Former showrunner of The Walking Dead sent intense death threats to staff

WARNING: This article contains a heavy amount of very strong language, may not be safe for work.

The Walking Dead is one of the biggest shows on TV these days. It has taken the world by storm and while some may argue that the quality of the show has dipped, it's still an absolute juggernaut when it airs on Sunday nights in the fall and winter.

Part of the reason the show was such a big success at first may be due to the fact that former showrunner Frank Darabont was a real hard-ass and he wanted it all done a very specific way. Before being fired during the show's second season (which is widely described as the worst/most boring season of the show), Darabont sent a series of emails AMC and staff about how he knows everything. He told a creative exec at AMC in the summer of 2010 to "stop invoking 'the writers room'" and "There IS no writers room… I am the writers room." Basically, he's saying he is the only one who can come up with ideas and he has creative control over the show's story.

In that same email, he went on a rant about how he thinks the writers are "fucking lazy assholes" and "overpaid con artists." Darabont was incredibly displeased with a script he had received and said if he could, he'd fire them and have them killed.

"If it were up to me, I'd have not only fired [them], I'd have hunted down and fucking killed them with a brick, then gone and burned down their homes."

"I told those assholes at least half a dozen times," Darabont continues. "Why don't they listen when I TELL them the way to do it? … [I]t's in one ear and out the other… It's almost as if they're intentionally telling me to fuck myself."

As time went on, the already riled up Frank Darabont got even more furious for various things including how some episodes were filmed. He wondered if the camera operator had "an epileptic seizure" and deemed the footage as "utterly demented and unusable shit."

In an email from the summer of 2011, Darabont got a bit upset with how the camera operators shot the episodes. "You MUST calm down the camera operating," he began. "This is turning out WAY more shaky-cam than I want. When I said please limit the handheld, it wasn't a random suggestion… And the operators MUST be told to HOLD THE FUCKING SHOT!"

"Tell these operators that if they cannot provide us footage that works, we need to replace them with people who can. What the fuck are we paying them for? Ray Charles could operate better," Darabont exclaimed.

He continued to rant about some crew members being visible in the background of shots. He went as far to say that they were "having a circle jerk" and claimed he was "boiling mad" at a character who was out of frame when a character falls down a hill. "The camera misses him COMPLETELY… yet I hear the operator say, 'Wow, that was fantastic.' … Really? You missed the fucking actor, you blind fucking moron!"

His very strongly worded email ended with an all-caps paragraph that reads as follows: "YOU NEED TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE MOTHERFUCKING SCRIPT! I EVEN CHOOSE MY GODDAMN COMMAS FOR A REASON! WHY AM I WORKING SO FUCKING HARD IF YOU'RE SHOOTING EVERYTHING SOME OTHER WAY THAT DOESN'T WORK?"

A new email came in the following day where he claims he has "never been a screamer" but we find that hard to believe.

"I'm in a state of absolute boiling rage right now," he said. "I have never been a screamer, but I am now… You've turned [me] into a raging asshole. Thanks a lot, you fuckers."

After getting annoyed with the directors of the show he threatened to start killing people, stating they "better wake the fuck up and pay attention. Or I will start killing people and throwing bodies out the door."

 "ANGLE CLOSES ON RICK, seething with fury,in" Darabont said pointing out a specific parof the script, "What does that suggest? An important moment? It does to me. That's why I fucking wrote it that way. I don't spray random shit on the page. So why is it shot like random shit?"

He went on to say that he was in physical pain from the actual stress that the crew gave him.

"Fuck you all for giving me chest pains because of the staggering fucking incompetence," he said in the closing of his email before telling stating that anyone who doesn't follow the direction of the script will be "beaten on the spot."

Darabont is currently in the middle of a $280 million lawsuit with AMC for how his firing was handled. Darabont did not apologize for the content of his emails and claimed that he wrote them that way due to the harsh circumstances during production.

"Each of these emails must be considered in context," he says. "They were sent during an intense and stressful two-year period of work during which I was fighting like a mother lion to protect the show from harm — not only on my own behalf, but ironically also on behalf of AMC.

"Each of these emails was sent because a 'professional' showed up whose laziness, indifference, or incompetence threatened to sink the ship," Darabont continues."My tone was the result of the stress and magnitude of this extraordinary crisis. The language and hyperbole of my emails were harsh, but so were the circumstances."

It's unclear if Frank Darabont will get the money he is seeking but these emails certainly won't help his case.

[The Hollywood Reporter]