zombies. They attack, killing his horse and forcing him to drop his bag of weapons and crawl under a tank, and as they follow him under it Rick contemplates suicide before noticing a trapdoor in the bottom of the vehicle. After he shoots a walker inside, he hears a voice from the tank's radio sarcastically ask if he is comfortable, before the scene exits with a top-down view of Atlanta overrun by walkers. Production Conception Robert Kirkman claimed that he had considered the idea of a television series, but never actively pursued it. When Frank Darabont became interested, Kirkman called it "extremely flattering" and went on to say that "he definitely cares about the original source material, and you can tell that in the way he's adapting it." In his interview, Kirkman exclaimed that it was "an extreme validation of the work", and continued by expressing that "never in a million years could [he] have thought that if Walking Dead were to ever be adapted that everything would be going this well." The Walking Dead institutes elements from George A. Romero's horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968). Darabont admitted to becoming a fan of the film at age fourteen. He insisted that the film has a "weird vibe", comparing it to that of pornography. He continued: "It had this marvelously attractive, disreputable draw [...] I loved it immediately." Darabont recalled walking into a comic book store in Burbank, California and seeing The Walking Dead on the shelf in 2005. Frank Darabont described the process of developing the series and setting it up at a network as "four years of frustration". He first initiated a deal with NBC to own copyrights to The Walking Dead, but was later declined. "They were very excited about the idea of doing a zombie show until I handed them a zombie script where zombies were actually doing zombie shit," he stated. Darabont credited Gale Anne Hurd with finally getting the series on AMC. "Gale was tremendously instrumental in jump-starting it at a point where it felt like it was languishing, "he asserted. "I'd gotten turned down enough times, which is no reflection on the material, but no matter what you're trying to sell in Hollywood, you're Willy Loman and it's Death of a Salesman. You're out there