Shaun of the Dead
A London sales advisor stuck in a rut and his slacker best mate face the zombie apocalypse armed with household objects, a vinyl collection, and a plan that begins and ends at the pub. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's "rom-zom-com" is the parody so precise and so affectionate it stands as a great zombie film in its own right — Romero himself phoned to say so.
The seed was planted in Spaced, the cult 1999–2001 sitcom Simon Pegg starred in with Edgar Wright directing. In a 1999 episode called "Art," Pegg's character hallucinates a zombie invasion after playing Resident Evil 2 — a throwaway gag that wouldn't stay thrown away. Pegg and Wright, devoted students of George A. Romero's Dead films, decided to write their own, and got the screenplay done in eight weeks.
The result — made for $6 million and released in the UK on April 9, 2004, then in the US on September 24 — was billed as a "rom-zom-com": a romantic comedy with zombies. Pegg plays Shaun, a 29-year-old London sales advisor stuck in a rut; Nick Frost is Ed, his slacker best mate. The apocalypse arrives and they barely notice. The beats are canon now: beating garden zombies with household objects and hurling Shaun's vinyl collection at them, the cricket bat, and the master plan — rescue Shaun's mum and his ex Liz, retreat to their beloved pub the Winchester, and wait for the whole thing to blow over. The Winchester rifle mounted over the bar turns out, gloriously, to be functional.
The love letter runs deep. The film is packed with references to Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead; the score pastiches Italian zombie-movie soundtracks; and the zombie extras were recruited from Spaced fan communities. It's set in Crouch End in north London, though the Winchester's exterior was a real south London pub, the Duke of Albany, since converted into flats. And then the ultimate blessing: Romero watched it alone in a Florida cinema, phoned Wright and Pegg to give his approval, and invited them to cameo in his 2005 film Land of the Dead.
It grossed $38.7 million — modest numbers for an immodest legacy. Shaun of the Dead announced Wright, Pegg and Frost to the world, and pulled off the rarest trick in parody: a comedy so fluent in the genre it was teasing that it became one of the genre's great entries itself, not despite the romantic-comedy heart but because of it.
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