“It’s more disturbing than many horror movies”: the horror comedy that painted us as the zombies of capitalism

When the 9/11 attacks gave the public a glimpse of what a televised apocalypse would be like, the script of horror cinema changed. And with it, zombie movies were resurrected. If Night of the Living Dead (1968), by George A. Romero, channeled the racial tensions and distrust in institutions of late-1960s America, films like 28 days later (2002) or Dawn of the Dead (2004) drew on the documentary aesthetics of modern horrors to speak of the fragility of our comfort and the speed at which an apparently stable social order could crumble. In that context, the British comedy Zombies Partyreleased in April 2004 in the United Kingdom and internationally in the autumn of that same year, became one of the key titles of the new wave of the subgenre by proposing another twist: what if comfort and the dominant social order are already, at their core, deeply zombified?

A satire with the living dead about the coming of age and the frustration of generational expectations, Zombies Party turns 20 years old with several re-releases around the world (a special screening will take place in Madrid on Saturday 14 September, at the Paz cinemas) and remains the most celebrated work of its director, Edgar Wright, and its leading duo, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The trio had previously coincided in the series Spaced (1999), another comedy about young adults struggling between job insecurity and difficulties in accessing a rental. And his film debut, born precisely from an episode where the protagonist had hallucinations due to a zombie video gameshared notable thematic features that went beyond its plot excuse.

With the original title of Shaun Of The Deadjoke at the expense of Dawn Of The Dead (George A. Romero’s 1978 film that in Spain was simply called Zombiealthough the remake did have a title Dawn of the Dead), the comedy follows the fruitless efforts of a thirty-something, Shaun, to adapt to adult life. He has a job he hates, with no career advancement on the horizon, and a relationship with his girlfriend mired in boredom, based on going to the same bar every night to meet up with his best friend, the only one he seems to enjoy. Between the sleepy passengers on the bus he takes to work, the drunks on the streets and the customers wandering the aisles of the supermarket with their gazes lost, the first moments of the zombie epidemic go practically unnoticed by the protagonist, unable to distinguish certain situations from the normal functioning of society. Shaun’s decision to put his life in order and grow up, after his girlfriend threatens to leave him, coincides with this outbreak: the fact that the characters are forced to constantly develop plans and strategies to survive among the zombies, sometimes blending in with them, takes on, from this perspective, a disturbing meaning.

“One of the reasons why Zombies Party “What makes it so popular is that, although it is a comedy, it is not a parody. It is scarier and more disturbing than many strictly horror films,” reflects, asked by ICON, the writer Clark Collis, a journalist from Entertainment Weekly and author of the book You’ve Got Red On You: How ‘Shaun of the Dead’ Was Brought To Life (2021, unpublished in Spain), dedicated to Edgar Wright’s film.

Collis highlights the great knowledge and love for the genre of Wright and Simon Pegg, who in addition to being an actor is also a co-writer. In addition to exploring the metaphors (often also acidic and comical) of George A. Romero himself, who in Zombie depicted a group of survivors confined in a shopping mall, the film also contains multiple references to Italian horror cinema; for example, a restaurant is named Fulci’s – in homage to Lucio Fulci, director of the classic New York under the terror of zombies (1979)– and features music from Goblin, the progressive rock group that provided the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s masterpieces. Romero was amused: after calling Wright to congratulate him, he invited the director and actor to make a cameo as zombies in his next film, The land of the living dead (2005).

Here, surviving

The absurd Spanish title (although formulated in English) of Zombies Party –also officially distributed with the addition A night… of death– has been the subject of much mockery over the years by Edgar Wright, who has stated that he has a poster of the Spanish version hanging in his house.

The joke went further when in his next film, Fatal weapon (2007, another licentious title change from the English original, Hot Fuzz), introduced a copy of the Spanish DVD into a scene. That film was the second part of what would end up being called the Cornetto Trilogy, with a different ice cream flavour appearing in each one linked to a subgenre: blood red for Zombies Partypolice blue for Fatal weapon and alien green for the delivery that completed the triptych, Welcome to the end of the world (2013).

They all share thematic elements and generational anxieties, such as the fear of growing up and the well-founded reasons for not wanting to integrate into the status quoalthough time has ended up giving the trilogy a valuable character of social x-ray immediately prior to Brexit. Reactionary nostalgia, extreme conservatism, xenophobia, nationalism, supremacism or gentrification are issues that appear unequivocally in its narrative, with special intensity in the second and third installments. “I think the secret sauce of the Cornetto Trilogy is that each film explores serious themes, whether it be family and urban life in Zombies Partyor addiction and conformist pressures in Welcome to the end of the world. But you never think of them as movies about important issues, because they are also very funny.”

About Zombies Partythe academics Kathryn A. Cady and Thomas Oates They came to define it as a film that “imagines a generation of heteronormative families as a result of the zombie invasion”, within its equivalence between the zombie and the capitalist routine culture. In addition to the embodiment of those almost mechanical procedures of everyday life that Wright relates through chained close-ups, like parts of a large gear, in the film there are a series of recurring jokes about these routines, such as the default response “Surviving” that Shaun gives to a friend every time he meets her in the film and asks her how she is, at different times.

The British journalist David Jenkins wrote in 2017 that the core of the Cornetto Trilogy was “the fear of cultural alienation,” with Fatal weapon as the “ultimate anti-Brexit film”. “You would never necessarily imagine Wright as a political filmmaker. His characters are unabashed cinematic constructs, whose traits draw more from big-screen tradition than reality. (…) [Pero habla de que] Rejecting progress can be dangerous, as can clinging to a false sense of nostalgia for a time that never was or a place that never existed. In the end, Wright just wants us to drive safely,” he wrote, with a coda dedicated to his then last film, Baby Driver (2017), another story with nostalgia (and the panic of abandoning a toxic, but accustomed, way of life) at its center.

Far from the days of Cornetto, Wright remains established as a director of major studios, despite the commercial failure of his first American foray, the vindicated Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), and a disagreement with Marvel, which fired him from Ant-Man (2015) due to creative differences. Simon Pegg, for his part, has returned to co-star in some comedies with his colleague Nick Frost, without the same success, and has established himself as a luxury supporting actor in franchises such as Mission impossible (where it appears from the third installment, from 2006) or Star Trek (since 2009). Although both reprised their characters from Zombies Party to offer health recommendations and encourage confinement against the coronavirus in 2020, Pegg has flatly rejected the possibility of a sequel to his most popular film. an interview in The Guardian in 2023the actor seemed to have taken the lessons on maturity of his trilogy to the extreme, stating that he preferred to see Succession before anything sci-fi, that he had left behind a lot of what people thought of him and that he was no longer “a geek.” “Every time I do an Instagram live or something like that, someone comes up to me and says, ‘I need to Zombies Party 2 in my life’. No, you need the fucking Zombies Party 2 in your life. It’s the last thing you need. It’s over. Move on,” he declared. A grown man ready for a new life, just as Shaun aspired.