31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 18 (Shaun Of The Dead)

You've got red on you.

Well, that was much better and captured my attention far more than poor George Romero did. Sorry, George. You'll get your moment in the limelight because there's a movie you worked on that I adore, but for now we're talking about this one. First off, I don't know how the hell this worked. This came out the same year as the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead, which I don't think I'm going to touch ever. In fact its London premiere was 10 days after Dawn 2004 came out. Back in 2004 I just assumed the movie had been put out as a timely parody of sorts, but I'm not sure how much of this is the case. Whether deliberate reaction or no, the fact remains that they came out in the same year and this one's name is a rhyme of the other. I hadn't seen Dawn Of The Dead, either of them, in September 2004, but I was there for this one. I was in the theater with college friends; we'd all gone out to the mall together for something to do on Saturday afternoon, and as I recall it was spur of the moment. It ended up being really great, and to this day it's still my second-favorite Edgar Wright thing I've seen.

So, what makes this good and entertaining to me where Dawn Of The Dead wasn't? For one, it's funny as fuck. Edgar Wright is a goddamned master of callback humor. So much of the sharp dialogue in these movies come right back to you in completely different contexts and that makes it funny. Stuff like "You've got red on you" or "No, I'm sorry, Shaun" or I could go on and on. Hell, Hot Fuzz is this personified; the last half-hour is a climax built almost entirely on these sharp callbacks, and that's what makes it my favorite Edgar Wright movie. Point is, being a really funny zombie movie is good! It's a change of pace from the dire tones of that other film and so many others like it. Who says the end of the world has to be grim? More to the point, we get to see normal life before it all goes sour. Well, shit is going sour in the background, but life is going on as normal. Hell, even when the shit hits the fan and the zombie apocalypse is upon us, things go on as normal. Case in point, and another instance of the callbacks, Shaun's second run down to the shops to get a Coke and Cornetto while everything is fucked up where he doesn't even notice due to being hung over. Then everyone does notice and... wow. Having not seen Dawn Of The Dead before, I didn't realize how the premise is somewhat mirrored in Shaun Of The Dead. The main thrust of the action is getting to a safe space with no zombies in it. In Dawn, it was the shopping mall. In Shaun, it's the Winchester pub. Both are places of consumerism, and neither last in the end. Still, we see a lot of differences. For how much I didn't like it, the folks in Dawn were a lot better at making their place zombie-proof... until a bunch of bikers fucked it up. Here, shit isn't safe from the get-go and Shaun's dreams of holing up in the Winchester are basically dashed after a few hours. Everything is constantly under assault, the back door is blocked, the zombie owners are still around... yikes. It's a bad situation all around. Things only get more and more grim, and it's here that Shaun gets a leg up over Dawn. In Dawn everything was fucked from the get-go. After two hours of that, you get a little numb to the tension. In Shaun we actually keep descending, and the zombies keep advancing and taking more and more of the Winchester and killing off more people. It makes things tense, and I like that.

There's not much else for me to praise, other than saying it's very very funny. Its editing is clever because Edgar Wright is also a clever editor! That bit with the channel surfing is nice, and the repeated montages of Shaun's plan to hole up from the zombies that speed up as he revises them is good. It's also a piece of zombie fiction that doesn't end on an ambiguous downer: we win! We domesticate the goddamn undead for reality TV and low-end jobs! It's a fucked up world, but it's still our world. For this, it works. Most zombie fiction just ends on those down notes anyway, so this is welcome. Shaun Of The Dead is a very good film, and a very good zombie film! These movies about undead monsters can be funny! Wait, what's that? They've done that before? Ah yes, of course. We can spend a day or two on those, of course. Well, I've only one thing to say to our next bit of focus.

Groovy.