Although it’s one of the biggest shows on TV, The Walking Dead has always had a notoriously small budget when compared to its contemporaries. While it does its best job to hide the discrepancy though, the limitations of the budget – compared to the likes of Game of Thrones – are instantly apparent in the often-sloppy CGI and visual effects used throughout the series.

Unlike that latter show, which can convincingly bring gigantic dragons to life and rival The Lord of the Rings with its ambitious fantasy battles, The Walking Dead often struggles to make even basic things such as blood splatters, animals, and cities look convincing.

With that said, it’s not always the worst, and a quick glance at some behind-the-scenes footage shows that the effects team actually do a bang-up job considering the amount of work they have to do – it’s just that when TWD’s CG is bad, it’s really bad.

Whether it’s down to the budget, time, or simply not having enough resources, not every CGI shot is created equal, and the filmmakers have repeatedly dropped the ball over the years, resulting in botched moments which came close to sinking the show’s credibility entirely.

10. The Truck Falling Onto The Walker Herd

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The season 6 premiere of The Walking Dead featured by far the biggest zombie herd to ever appear on the show, and while the CGI used to bring this mass of the undead to life was fine, the shot of a truck falling and freeing the walkers didn’t fare so well.

As seen in the gif above, the way the truck tumbles off the cliff is stilted and unnatural, while the smokescreen that follows its fall doesn’t even seem finished. Even the shift to black-and-white cinematography can’t obscure how off it looks.

Even worse, once the smoke has stopped billowing you get a good view of the walkers shambling across the quarry and falling into its depths. Unfortunately, these shots seem completely detached from the action happening in-camera, not helped by the flares and photoshop-level fog obscuring what feels like a 2D rendering.

It’s an utter mess of a sequence, and makes the walkers look like little more than PS2-era background sprites rather than a group of menacing monsters encroaching on our heroes.

9. Reg’s Throat Slit

Although it’s understandable when The Walking Dead fumbles some of its more ambitious visual effects shots, it’s a constant head-scratcher as to why so many seemingly simple instances of CGI in the show come across as utterly laughable.

While blood-splatter has increasingly gotten worse as the programme has progressed, it was Reg’s death at the hands of Pete in the season 5 finale which led to one of the worst uses of digital gore. The throat slice only lasts for a second, but the obvious CG blood undercuts all the tension the scene had built up until then.

Of course, while the CGI doesn’t effectively communicate the supposed brutality of the moment, the actor playing Reg is just as much to blame. The effect, combined with the over-the-top reaction, makes the whole scene feel far too cartoony than it should have been, and resulted in one of the biggest WTF deaths in TWD history.

8. Carol’s Walker Explosion

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The season 5 premiere is arguably one of strongest hours of television TWD has ever produced. Chronicling Rick’s group’s escape from near-death at the hands of the Terminus cannibals, the action set-pieces are brilliantly choreographed and executed, utilising a surprising amount of practical effects as well as pretty solid CGI to sell the revolt.

However, how strong the rest of the episode is only serves to highlight just how poor one egregious use of CGI is. When Carol is storming the base, she takes aim for a giant barrel and, because The Walking Dead works on the same logic as a video game, starts shooting it to cause a huge explosion.

The blast itself is fine (if a bit B-movie in its execution), but the zombies that fly up alongside it and the highlights of the fire are inexcusable. The violence in the rest of the ep is so grounded and nasty that it works where a lot of shootouts in TWD don’t, but this explosion is so over-the-top and out there that the writers had to spend a whole season attempting to bring Carol back down to reality.

7. Denise’s Eyeball

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Abraham’s iconic death from The Walking Dead comics was always going to be one of the most difficult to translate over to the small screen. Taking an arrow to the eye whilst enjoying an otherwise peaceful walk, in the show this death was given to Denise and the end result was… a mixed bag.

Pushing aside for a second that The Walking Dead’s worst habit of suddenly giving a character a huge focus in an episode only to kill them off by the time the hour’s over was in full swing here, fans also didn’t react well to Denise receiving Abe’s pivotal death because of the awkward way it was shot.

The practical effect on the eye was admittedly well done in the few images it was visible, but it’s the shot of Denise staring at Daryl and Rosita while the unconvincing CGI arrow awkwardly sticks out like a sore thumb that’s so bad.

The slow-mo reactions which followed didn’t help make the death feel any less comical either, and after seeing how gruesome the team can make facial injuries look when they want to (just look how messed up Glenn was after going seven rounds with Lucille), this CGI arrow feels far too slap-dash for such an iconic and anticipated moment.

6. Burning Mattresses

Although The Walking Dead usually struggles to do blood, wounds or explosions convincingly, its biggest stumbles are often on seemingly mundane things that could have easily been accomplished in-camera.

Perhaps the most baffling example of a CGI moment which definitely didn’t need to be CGI came in season 7 though, when Michonne stumbled across a pile of burning mattresses left behind by the Saviours.

The effect was so bad, so blurry, and so weird that when the episode aired, a good chunk of viewers didn’t even know what they were supposed to be looking at, or why Michonne was so upset.

To be fair, if I was Danai Gurira and saw effects that bad, I’d probably have had a breakdown too.

5. Close-Range RPG

By adapting the All Out War comic storyline for season 8, The Walking Dead dropped pretty much all pretences of being a serious show and properly embraced its B-Movie influences. While you can trace this shift across the past few seasons, nothing exemplified how much the series’ believability had been stretched than Rosita blowing up a Saviour with a rocket launcher at point-blank range.

Even though the shot only lasts a few seconds, there’s a lot to unpack in regards to just how daft it is. The CGI rocket that’s fired already looks like it could have been taken from a straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal flick, but it’s the jaw-dropping way the Saviour’s body is pulled upwards by the blast that makes it look so cheesy.

The ridiculous CG sort of sold the cartoony violence in a humorous way, but by resorting to Wile E. Cayote tactics The Walking Dead shed every lingering tie to reality it had left.

4. The Invisible Possum

On paper, this head-scratching shot from season 5 should have been an easy moment to bring to life. Daryl hears a noise, thinks it’s a walker, and turns around to see that it’s only a scurrying animal. Job done, right? Proving they can completely mangle even the simplest beats of a script though, the execution of the scene, which ended up showing a semi-invisible CGI possum scaring our heroes, looks ridiculously amateur in motion.

It’s such a small, inconsequential moment that should have been cut entirely, but, somehow, it ended up in the finished episode. While the CGI animal itself is hilarious, it’s the completely unnatural way the bin falls over, obviously tugged by an off-screen stagehand, which makes the whole affair look shockingly cheap and downright embarrassing.

It’s classic Walking Dead through and through though: an easy concept that ends up being executed in the most mind-numbingly botched way possible.

3. Hershel’s Decapitation

One of the biggest deaths in the original run of the comic was Tyrese being beheaded by The Governor, a major event which was given to the equally-important Hershel in the show.

However, the decapitation fell flat, funnily enough, because of how two-dimensional the CGI wound made Hershel’s head look, with his severed neck looking like a fan edit rather than a gruesome katana injury. At such a pivotal moment like this, the effect needed to match the shock of the audience, but in execution it only undercut it.

This instance of bad CGI is often overlooked because of how well shot – and emotional – the scene is otherwise, but under scrutiny it just doesn’t hold up. The idea of the beheading not being a clean cut is straight from the comic, but it could have been shot in a way that didn’t draw attention to the intrusive digital effects when it was adapted.

2. The Trash Wasteland

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One of the most derided additions to The Walking Dead so far has been the introduction of a group of strange survivors, dubbed by fans as the “Trash People”. Getting their moniker not only because fans would like to see them binned as soon as possible, but because they literally live in a trash heap, Rick eventually makes his way to their settlement in season 7.

TWD always does a surprisingly good job at making digital backdrops look authentic, to the point where a lot of people probably don’t know that a lot of major scenes are shot on sound stages, rather than in the Georgian wilderness. Predictably though, the show drops the ball every time it needs to really sell a major backdrop, most egregiously exemplified in the shots of Rick standing against a poorly-composited landfill that the Trash People call home.

It’s by far one of the least believable green screen shots in the entire show, made even worse by the fact that everything in the backdrop is so static, except for the clouds which only draw attention to how lifeless the whole thing feels.

1. The Deer

When it came to examples of bad CGI in The Walking Dead, nothing was ever going to beat the infamous deer from season 7. Becoming a meme overnight, the CGI animal was downright cringeworthy, exacerbated by the shots where the filmmakers actually used a real-life deer, making their digital version look even worse.

Again, the show had previously proven how it can create lifelike animals by brilliantly bringing Shiva to life – but the producers must have blown the whole effects budget on that character to excuse having a CGI creation like this which literally emanated its awfulness every time it was onscreen.

Even worse, the terrible effect was supposed to have a deep thematic purpose and be a poignant image – but all it left viewers complementing was how this scene ever made it through quality control and onto television.

The CG wouldn’t be excusable if this was a student project, but The Walking Dead is easily one of the biggest shows in the world at the moment (well, maybe not after the first half of season 8), and to anchor so much significance onto a digital animal which looks that bad, is indicative of how lax and sloppy the show has become.

Any more instances of terrible CGI on TWD you think should be here? Let us know down in the comments.