Shaun of the Dead

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From the New Yorker review:

There is one scene in “Shaun of the Dead” that tells you more, in a couple of minutes, than any movie I have seen this year. It is a Sunday morning on a quiet London street, and Shaun (Simon Pegg) leaves his house, walks to the corner shop, buys a Diet Coke and an ice cream, and goes back home. That’s it. A few details snag your attention: a smashed windshield, the yelp of a car alarm, torn sacks of trash, and a guy who shambles toward Shaun and stretches out his arms, but, still, nothing out of the ordinary. What Shaun doesn’t yet realize is that the dead have returned to life and are stalking the streets, that civil society has crumbled, and that the man reaching for him is not begging but trying to gorge on human flesh. “No, I haven’t got any change,” Shaun says, brushing him aside, and that’s the comic miracle of the sequence, which was shot in a single take. Go down most London streets any day and there will indeed be spilled garbage and a hole in a car window, with the occasional drunk or junkie, routing for help or cash. If Shaun fails to notice that England is swarming with zombies, it’s because England is like that all the time.

Shaun of the Dead: An Oral History:

These days, the idea of a zombie romantic comedy directed by Baby Driver filmmaker Edgar Wright and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost seems like horror-fan catnip. But when Wright and Pegg first conceived of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, it was the longest of shots. Wright had almost no track record as a director, Pegg and Frost were unknown outside the U.K., and the concept of a comedic love story inspired by the gore-filled universe of director George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead franchise appeared downright perverse. “It really was quite unusual at the time,” says Kate Ashfield, the film’s female lead. “They called it a ‘rom-zom-com.’ You think: ‘I’ve never heard of one of those before.’

 

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