Shaun of the Dead is a zombie film that keeps stopping to argue about where to eat. That is the joke, and it is also the whole engine. Edgar Wright’s 2004 feature, written with Simon Pegg, runs 99 minutes and ends with its hero choosing a pub over a plan. It spends more time on a break-up than on the outbreak, and it works because of it.
Trailer, via Focus Features.
The Winchester and the anniversary dinner
Pegg plays Shaun, a 29-year-old sales advisor in Crouch End, north London. His life revolves around his girlfriend Liz, his mother Barbara, and above all his local pub, the Winchester. He is disrespected by his colleagues. He does not get along with his stepfather Philip. Liz dumps him after he promises to improve himself but fails to make decent plans for an anniversary date.
That is the first act, and it has almost no zombies in it. The film’s tagline is “A romantic comedy. With zombies.” It is not a marketing lie. Wright and Pegg build a full domestic comedy first — the flatmate who will not move out, the stepfather who will not let anything go, the pub that is the only place Shaun can think of to take anyone.
Ed, Pete, and the garden fight
Nick Frost makes his film debut as Ed, Shaun’s slacker best friend. Frost met Pegg while working as a waiter and was brought aboard Spaced despite having no acting experience. Frost has said the Shaun-and-Ed dynamic mirrors his real friendship with Pegg, who had lived together for years.
The film’s most quoted sequence arrives when the apocalypse has already happened and Shaun and Ed have not noticed. They find two zombies in their garden and kill them by throwing household implements and Shaun’s vinyl collection. Pete, their roommate, has complained of a bite wound from a mugger and told Shaun to stop leaning on Ed and get his life together. In our reading, the film is careful to make the audience laugh at the same information the characters are ignoring.
Nine weeks at Ealing Studios
Principal photography ran nine weeks across London and at Ealing Studios, between May and June 2003. The film premiered in London on 29 March 2004, opened in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2004, and reached the United States on 24 September.
It grossed $38.7 million worldwide on a budget of $6.1 million, and picked up three nominations at the British Academy Film Awards. It was ranked third on the Channel 4 list of the 50 Greatest Comedy Films. It is the first entry in Wright and Pegg’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, followed by Hot Fuzz in 2007 and The World’s End in 2013.
Barbara, Philip, and the Jaguar
The back half of Shaun of the Dead is a rescue mission with a pub at the end of it. Shaun and Ed plan to collect Barbara and Liz and wait out the crisis at the Winchester. They escape a zombified Pete by stealing his car, pick up the bitten Philip and Barbara, and Ed deliberately crashes Pete’s car so he can drive Philip’s Jaguar Series 3.
They fetch Liz and her flatmates David and Dianne. Philip reconciles with Shaun before turning. Forced to abandon the car and their weapons, the group sneaks through the neighbourhood and briefly meets a group led by Shaun’s friend Yvonne, each member resembling a double of the other group’s. Shaun defends Barbara from a zombie and impales it with a swingball pole.
Penelope Wilton plays Barbara. Helen Mirren was approached for the role and turned it down, noting she would rather play other funnier characters. Bill Nighy plays Philip, and accepted after Wright sent him an early script. Kate Winslet was approached to play Liz, met with Wright and Pegg, and declined.
She’s brilliant, but it was obvious that her fame would capsize the film in maybe a not useful way.
That is Wright’s own account of the Winslet near-miss. He has said he was relieved she passed.
The swingball pole and the doppelgängers
The casting is a survey of British television comedy of the period: Pegg, Frost, Peter Serafinowicz, and others drawn from Spaced, Black Books and The Office. Dylan Moran plays David. Lucy Davis plays Dianne. Kate Ashfield plays Liz. Jessica Hynes plays Yvonne. Television presenters and newsreaders — Carol Barnes, Rob Butler, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Vernon Kay, Jeremy Thompson — appear as themselves. Mark Gatiss and David Walliams voiced news reporters, uncredited. Wright, Joe Cornish, Garth Jennings, Michael Smiley and Lauren Laverne appear as zombies. Chris Martin appears as a zombie and as himself with Jonny Buckland.
The film’s references to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead cycle are deliberate, not decorative. The ideas came from Spaced, the 1999–2001 sitcom Pegg and Wright made together, particularly an episode in which Pegg’s character hallucinates a zombie invasion.
What the film is actually about
In film studies, Shaun of the Dead is read as a product of post-9/11 anxiety, a portrait of post-Thatcher Britain, and a model for transnational comedy. That is a lot of weight for a film whose hero weaponizes a swingball pole.
Here is what holds up. The film’s real subject, in our view, is not the dead. It is the living who will not change until something forces them. Shaun ignores the outbreak because ignoring things is what he does. Liz leaves him for the same reason. Philip needles him for the same reason. The zombies are not the problem; they are the deadline.
The pub is the thesis. The Winchester is a small, warm, familiar room, and the film treats the decision to wait out the end of the world there as both pathetic and noble. Shaun’s plan is bad, and as far as the film shows it is the only plan anyone has.
Where the film thins out, to our eye, is the middle stretch. Once the group is assembled and moving, the plotting becomes a series of errands — get Barbara, get Liz, get to the pub — and the comedy leans on the same joke, that these people keep bickering about ordinary things while being eaten. It lands more often than not, but the first act’s precision is not sustained.
The doppelgänger encounter with Yvonne’s group is the smartest idea in the back half, and it goes by fast. Two sets of survivors, mirrored, each led by a friend who has become something else. The film notices and moves on.
Frost, in our judgement, is the film’s secret weapon. His Ed is genuinely annoying, which is the harder performance. A lesser film makes the slacker lovable. This one lets him waste time on his phone, attract the zombies’ attention, and start the argument that gets people killed.
The gore is practical and modest, and that reads as a strength. The budget was $6.1 million, and the film never pretends otherwise. It uses a garden, a car, a pub, and a swingball pole. The scares are small and the laughs are small, and both come from the same place: people who know each other too well, behaving exactly as they always have.
Shaun of the Dead is not the best film in the Cornetto trilogy. It is the one that had to work first, and it did. It was Nick Frost’s film debut, it proved Wright could hold a feature together, and it remains a durable zombie comedy.
The audience score sits at 7.5 out of 10 across 9,616 votes. That feels right, and slightly generous to the middle. The opening hour is close to perfect. The last act is good, not great. A film this durable deserves its cult following, and it deserves to be told plainly that its best ideas are in its first act.
The numbers behind the film
- Title: Shaun of the Dead
- Year: 2004
- Director: Edgar Wright
- Writers: Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg
- Runtime: 99 minutes
- Budget: $6.1 million
- Worldwide gross: $38.7 million
- UK release: 9 April 2004
- US release: 24 September 2004
- London premiere: 29 March 2004
- British Academy Film Awards nominations: 3
- Score: 7.5/10 (TMDB audience score, 9,616 votes)
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