Shaun of the Dead

When I first saw Shaun of the Dead twenty years ago, I thought it a great movie.

I remember walking out that screening and seeing posters for the twentieth anniversary re-release of Ghostbusters and struggling to believe it was that old. Watching Shaun of the Dead twenty years later, I still enjoy it, but rank it as good, not great. Were its flaws always there, or have my tastes changed?

I suspect a combination of both. The plot concerns the titular Shaun, played by Simon Pegg, a twenty-nine-year-old stuck in an arrested adolescence. He still lives with his equally stunted best friend Ed, played by Nick Frost, and is content with his life, working his high-school job and spending his evenings drinking in the local pub. His girlfriend, Liz, tired of waiting for him to grow up, dumps him. Shocked by this change to the status quo, Shaun resolves to sort out his life and win Liz back, but finds his efforts complicated by a zombie apocalypse.

The film bills itself as “a romantic comedy with zombies,” but a more apt description would be “a screwball comedy with zombies.” Much of the film’s humor stems from Shaun and Ed’s self-centered natures. Consider an early sequence where a hungover Shaun trudges through his neighborhood to the local shop for coffee and ice cream, oblivious to the shambling zombies, empty streets, and other signs of destruction. In a bit that still made me chuckle, he nearly slips on blood in a store aisle.

But as I age, this sort of humor wears on me. Watching it close to Shaun’s age, it seemed less obvious that he and Ed are essentially children, and this is a children’s movie. That’s fine, except for later, when it tries for serious drama.

Fast-forward and Shaun and company have barricaded themselves inside his beloved pub. They’ve rescued Shaun’s mother, but she’s succumbed to a zombie bite. Liz’s roommate David, who harbors a secret love for Liz, raises a shotgun to prevent Shaun’s mom from reanimating. This alarms Shaun, who leaps toward David and holds a jagged broken bottle to David’s throat, crying, “Don’t point that gun at my mum!”

The resulting standoff isn’t a bad scene. It’s convincingly performed by all the parties and reinforces Shaun’s childlike nature. He’s a boy who wants his mommy. But the film hasn’t earned it. The preceding screwball antics didn’t provide the requisite emotional investment.

We react because we can identify with losing our own parents, not because we’re invested in Shaun or his mom. It’s a subtle, but important difference that fosters a tonal dissonance. Especially given the following scene features an over-the-top gore sequence that pays homage to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead complete with music cue. Compare it to the tonally appropriate scene a short while later where Shaun says goodbye to Ed with a callback to an earlier fart joke.

I remember these thoughts swirling after my initial watch, along with a nagging dissatisfaction with the ending. These faults were easier to ignore then, given the film’s mix of graphic zombie horror and comedy was so fresh. But time has seen the zom-com established as a familiar genre, diminishing its novelty.

This familiarity also renders the first act, where director Edgar Wright seizes every moment that could be a jump scare and adds the requisite music cue before revealing a non-threatening surprise, tiresome. It’s not enough to splice disparate genre tropes together—even if they’re executed perfectly—you have to blend them tonally.

Indeed, the more films I watch, the more I’ve learned to appreciate films that craft a perfect tonal blend of disparate genres. Ghostbusters is a great example of a film that blends comedy and horror. I still regard Ghostbusters as a great movie, even forty years later. Shaun slipping a bit is more indicative of my changing perspective. Late-twenties me will always love it, but middle-aged me is, perhaps, more discriminating.