Fans of The Walking Dead (2010) have widely voiced negative reactions to the companion series’ title as being dumb and unoriginal. While The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman hasn’t done anything to suggest he’s overwhelmingly pleased with the title himself, he has voiced some reasons for why the name Fear the Walking Dead (2015) works for the new series.

“You don’t want to call it The Walking Dead: Los Angeles, you know?” Kirkman told the crowd at the broadcast megaconference NAB Show in Las Vegas. “That would be so easy, so obvious. It’s the exact wrong thing for what we want to do.”

Kirkman explained the intent was to create a name that focuses attantion towards the zombies. The Walking Dead has spent several seasons curating the idea that the humans become a bigger threat than the walkers, and it makes use of interpersonal matters as the root of its major conflicts. In Fear The Walking Dead, fear of other humans isn’t as present as people haven’t yet had the experience of being warped by the apocalypse. The zombies are the threat.

“To me, it means a lot of things,” Kirkman said. “It’s taking us back to a time when the walking dead were more dangerous and more of a daily threat. So there is good reason to fear the walking dead.”