When I first saw "Night of the Living Dead," it struck a very particular nerve for me. I followed it up very quickly with "Dawn of the Dead" and after that I just couldn't get enough. I watched all the zombie movies I could find. Most of them, frankly, were terrible. Nobody got it the way Romero got it. But I was still entranced. There's just something fundamentally terrifying about the zombie to me in a way that vampires, werewolves, serial killers, etc. never will be. It's all about entropy and decay, the slow strangling death of the human species. It's about the end coming not in a great redemptive ball of fire (either through an act of God or nuclear fuckery), but right down in a gutter where your dead mom is chewing on your entrails. It's a dirty, foul way to shuffle off this mortal coil.
It was the early/mid-90s when I discovered Romero, so zombies weren't really a thing back then. They were my monster. Romero and his legion of the living dead belonged to me.
This, of course, all changed in the early/mid-2000s, and now we're caught up in the midst of a great zombie Renaissance that, to me, is as unwelcome as it is utterly baffling. I hate to be a whiny hipster about it, but I was into zombies before they were cool.
Most of the new zombie stuff is pretty terrible (to be fair, most of the old zombie stuff was pretty terrible, too). But it's terrible in a new way — self-aware and ironic in a way that I just find insufferable.
I refuse to read "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," because fuck that shit. There's even a book I see on the horror shelves at Barnes & Noble that's all about the Beatles as zombies. I mean, come the fuck on.
Zombies have been neutered.
They're, like, cute now.
Ugh.
Granted, there has been some good stuff over the last few years, stuff that does honor the zombie for the horrible nightmare it is. Max Brooks's "World War Z" is as good as everyone says it is (the movie not so much). Justin Cronin's "The Passage" is technically about vampires, but he captures the melancholy spirit that typifies the best of the zombie genre. I have a love-hate relationship with "The Walking Dead," but I appreciate that they're interested in exploring the essential tragedy and sadness of what a zombie apocalypse would really look like.
And then there's this short film, which does in seven minutes what "The Walking Dead" struggles to do over the course of a season.
But the funny zombie thing is the worst.
EXCEPT. "Shaun of the Dead."
I can't even begin to express the level of love I have for this film. When I think of the movies I've laughed at the hardest over the last, I dunno, 15 or 20 years, "Shaun of the Dead" is way up at the top of the list.
What makes this film different? Well, for one thing, it pretty much invented the modern funny zombie thing ("Return of the Living Dead" doesn't count. It's funny in a very 80s, camp way which is markedly different from the current trend). What has become so annoying to me in the decade since was completely fresh and original at the time.
But it's also just better. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are absolute comic geniuses with an impeccable sense of timing that is pretty much unmatched by anyone else working today. In fact, there isn't a weak spot in entire cast. Everyone is working at the top of their game. The writing is incredibly sharp, each joke funnier and more quotable than the last.
Edgar Wright's direction is the real revelation here. It's hard to believe this a debut film (granted, he had been honing his craft in British television for years before). It's remarkably self-assured. Every shot and every edit is meaningful. Fully half of the laughs in this film come from what he's doing with the camera rather than the performances.
But, as silly as this film is, it manages to transcend parody and work as a legitimate zombie film. I wouldn't call it scary, exactly. But they get it. Shaun isn't just a bundle of comic tics and clever one liners, any more than Ben from "Night" is a stock horror-movie hero. Wright follows Romero's lead in using the zombies as a catalyst for personal crisis and growth. Shaun is a real person, with genuine desires and very human flaws. The movie is about growing up. It's about friendship. It's about family. It's also about clubbing a zombie to death with a cricket bat.
This tricky balancing act has become a trademark of the trio's "Cornetto Trilogy" ("Shaun," "Hot Fuzz," and last year's "The World's End"). I'm consistently stunned by Wright, Pegg and Frost's ability to balance silliness and absurdity with grounded, personal storytelling. Pegg and Frost are as good when they're being serious as they are when they're hamming it up, and they're able to make that shift on a dime, sometimes three or four times within a single scene.
For my money, "Shaun" is the best of the three, but all three films are works of comic genius and truly stellar filmmaking. I don't need any more funny zombies, but I'll be watching and rewatching "Shaun of the Dead" until the day I die.
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