SHAUN OF THE DEAD @ 20

Shaun is still young but time is ticking. As someone who has holidayed in Greece but prefers the confines of the local pub, he is terminally under motivated. His girlfriend Liz, credible but weary, all but delivers an ultimatum (in the pub): get moving or get another girlfriend. So, with work conditions squeezing in and plagued by his flatmates' mutual antipathy, the potential loss of the love of his life, his dour stepfather emotionally blackmailing him into appearing at their place with flowers, he writes a note to himself on a white board to improve. Just in time for a zombie outbreak across London. Doesn't crisis mean opportunity in some language?

Edgar Wright's 2004 film was described by its co-writer Simon Pegg (here also playing Shaun) as a RomZomCom. It's a cute line but that it's also an accurate description of this film ensures its durability and popularity. The central rough-shod romance works from the off and develops fluently. The zombie crisis is all out of the great Romero. The comedy is non-stop, even when the action calls for tension. The concept brought in to a smooth landing makes this film a rarity: a horror comedy that is both.

The opening titles shots of people moving through their normal '00s lives like the checkout chick whose permanently downcast eyes don't seem to be aware of her hands sliding items over the barcode reader, or the group of head bobbing earbud isolators roaming the streets, or any number of droolers texting or reading. Modern London (or any city) is a zombie outbreak waiting to be announced. This is after the prologue in the pub where Liz is trying to draw some life out of Shaun and, in a shockingly funny series of reveals where the people being talked about are in the same scene, we get a lot of exposition which we don't even notice. Soon after, when Shaun is going to the shop, completely oblivious to the carnage surrounding him, walking past monstrous figures, whose stumbling motion doesn't alarm him, back home where his flatmate Ed points out the girl outside whom they first take for a drunk. This is not a comment about denial but the crushing confrontation with the familiar.

While Wright keeps the pace high and the jokes constant he is paying a continual debt to the films of George Romero. Romero redefined the zombie film in 1968's Night of the Living Dead in a few crucial ways that ensured its influence over genre cinema across the decades to the future. First, he removed the Voodoo or magic or religion from the premise. Zombie movies used to be about local wizards using magic to manipulate the living. Romero intentionally kept the cause of the outbreak vague. When the news report suggests an extra-terrestrial cause it fades as the latest guess. The crisis is banging down the doors as the newly risen dead come looking for living flesh to eat. The other contribution was to heighten the sub-text of the zombie sieges whether it was racism, unpopular wars, consumerism, unethical scientific research or (in the case of the undersung Land of the Dead, refugees). Horror cinema had always used sub-text but now it could be acceptably writ large in monsters numerous enough to resemble the whole culture. Those shots of automatic behaviour by non-zombified Londoners are funny when you first see them. So is the response of Shaun an Ed to the zombie girl outside. It is very easy to absorb the fatigue of the crisis and burp it out as a joke.

And what jokes! Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg had already collaborated on the dowd humour of Spaced. Pegg was also a regular in the cast of Big Train. There are major parts and walk-ons from the spectrum of that golden moment in U.K. TV comedy. The casts of the aforementioned join those of Black Books, The Office, and The League of Gentlemen. The mix of absurdism and satire was constructed of these performances for a good half decade and Wright managed to cast the lot who, even if they really are just there to be recognised, add such spice to the proceedings.

Also, the humour throughout is unrepentantly British. The gag about Ed pleading to keep being the driver because he adjusted the seat would have been sarcasm from Bill Murray. His reading is earnest and casual, a detail of everyday life rising into present day crisis and as impossible to argue with in either context. The completely reset line, "Coming to get you, Barbara," is a direct lift from the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead. There is a Fulci restaurant in the phone book. But mostly, the comedy arises from astutely crafted scenes where the interaction of characters all but allows the humour to form more or less naturally. When the action turns dark, this only needs to keep going.

Even with the TV players and influences on Shaun of the Dead, it plays like cinema. It's a London that might as well be shot on location. Its streets shuffle with zombies whose gore filled mouths are shown to be a short step away from detached urban life. The bromance of Shaun and Ed and the romance of Shaun and Liz feel real and get to poignancy without force. It would take the obscurity of some of the local references to diminish most of what's on screen here but almost all of it would survive that particular zombie onslaught. It wins its night, dawn, day and land, ready to rise again and strike terror and belly laughs in all who look upon it.

Viewing notes: I watched my 4K disc of this which features an impressively detailed HDR video pass and DTSX audio. It's available locally in this form but also on a few streamers. Do yourself a favour.