George A. Romero’s groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead not only defined the modern zombie archetype but possessed a subtext that alluded to the televised horrors of the Vietnam War and racial violence in America circa 1968. Likewise, Romero’s sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead was steeped on sociocultural commentary, lampooning mass consumerism in its shopping mall setting. John A. Russo, the co-writer of Night, parted ways with Romero after that seminal 1968 zombie flick, charting his own creative course by writing The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which injected slapstick humor into the zombie horror subgenre to perhaps become the first true “zom-com.” In 2004, Edgar Wright intertwined these two threads, imbuing comedy into an apocalyptic scenario involving the lumbering, classic Romero zombies — none of the sprinting 28 Days Later (2001) rage-virus ghouls here — while keeping the film brimming with cultural subtext.
In Shaun of the Dead, which Wright co-wrote with Simon Pegg, a zombie plague is merely a metaphorical extension of the drudgery of working-class existence in Britain and the mindless forms of entertainment used as a distraction from this mundanity. Shaun (Pegg) virtually sleepwalks through the opening scenes in the film, yawning and stumbling his way through the neighborhood to grab a soda at the local convenience store and returning home to briefly play video games with his unemployed slacker roommate, Ed (Nick Frost), before heading off to work at a nearby electronics shop, where he sells TVs that distract the masses. On the bus, he’s surrounded by slack-jawed, dead-eyed working stiffs, all going about their entrenched routines as they have the day before, and the day before that. At work, he’s disrespected by the teenage employees he manages and, at 29 years of age, is viewed by the youth as too old to make anything of himself. His only real respite from the daily grind is round after round of pints at the Winchester, a pub where he routinely drinks himself stupid.
For all the film’s cultural commentary or even overt satire – by film’s end, the zombies make terrific employees for menial service jobs and even the perfect reality and game show fodder – Shaun of the Dead remains such a comedy horror staple 20 years later because of the compelling interpersonal drama that Wright and Pegg manage to tease out amid all the gory mayhem. It’s as much a rom-com parody as it is a zombie horror homage, making it one of the first and certainly the most enduring “zom-rom-com” (sorry, Warm Bodies). In fact, the zombie apocalypse hits just as Shaun’s relationship is falling apart. His girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), is sick of being pulled down into Shaun’s rut of drinking his life away at the Winchester and dumps him. But when he wakes up with a hangover after drowning his sorrows with Ed at his beloved pub, the usual neighborhood denizens are a bit more “bitey” than the used to be.
Shaun is able to turn the misfortune of being surrounded by undead ghouls (he prefers to not use “the zed word”) into an opportunity to prove his romantic muster by attempting to bravely rescue Liz from the high-rise apartment where her friends Dianne (Lucy Davis, fresh off The Office) and David (Dylan Moran) would prefer to simply hole up, especially since David fancies Liz and belittles Shaun at every turn. In the meantime, Shaun rescues his mum, Barbara (Penelope Wilton) – an opportunity for Ed to shout into a phone the clever Romero-homage “We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” ‒ and along the way has a heart-to-heart with his zombifying stepfather, Philip (Bill Nighy), neither of whom he’d ever bothered to introduce to Liz.
But as much as Shaun of the Dead pokes at the expected rom-com beats, the film is as much about the bromance between Shaun and Ed ‒ the latter of whom is berated by their quickly bitten third roommate Pete (Peter Serafinowicz), the only one of the three to successfully navigate into adulthood. Shaun stands up for Ed, but moreover he’s even more reliant on his fart-joking pal’s companionship than he is Liz’s. Despite its comedic angle, the film doesn’t pull any punches with what the zombie apocalypse takes from Shaun: namely, everyone he cares about (save Liz). He’s even forced to shoot his own undead mother in the face. When a badly bitten Ed stays behind as Shaun and Liz escape the Wincester to safety, Shaun literally and figuratively leaving his old life behind, the farewell moment between the two is genuinely moving—even though, in the film’s coda, we find that Shaun can still play video games with a drooling, zombie Ed chained up in the garden shed.
All these moving parts wouldn’t interlock as seamlessly as they do without Wright’s deft direction, particularly the film’s quick cuts that add such a sense of propulsive momentum even to the more mundane actions to which they’re employed. This technique is used throughout Wright and Pegg’s Cornetto trilogy (also consisting of 2007’s Hot Fuzz and 2013’s The World’s End), but perhaps are most effectively used here, the frenzy of a zombie apocalypse captured in the urgency of the editing. The film also benefits from a killer soundtrack, and even its diegetic music, with the jukebox’s playing of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” during a pivotal fight scene in the film’s third act. The witty dialogue and endearing chemistry among virtually the entire cast, not only Pegg and Frost, make the viewer legitimately care about these characters, causing it hit that much harder when each is dispatched by the horde—with the antagonistic David’s evisceration as gory as almost any zombie film death to come before it, and recalling the villainous Captain Rhodes similarly being ripped apart in Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985).
Ultimately, the fact that Shaun of the Dead is first and foremost a zombie film allows it to endure as one of the more memorable entries in a horror subgenre it could’ve simply parodied. The Scary Movie franchise, so popular in this same era of the 2000s, may have treated mere mocking reference as comedy gold, but Shaun fully embodies all three elements of its “zom-rom-com” designation; even as it satirizes the conventions of romantic comedies, it works on that level too. Our unlikely hero escapes the zombie horde with his life, gets the girl, and even retains some semblance of continued relationship with his affable best bud Ed. What more could a guy, or for that matter the viewer, ask for?
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