"The Walking Dead" showrunner Glen Mazzara recently touched on the story impact and production design involved in the survivors' new home at a Georgia prison on the hit AMC zombie series.

Briefly revealed during the closing moments of the Season 2 finale, the prison will play a major role in the coming season.

“I’m incredibly proud of the prison,” Mazzara said in an interview with EW.com. “I think our crew has done a great job. It’s a huge sense of scale and magnitude I haven’t seen on any other show as far as construction.

"What’s important to us is the prison itself is now a character in the show. It’s a haunted house, it’s scary, it’s frightening, and there are parts of the prison that are always terrifying, that are always inaccessible to our group. It’s not necessarily the blessing that the prison in the comic book turned out to be.”

Featuring 16 episodes for Season 3, "The Walking Dead" returns this fall following a wildly successful sophomore season, which broke a basic cable record when it pulled in 9 million viewers for its action-packed finale, "Beside the Dying Fire."

"The Walking Dead" follows police officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) as he leads his family and a group of survivors across the country in search of a safe home as zombie hordes threaten their every move.

Lincoln ("Love, Actually," "Teachers") was recently nominated during the 2012 Airlock Alpha Portal Awards for Best Actor/Television. You can now participate in the voting here.

In 2011, the series earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Television Series - Drama and won the 2011 Emmy Award for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup.

See a pair of new photos from Season 3 at EW.com.

"The Walking Dead" also stars Steven Yeun, Sarah Wayne Callies ("Prison Break"), Chandler Riggs ("Get Low") and Laurie Holden ("Shield").