You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life

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Eventually, producer Nira Park secured the film’s budget from WT2, a subsidiary of the production company Working Title. Wright shot Shaun of the Dead in the summer of 2003 on location in London and at the capital’s famed Ealing Studios. An exemplary movie retrospective, one which combines an astonishing amount of research with a real flair for storytelling. 5/5 stars."— SFX The pair regarded Shaun of the Dead not as a parody of Romero’s films but as a love letter to them, with the humour coming from the collision of this apocalyptic scenario with humdrum London life. “I have, for many years, reiterated the fact that every zombie film, they’ve all stolen from George Romero,” says Pegg. “The cannibalistic viral zombie was entirely his idea, which was so brilliant and scary, and the most contemporary classic monster. They stand alongside vampires and werewolves, but those things have been around for hundreds of years. George came up with this in 1968.”

The director was on vacation in Florida, and had watched Shaun of the Dead at 10 a.m. Eastern time at the Island Cinema in the small beach town of Sanibel. Now, Pegg was waiting in his north London home for Romero to call and give his verdict. “I was in the kitchen in my house in Crouch End, the first house I’d bought with my then-girlfriend, now wife,” says Pegg. “I was pacing up and down like I was expecting test results.” How did a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub become a beloved global pop culture phenomenon?

The movie’s executive producer Jim Wilson arranged for American horror director George A. Romero to watch the film, in the hope that he would give it a buzz-generating quote. “This all came from Edgar,” says Wilson. “He was like, ‘I want George Romero to see it.’” Wilson knew an agent in Los Angeles named Frank Wuliger who worked at The Gersh Agency, which represented Romero. With Wuliger’s assistance, the executive producer “eventually got a print to somewhere where George Romero could see it.” I heard it was a romantic-comedy with zombies, and I was like, well, that sounds sh*t.”— actor Rafe Spall Pegg and director Edgar Wright decided to follow the example of legendary director George Romero’s zombie films — and in particular, the consumer culture-parodying Dawn of the Dead— by having a nugget of sociopolitical satire at the heart of their script for Shaun of the Dead. The film foregrounded the idea of how monotonous dead-end jobs, the grind of urban existence, and even the brain-numbing nature of mass entertainment can turn people into the undead even without the intervention of a zombie virus. The overarching joke of the film’s first half would be how long it takes Shaun to realize that Londoners have become zombies, so similar are the shambling, blank-eyed ghouls to the living people they once were. me and Simon standing at the side after doing our intro, looking at each other like, f—ing hell, they’re really loving it. It got a rapturous reception every night.” Romero was a hugely influential figure in the history of horror. Together with a small group of Pittsburgh-based collaborators, the filmmaker had created the modern zombie genre with his low-budget 1968 directorial debut Night of the Living Dead. Previously, movie zombies had been depicted as the subservient tools of evildoers, an idea based on Haitian folklore. Romero’s zombies were a much more alarming species: revived corpses hell-bent on devouring the flesh of the film’s characters, who seek refuge in a remote farmhouse. Once bitten, the ghouls’ victims themselves transform into the undead and go hunting for people to eat. Though slow-moving, Romero’s zombies can only be stopped when they are shot in the head or receive some other significant brain trauma.

So many relationships grow and expand over the course of Collis' book that readers will find themselves falling in love with Shaun of the Dead– to say nothing of Wright, Pegg, and Frost – all over again, twenty years on. 4/4 stars."— Starburst Pegg had co-written Shaun of the Dead with the film’s director, Edgar Wright. The pair had previously collaborated on the TV sitcom Spaced, which starred Pegg and Jessica Hynes as two impoverished acquaintances who pretend to be a couple so they can rent a flat. Spaced rapidly developed a cult following, but the show left screens after just two seven-episode seasons, partly so that Pegg and Wright could concentrate on developing Shaun of the Dead. A sharply written, thorough, and loving tribute to a modern-day cinema classic."— Kirkus, starred review The intricately rendered and definitive story behind the creation of Edgar Wright’s cinematic rom-zom-com tour-de-gore’s that is Shaun of the Dead, recounted with affection by the one and only Clark Collis."— The Nun director Corin Hardy

George Romero loved Shaun of the Dead

If you’re a fan of Shaun of the Dead or a filmmaker influenced by the films of Wright this is essential reading. It is so good we read it twice before this review."— Screen Anarchy Entertainment Weeklysenior writer Collis’ debut nonfiction work tells the story of how a much-beloved zombie movie made its way to the big screen.