Best zombie build-up ever

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2005)

Yes, we all know about how terrific, original, creative, funny, etc. this movie is, but there is one aspect of "Shaun of the Dead" that tends to be overlooked. One thing that - to my knowledge - no zombie movie has ever pulled off as well as Shaun, maybe because of the expectations an audience has of a zombie comedy as opposed to a flat-out zombie movie, and that is the zombie build-up. Think about it: Night of the Living Dead had a zombie show up to motivate the plot within the first five minutes; Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead both started "in medias zombie," and even if the zombies weren't actually on screen for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, they were the driving force behind the plot. I liked 28 Days Later (which was, in form and execution, a zombie movie with slightly modified monsters), but I was a little disappointed that they skipped over the 28 days of chaos after the Rage virus emerged. Let's face it, nobody deals with the day-to-day mechanics of a zombie invasion. Until now.
By using the romantic-comedy element of the movie, the filmmakers were able to move the movie from the start without using zombies; you have twenty minutes of relationship comedy with weird elements in the background, and you get to watch as the world slowly collapses into zombified chaos. Now that's brilliant. The characters aren't "zombie movie" characters, they're romantic comedy characters who suddenly have to fight the undead; again, that's brilliant. Let's face it, we don't live our lives like a zombie movie. If there are lots of police sirens going off, or people running down the street in a panic we figure there's lots of crime and people are morons. That's what makes zombie movies so effective; it's not like these are aliens conquering the earth. Zombies are just like us. "Shaun of the Dead" plays zombies for laughs, but at the end - as in any good zombie movie - whatever we're laughing at is really, truly terrifying.