Shaun Of The Dead – ‘Have a sit down’ and watch it again

by Dan Meier

This Halloween I remember why Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's 'romantic comedy with zombies' deserves its status as a cult classic.

Cast your minds back to the year 2004; President George W. Bush won a second term, the Boxing Day Tsunami killed over 200,000 people, and one small, British film became a modern classic. The name of that film? Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. I mean Shaun of the Dead.

Everybody’s favourite rom-zom-com succeeds as both a comedy and a horror film. Moments such as the disemboweling of Dylan Moran are genuinely unsettling, while others are incredibly moving — “You know, I don’t think I’ve got it in me to shoot my flatmate, my mum, and my girlfriend all in the same evening.” Shaun of the Dead is, at its heart, a story about love and friendship, without ever slipping into over-sentimentality as so many films do.

The first film of the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy saw the return of Spaced‘s perfect combination: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright. Pegg is wonderfully watchable as anti-hero Shaun, whose natural chemistry with Frost is based on their real friendship. Shaun of the Dead looks like what we now recognise as an Edgar Wright film — complete with comic book atmosphere, littered with trademark rapid-edit sequences, laced with cultural references.

Personally, what I love most about the film is the central question: If there was a Zombiepocalypse tomorrow, would you notice? Shaun of the Dead asks just how close we are to zombies, given the mundanity of our daily routines and the shared exhaustion of the human race. The scene in which Shaun walks to and from the shop in one continuous shot, without noticing the mass zombification around him, remains one of the greatest pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen.

Ultimately, what is it that we want from comedy films? We want them to be funny. And Shaun of the Dead is one of the funniest. Its humour is witty, physical, silly, clever and quotable. Phrases like “You’ve got red on you” and “Alright, gay” have entered our collective lexicon.

I could go on forever about how great this film is. I could talk about brilliant scenes such as the pub siege, the vinyl throwing and the Don’t Stop Me Now sequence. I could bore you about its influence on other great comedy/horror crossovers like Zombieland, Attack the Block and Charlie Brooker‘s amazing Dead Set. But all it takes is one look at the iconic Shaun holding a cricket bat and wearing his tie round his head (although he never has both those things at the same time in the film) to remember how much you love Shaun of the Dead; a film whose refrain is “let’s go to the pub.”