Nelson Hicks of WSBtv.com took photos of the media tour and I ended up in a few of the shots, including this one at the Goat Farm. PHOTO CREDITS: Nelson Hicks/wsbtv.com

Carrie Sagel Burns became immediately hooked on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” when the Atlanta-based show invaded TV screens on Halloween night 2010.

During the annual DragonCon science-fiction convention in Atlanta last fall, Burns held impromptu tours, taking out-of-town friends to showing locales where the zombie apocalypse drama had been shot. Early this year, her friend Patti Davis suggested they turn it into a bona fide business, dubbed Atlanta Movie Tours.

Last Saturday, Burns and Davis unleashed “The Big Zombie Tour,” featuring “Walking Dead” spots such as the Goat Farm Arts Center in west Midtown, Mitchell Street in downtown Atlanta and Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, which masqueraded as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lunch is provided by Diesel Filling Station, a restaurant/bar in Virginia-Highland that hosted “Walking Dead” viewing parties season two. (They don’t have AMC’s clearance to use the show’s name in their advertising.)

“The Big Zombie Tour” will have a rotating set of guides, all local actors. The first guide, Sonya Thompson, has played a zombie on both “The Walking Dead’ and the 2009 film “Zombieland,” which was partially shot in Atlanta. (Her zombie-fied mug made it on the cover of “Entertainment Weekly” and was used in promotional “Walking Dead” photos before the show debuted.)

Thompson gave the first tour of 30 fans an inside look at life as a zombie, detailing the discomfort of donning makeup and special prosthetics for up to 16 hours a day, the searing Atlanta heat and the art of walking like the undead. “I want them to live through my eyes, vicariously through me,” she said.

The group spent the first part of the tour walking the streets of downtown Atlanta, followed by a bus tour to various key spots from the show, culminating at the Jackson Street bridge, where the iconic promotional photo of lead character Rick Grimes on horseback enters the city.

Sonya Thompson, an actress, is the first tour guide in "The Big Zombie Tour." CREDIT: Brant Sanderlin/AJC.com

“It was freaking fantastic,” said Covington resident Shea Downing after the tour. “We were tweeting like crazy!” Her favorite moment was when two actors dressed as CDC doctors distributed gave out “zombie inoculation” drinks at the Goat Farm.

“On my bucket list, I want to be one of those zombies,” said Downing , a 40-year-old domestic violence crisis line operator in real life. “Nothing would deter me at this point. I’m like, ‘Bring it!’ ”

With the kudzu-like growth of Georgia’s film and TV industry the past three years, these types of tours are a natural offshoot. And science fiction shows such as “The Walking Dead” tend to engender extremely loyal devotees of the show and want a closer connection to it. It helps that “The Walking Dead” is a smash, ending its second season with 9 million viewers, huge for a basic cable show.

Dustin Pullen, a 32-year-old electronics salesman from Villa Rica, enjoyed the “Walking Dead” tour, but would have loved to have seen a zombie or a show cast member.

Burns, the organizer, said given the economics of the weekly tour, which costs $45 per person, that isn’t feasible. But she said if groups want customized tours, she could round up a real zombie or two at a negotiable rate.

Atlanta Movie Tours also hopes to create other tours. Ideas, she said, include a general tour name-checking different movies shot around town such as “The Blind Side” and one focused on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.”

A vampire tour, too

Photo courtesy of Jessica Lowery.

Another big TV hit, the CW’s “The Vampire Diaries,” has been a boon for Jessica Lowery of Covington, where many of the show’s scenes are shot. For the past two years, she has run Mystic Falls Tours, referencing the fictional Virginia town in which “Diaries” is based in. The drama, seen internationally, is in its third season and is CW network’s most popular program, averaging more than 3 million U.S. viewers a week.

Lowery began with two or three tours a week. Now she hosts two or three a day, each with six to 12 customers. Fans from the United Kingdom, Austria, Amsterdam and Australia have taken the tour.

“We get repeat customers who bring in new fans of the show,” Lowery said. “Some people come back each season because we add new locations where they shoot. And they want to know spoilers.”

Lowery — formerly a special needs teacher in the Newton County school system — prides herself as a virtual encyclopedia of knowledge about “Vampire Diaries” and is rarely stumped by fans’ questions.

As a bonus, if the show happens to be in production, actors have come out and given shout-outs to tour customers. Recently, Lowery said Ian Somerhalder, who plays sharp-tongued vampire Damon, said hey. “The girls were flipping out and crying,” she said.

As seen on TV

– “The Big Zombie Tour”

(Based on “The Walking Dead”)run by Atlanta Movie Tours

10 a.m. Saturdays, $45, www.atlantamovietours.com.

– “Mystic Falls Tours”

(Based on “The Vampire Diaries”)

Dates and times vary, $55, www.mysticfallstours.com.

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By Rodney Ho, Radio & TV Talk