Edgar Wright's directorial debut. A romantic comedy with zombies. The film that established Wright as one of the most-distinctive working visual comedians of his generation.
North London suburbs, contemporary. Shaun is a 29-year-old electronics-shop salesman whose life is in a stagnant pattern — he lives with his slob best friend Ed, his other flatmate Pete, his job is going nowhere, and his girlfriend Liz has just broken up with him. A zombie apocalypse begins; Shaun does not notice for approximately the first thirty minutes of the film. When he does notice, he decides to rescue Liz, his mother, and his stepfather, and to hide in his local pub (the Winchester) until the situation resolves.
The film tracks Shaun and Ed across approximately twenty-four hours. They navigate to Liz's flat, to Shaun's parents' house, and finally to the Winchester. Most of the rescue party is killed across the course of the film. The film closes with Shaun and Liz alive in Shaun's suburban flat several months after the crisis has been substantially contained, and with Ed — who has been turned into a zombie — chained in the garden shed playing video games with Shaun.
Shaun of the Dead was Edgar Wright's directorial debut. The film established the working partnership with Simon Pegg (co-writer and lead) and Nick Frost (supporting lead) that would extend across the subsequent Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead 2004, Hot Fuzz 2007, The World's End 2013). The trilogy is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-distinctive contemporary British comedy projects.
What distinguishes Wright's filmmaking from the broader British-comedy tradition is the visual precision. The films are constructed at the editing-and-blocking level with a degree of care that conventional comedy films do not always attempt. The famous record-throwing sequence in Shaun of the Dead — Shaun, Liz, and Ed throw the worst LPs from Shaun's collection at attacking zombies while debating which records they're willing to sacrifice — is shot with cuts on movement that mainstream action cinema would aspire to. The technique elevates the genre material into something cinematically distinct.
Shaun of the Dead is, on close inspection, an extremely faithful zombie film. The film's zombie conventions are derived from George A. Romero's foundational films (Night of the Living Dead 1968, Dawn of the Dead 1978, Day of the Dead 1985). The zombies move slowly, can only be killed by destroying the brain, infect through bites. The film respects the genre's rules rather than treating them as comic material.
What the film does, instead, is play the romantic-comedy mechanics against the zombie-film background. Shaun's emotional growth (from arrested adulthood to functional partner) is the film's actual subject; the zombies are the external pressure that forces the growth. The structural achievement is that both the romantic comedy and the zombie film operate at full intensity simultaneously — the audience experiences both genres without either being subordinated to the other. The technique has been imitated extensively but rarely matched.
Twenty-plus years after release, Shaun of the Dead remains one of the most-rewatchable comedy films of its decade. The structural reasons are recognisable. The characters are specific enough that audiences can identify with them rather than just laughing at them. The visual jokes reward multiple viewings (Wright plants visual gags in the early scenes that pay off in the late ones; the film is, in some sense, an extended visual setup-and-payoff exercise across 99 minutes). The genre conventions are followed precisely enough that genre-fan audiences read the film as genuine zombie cinema rather than as parody.
The film's legacy is also recognisable. The contemporary 'genre comedy' tradition that includes Hot Fuzz, Tropic Thunder, The Other Guys, This Is the End, the Cornetto sequel The World's End, and various others is downstream of Shaun of the Dead's specific approach. Almost any contemporary comedy that takes its genre seriously rather than purely parodying it is operating within the structural template the film established.