Shaun of the Dead
With Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Morgan, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, and Peter Serafinowicz
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The scene embodies two principles that would become standard in horror movies: it’s vaguely postmodern, calling attention to the movie itself as part of a cinematic tradition, and it shows how quickly laughter can be overtaken by terror. It’s the movie’s most memorable scene, so naturally a reference to it turns up in Shaun of the Dead, a very funny spoof of Romero’s zombie movies by British TV writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Night of the Living Dead has produced so many sequels, remakes, and rip-offs that a flat-out comedy may seem something of a last gasp, like the Abbott and Costello comedies that buried Universal Pictures’ classic horror cycles. Yet in its own snarky way, Shaun of the Dead comes remarkably close to the bitter satire that makes Romero’s zombie movies so distinctive.
Actually the dualistic struggle of Shaun of the Dead takes place not between the zombies and the living but between Ed, who prizes Shaun’s company in a perpetual adolescence of pints and PlayStation 2, and Liz (Kate Ashfield), Shaun’s bright and ambitious girlfriend, who thinks Shaun could do big things if only he’d apply himself. In the first scene Liz and Shaun are sitting at the Winchester, the local pub where they always seem to wind up. Liz has had it. “I want to live,” she tells him. “I want you to live too.” After she finally dumps Shaun, Ed drags his miserable pal to the Winchester to console him. “It’s not the end of the world,” Ed insists, as zombies clamor unnoticed at the door. He has his own long-term vision for Shaun: why don’t they just stay in the pub and drink nonstop for days?
The movie rallies in its last minutes, after Liz and Shaun are rescued by riot police and the zombie horror is contained. In a sequence worthy of Romero, another round of channel surfing shows how crassly the surviving zombies have been integrated into modern life, employed by service industries as simple laborers and recruited as contestants for stunt-oriented game shows. A woman on a tabloid talk show admits that she and her zombie husband still share the same bed. Even Liz and Shaun have found a more congenial middle ground and seem quite contented as they look forward to a lazy Sunday together. Ed has become a zombie, and Shaun keeps him chained in the shed out back, where he can play video games to his dead heart’s content. The gag reverses the dynamic that opened the film, but this could be the best thing that’s ever happened to Ed.
