Colin Hogg: Where blood, blade and horror reign

Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier and Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead. Photo / Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC

Latest series of The Walking Dead pushes graphic violence.

When the horrors of the world become its entertainment, should we be concerned? That's a question I pushed way to the back of my mind as I settled down to watch The Walking Dead, which launched its fifth series on TV2 on Monday night, hot and only hours old from America.

Like many others, it seems, I'm drawn to this sort of thing. I grew up on horror movies - vampires, werewolves, many variations of Frankenstein's monster and zombies, of course.

Zombies could be fun, especially that business about them wanting to eat your brain. We used to lap that up as we ate our icecreams.

But, along with almost everything else, horror isn't what it used to be and it's not just at the movies any more, of course. It's on primetime free-to-air TV, just about the time you might be considering that hot chocolate and Gingernut ahead of bed.

Reconsider if you're watching The Walking Dead, which screeches the concept of graphic violence up so many notches it might make you dizzy.

Or sick, or even look away. I didn't because my contract forbids me from ever looking away. So I caught an opening scene the very many aficionados of show are already babbling about.

It's a scene of execution. The show's battered heroes are tied up like turkeys, on their knees in a row, heads over an alarmingly-shiny stainless steel trough. The camera jumps around, the soundtrack screeches.

In jolting, disbelieving detail, two men standing behind the kneeling figures - the executioners - set about dispatching their victims with first a blow from a baseball bat from one and then a knife through the throat from the other. They kill one, two, then the third.

The blade and the blood are stars of the scene. It's beautifully shot, like everything else on The Walking Dead.

It's art, but not as we've previously known it on primetime.

Outside the slaughterhouse, the zombies that now rule a ruined world, shuffle and ramble and rot, forever in search of some left alive to eat.

The Walking Dead is in many ways just another post-apocalyptic, extreme-survivalist yarn with an awful lot more zombies than usual, each looking more brilliantly awful than the last.

The few humans left alive, when not taken up with slaughtering the ever-present zombies, are slaughtering each other. Our heroes had fallen into the hands of a band of murderous cannibals, as it turned out.

The key heroes survived, as at least some of them need to with long-running series like The Walking Dead, but this show lays on terror and violence with such force, it's hard to believe anyone will survive. I was worried for myself at times.

The Walking Dead also works so well because it makes you want those ragged heroes to survive and overcome all those hungry zombies - though not too soon.

There's still too much sick fun to be had from all the zombie killing that weaves a splattered spine through the show.

On Monday night, apart from the usual stabs through rotting heads, there were exploding zombies and zombies on fire.

In perhaps a first for the genre, there was even a burning zombie eating some poor devil's face.

And, yes, beautifully shot.

But the horror, the horror ...