Sometimes there’s a film that comes out of nowhere and has the cultural shock comparable to the San Francisco earthquake of 1989. Such was the film Shaun of the Dead (2004). This film was a breath of fresh air compared to the junk that was being made in the horror genre. There was a lot of disappointments (28 days later) and silly remakes/reboots/sequels and buddy pictures (Freddy VS Jason).
Along comes Edgar Wright with his manic visual style, Simon Pegg as the everyday(slightly dumb-self-involved persona) and the underplaying comedic acting of Nick Frost (playing a man-child of sorts), Pop-culture references , then add some blood and guts and lots of Zombies; it was a brilliant mix.
Wright, Pegg, and Frost came from TV comedy. Their big success was Spaced - a hilarious comedy about late twenty-something flat mates and their everyday adventures in the big bad world. Don’t for a second think the show was the British version of Friends; if it was I wouldn’t even mention it here. No, it was as manic, nutty, (offensive) and geeky as it was completely stuck in British culture.
The same goes for Shaun of the Dead. It isn’t your typical Zombie film. Shaun works in an electronics shop. His life is going nowhere. Stuck in the same apartment, living with floundering Ed (Nick Frost) and anal Pete (Peter Serafinowicz) and dealing with a demanding girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) - he can’t stand being stuck in the same situations day after day of being in the same pub with her friends David (Dylan Moran-----Black Books) and Dianne (Lucy Davis) and of course, Ed, getting shit faced. Nor does she like the fact that Shaun has no ambition at all. She breaks up with him.
Shaun also has problems with his step dad (Bill Nighy from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) who thinks Shaun is a waste of life on this planet. He forgets he is supposed to have dinner with his parents as well as taking Liz to dinner. After a bad day at work, he argues with Pete over Ed living at their place and hasn’t paid rent in five years. They notice Pete’s hand has been bandage. He tells them a crack head bit him during a failed mugging.
Shaun wakes up in the morning to find Ed is still up playing videogames and tells him he’s off to the local shop for a drink. When he arrives there, clueless (self-involved) Shaun doesn’t notice blood stains everywhere and he cannot find the store owner. He tosses down a few pence, yells to him he owes him the money for the merchandise. Walking down the street, he sees some strange people staggering around at the pace of a corpse and growling to themselves. None of this had set in Shaun’s feeble mind.
Shaun and Ed find a zombie woman roaming their garden. And the movie becomes not only a parody of Zombie films, but also treats the Horror genre with respect that straight horror films have stopped giving themselves. In this hilarious scene, they decide to use Shaun’s record collection as a weapon against the Zombie. This is where Wright and Pegg bring in their pop culture sensibilities. Their discovery of a zombified Pete in the shower definitely was a laugh out-loud moment.
There is loads of irony in the film and character development. Such as discovering there is another group of survivors just like them led by Pegg’s former co-star and co-writer of Spaced, Jessica Hynes. The references to Romero’s Dead films and soundtrack references shows Wright’s love for 70’s horror films.
There are so many great moments in this film, to list them all would be a crime, as everyone needs to give the film a viewing at least once. But one that really stands out is in the pub when everyone is smacking the pub owner, who is now a zombie, with pool sticks to the beat of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”.
When this film came out, it was everywhere just as Simon Pegg, Nick frost, and Edgar Wright were and deservedly so. American filmmakers seemed to have stopped trying to make interesting horror films and it hasn’t really gotten better with the Paranormal Activity sequels. It feels like the filmmaking community as a whole, not just horror, but all categories have as they say, shot their wad and have nothing more to say. Of course that’s not really true. Someone somewhere is out there shooting a film that will one day be considered a classic.
Shaun of the Dead spawned two more in Wright and Pegg’s “Three Flavours Cornetto” trilogy, followed by 2007's Hot Fuzz and 2013's The World's End. The film has been released on DVD and Blue-ray packed with all kinds of special features. There have been films inspired by Shaun: The 2010 Cuban film Juan of the Dead and the 2013 Singaporean film Hsien of the Dead was inspired by Shaun of the Dead.
There have also been action figures of the characters. 12" Shaun with sound 7" Shaun, which was released in Cult Classics series 4. The sculpt was based on the 12" figure - "Winchester" two-pack, featuring 7" versions of Ed and a bloodied-up Shaun with the Winchester rifle. Zombie Ed, which is a re-deco of the "Winchester" Ed, to be released in Cult Classics: Hall of Fame. Upper Deck Entertainment released a card for the popular World of Warcraft in 2007, an ally named "Shawn of the Dead", with the power of bringing back allies from the enemy graveyard. No film by Edgar Wright could go without a soundtrack release.
The film's score by Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford is a pastiche of Italian zombie film soundtracks by artists like Goblin and Fabio Frizzi. It also uses many musical cues from the original Dawn of the Dead that were originally culled by George A. Romero from the De Wolfe production music library.
On the soundtrack album, dialogue from the film is embedded within the music tracks.
1. "Figment" – S. Park
2. "The Blue Wrath" – I Monster
3. "Mister Mental" – The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster
4. "Meltdown" – Ash
5. "Don't Stop Me Now" – Queen
6. "White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)" – Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Melle Mel
7. "Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don't Stop)" – Man Parrish
8. "Zombie Creeping Flesh" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
9. "Kernkraft 400" – Zombie Nation
10. "Fizzy Legs" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
11. "Soft" – Lemon Jelly
12. "Death Bivouac" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
13. "The Gonk (Kid Koala Remix)" – The Noveltones
14. "Envy the Dead" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
15. "Ghost Town" – The Specials
16. "Blood in Three Flavours" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
17. "Panic" – The Smiths
18. "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" (originally by Buzzcocks) – Ash featuring Chris Martin
19. "You're My Best Friend" – Queen
20. "You've Got Red on You / Shaun of the Dead Suite" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
21. "Normality" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
22. "Fundead" – Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford
23. "Orpheus" – Ash
There was even a comic strip Pegg and Wright also scripted a one-off tie-in comic strip for the British comic magazine 2000AD titled "There's Something About Mary", Set the day before the zombie outbreak, the strip follows and expands on the character of Mary, who appears briefly in the introductory credits, and is the first zombie whom Shaun and Ed are aware of, and details how she became a zombie. It features expanded appearances from many of the minor or background characters that appear in the film. The strip was made available on the DVD release of Shaun, along with two other strips that wrapped up "Plot Holes" in the film, like how Dianne escaped and survived the Winchester incident, and Ed's fate as well.
Mark Slade, HMS
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