Ever heard of a romantic comedy ... with zombies? You're about to see the first. "Shaun of the Dead," opening tomorrow, is the brainchild of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg.
Wright, the pale and thin 30-year-old first-time director, can talk zombies. He can talk your ear off about slow versus fast zombies or regular zombies versus viral zombies.
Despite the fact that Wright's film is one of the funniest to hit theaters this year, he and his lead actor and co-writer Simon Pegg are dead serious about "Shaun." These two fanboys have not only crafted a sincere homage to horror, but also have managed to add their own flavor of wit and stylish humor to the equation.
Wright and Pegg, along with "Shaun" co-star Nick Frost, got their start on the British television comedy "Spaced." The concept for "Shaun of the Dead" came from an episode of "Spaced" in which Pegg's character hallucinates a zombie invasion after taking some bad speed.
The basic story for "Shaun" was then expanded into a valentine to "Night of the Living Dead" filmmaker George Romero. As soon as the film was completed, Wright and Pegg screened it for Romero.
"We wanted his approval, really. His was the opinion we were going to value the most," Pegg said. "Me and Edgar spoke to him on the phone and he really enjoyed it. I think he was genuinely flattered, and I think he was probably expecting something a little more studenty, more of a pastiche made on the hop. He wasn't expecting a fully rounded piece of cinema."
After getting Romero's praise, the film did extremely well in the United Kingdom, opening around the same time as the remake of Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" in England.
In the past three years, there has been a kind of resurgence in zombie horror with not only the "Dawn" remake, but Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" as well.
"Before that there was like a zombie wilderness," Wright said. "People's only sense memory of the word zombie was Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video. There was a long stretch where you couldn't do zombies because they had been rendered not very daring anymore."
Wright feels that these recent movies are more of a re-invention of the zombie film as opposed to a classic zombie approach as in the films of George Romero.
"They very studiously avoided the 'Zed word' in ['28 Days Later']," Wright said. "In some respects it kind of wronged me. It's almost like they thought they were too cool to be a zombie film. The 'Dawn of the Dead' remake I think was literally somebody had seen '28 Days Later' while they were making it and thought, 'Oh shit, ours ought to be fast as well.' So we're really pleased that we stuck with the slow zombies."
Wright and Pegg also stayed old school in more ways than just their zombies. Developing the characters and the environment was as important as delivering the gore.
"There are a lot of horror films where people die every five minutes and their friends and family have like two seconds of grief and then it's on to the next car chase," Wright said. "In the 'Dawn of the Dead' remake, Sarah Polley's character - her husband or boyfriend in bed is killed and then tries to kill her and she thinks about it for all of 10 seconds," Wright said, laughing. "We wanted in 'Shaun of the Dead' that when people died, it really hurts. It hurts the characters and it hurts the audience because you've been watching them for the last 90 minutes."
When writing the script, Wright and Pegg stud-
ied not only horror films, but films that they
thought were particularly well-structured, like "Back to the Future" and "Die Hard." They also were very careful when balancing the comedic elements with the horror.
"We very much wanted it not to be a spoof," Wright said. "We didn't want it to become camp or silly. We weren't trying to send up the genre; we genuinely love the genre. We wanted that element of it to be serious. When we were writing the script, we imposed rules on ourselves, like the zombies shouldn't be funny and they shouldn't be doing anything silly. All the comedy comes from the characters."
And most of the film's comedy belongs to Pegg's tremendous performance as the film's titular character.
Pegg said that the shoot was physically demanding but still fun.
"We were working six-day weeks, 14, 15 hours a day doing a lot of physical stuff," he said. "We had like a whole gore squad all coming at it from different angles. There must have been like five or six different types of blood on set at any one time. There was makeup blood, props blood, wardrobe blood, special effects blood, you know, my blood. It was a whole lot of blood."
And "Shaun of the Dead" doesn't skimp on the blood and guts, but Pegg says it's a necessity.
"It's like a staple Romero detail to have somebody disemboweled," Pegg said. "Any self-respecting zombie film features a graphic disembowelment."
Wright and Penn believe that their zombie film can be as successful in the United States as it's been in the United Kingdom (where it outgrossed both "28 Days Later" and the "Dawn of the Dead" remake).
"Our senses of humor are pretty similar in America and in the U.K., like silliness and self-deprecation and irony," Pegg said. "We get all the same jokes as long as they're not too culturally specific. And the film is about big things. It's about [Shaun's] life and him becoming responsible and things like love and redemption. It's particularly universal I think. The lazy couch-bound slob is not just a U.K. thing."
Wright added, "I think we got it from you guys."
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ESSENTIAL ZOMBIE VIEWING
Night of the Living Dead (1968) Directed by George Romero. The classic film that put zombies on the map. Romero's brilliant mix of social commentary with horror at its best.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) Directed by George Romero. Romero's follow-up to "Night." The gorier, more brutal "Dawn" follows a group of survivors within a mall. Despite the mall scenes being a tad tedious (but that's the point anyway), it's totally awesome when those bikers show up and get torn up.
The Evil Dead (1981) Directed by Sam Raimi. When Ash was called Ashley. Sam Raimi's low-budget horror classic is much darker than its light-hearted sequels. Gives a new name for its zombies: Deadites.
Day of the Dead (1985) Directed by George Romero. Romero's thrid installment in his zombie series. This ime, a zombie learns how to shoot a gun...
Evil Dead 2 (1987) Directed by Sam Raimi. Raimi's brilliant follow-up to "Evil Dead" mixes gore-riffic horror with "Three Stooges" slapstick. Star Bruce Campbell makes commando zombie-killer Ash the hero to all nerds by cutting off his own hand and replacing it with a chainsaw. Groovy.
Dead Alive (1992) Directed by Peter Jackson. Before the "Lord of the Rings," Peter Jackson was busy making arguably the goriest movie of all time. See what happens when you take a lawnmower to a horde of attacking zombies ... lots of intestines everywhere.
Land of the Dead (2005) Directed by George Romero. Romero's fourth film in his zombie series, due out next year. This time, the humans have fled to an island. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg of "Shaun of the Dead" have undergone body-casting to cameo as zombies.
