“I said, ‘What the dead would be doing to Hodor would be ripping his clothes off once they got through that door,”
he admitted in an interview. “They would be ripping his flesh off. If the dead can go through wood, they’re going to be tearing Hodor apart.”
Yet showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss pointed out that tearing Hodor apart might make the scene more horrific than sad. Think Red Viper of Dorne. So Bender relented and we got the scene we watched that traumatized us in a very different way.
“I still wanted to make it scary enough, see Hodor surrounded and engulfed by these skeletal arms and long fingers, that were eventually going to smother and kill and rip him apart, or whatever they were going to do that we didn’t see. But to not let the horror of it overwhelm the emotion of losing that character and making it really land on the idea that he was sacrificing himself so his friends could get away. That was the dominant idea.”
