| Title | The golden age of horror: Shaun of the Dead (2004) |
| Author | Chris Hornbostel and Rob Morton |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | October 12, 2014 |
Rob: Maybe everyone's already dead. The checkout clerks at the supermarket with their pale complexions and vacant stares. The commuters at the bus stop staring drearily into their mobile phones. The shuffling hipsters, car washers, football kids, and bums..
Read the full articleOh man but I love this film. I remember dragging along my friend from Ireland who was pleasantly surprised this was an English movie. But you guys called it, the secret weapon of this movie is the way it plays off the zombie threat as fairly innocuous and even benign until suddenly it isn't. Ok wait, its second secret weapon is that great cast - this was my introduction to Wright, Frost and Pegg and those guys just blew me away. Oh wait, the third secret weapon was ... Oh bollocks.
I love Shaun of the Dead, so don't take what I'm about to write as a knock on this film. But I do find it a bit arbitrary that you go out of your way (in the introduction to this year's marathon) to dismiss Scream, for all its ironic tendencies, while then including (and lauding over) a viewing of Shaun of the Dead. Scream delivers all the inside jokes and nods to the genre that SotD does, except it attempts (and succeeds) in making itself an actual scary, horror film too (and a classic one at that).
Anyway, I'd be curious to know how you came to the distinction between the two. Thanks
I never found Scream to be all that scary, but the bigger division is that Scream's is about as good as you got in the 90's. Shaun of the Dead is a film that feels more energetic and feels more than just about horror when it pokes fun. Plus, Shaun sits as a key component in the rise of zombie everything in the last 10 years. Scream didn't really inspire the return of the teenage slasher movie.
I guess it comes down to this. You can celebrate Bucky Dent when he just a fun and interesting story on a winning team. If Bucky's the best player on your squad, he's not much worth discussing.
Huh? I was always under the impression that Scream revitalized the slasher subgenre in the 90s, after years of diminishing returns and movies that didn't have any ideas other than "let's kill even more people in more improbable ways." Plus, it DID revive interest in horror franchises. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, and Final Destination came shortly after, and of course Scary Movie took its biggest shots at Scream. The Halloween franchise was revived after a 10-year absence, and Friday the 13th came back a few years later (the last Jason movie was in 1993). Hell, even the Chucky movies came back. And my memory might not be completely reliable, but I seem to remember an uptick in the ubiquity of old slasher movies on TV post-1996. For a long time, there was always some cable channel that would run all the Friday the 13th movies every time the date came up, and Halloween filled TV up with old forgotten horror franchises, as channels tried to see whether Painkiller would draw more eyes than Children of the Corn. The horror explosion of the 00s owes quite a bit to Scream for laying the groundwork.
Sorry. I meant "return of teenage slasher movies that are worth spending time seeing, and not Chucky, Friday the 13th, Children of the Corn, Halloween, and Urban Legend franchises." If Scream inspired anything much artistically, it was more Scream movies. More than that, it inspired a whole bunch of awful and vacuous garbage. I mean, if those movies get it done for you, don't let my opinion clear you off them. I saw too many of them, and felt like it was utter dreck and nothing worth revisiting.
I couldn't find many folks around here interested in those franchises, either. When I proposed this back in August, I seemed to find pretty general agreement amongst the regular Qt3 posters on the forum that the 1990s were a horror movie desert, redeemed in spots here and there by something like Cemetery Man.
Have a nice day!
One of the most memorable parts of Shaun of the Dead that only becomes apparent after watching it a few times is how they reveal the plot of the movie in the very beginning. This scene right here https://www.youtube.com/watch?... which other users have also pointed out. That and meeting the Dopplegangers were two scenes that made me realise just how clever this movie was.
Here's a Froemmer's fact for you: another Children of the Corn movie was made in 2009, starring Sark from Alias and Lt Dualla from the BSG remakle. Outside of one completely nonsensical sequence, it's the most faithful. version of King's story ever. It's a non-terrible version of Children of the Corn, in fact (one of only two movies to have that in the title and be non-terrible, the other being the original).
I like "Shaun of the Dead" as much as the next guy, but it's no horror film. Yeah, there's zombies and gore, but at no point is the movie genuinely scary. It's a strange sort of comedy, but I don't think it deserves a spot on the 'golden age of horror' list.
You're going to love it when we get to Berberian Sound Studio, then!
Shaun is way more funny than scary, yes. In fact, the humor heads off the scary at the pass at every opportunity. It's an unusual film in that respect, so decidedly rooted in one genre (horror) but ultimately being more of another (comedy). Army of Darkness is similar example (and is also interesting because the entire series shifted from a significant horror lean in the first to a significant comedic lean in the third). Shaun 100% deserves to be on the list. It's in-arguably a horror comedy even if the comedy and character focus keeps us from ever being scared. Shaun is a horror-comedy in ways that Scary Movie is not. And that's to say nothing of the fact that scary is relative anyway.
Really, "is/is nothorror" tends to be such a banal discussion. People were arguing the same thing about Trollhunter and that was just as wrong headed.
I won't vouch for the artistic quality of the post-Scream slasher craze, but I will say that Jason X, Halloween: H20, and Bride of Chucky all do things that you just plain don't expect slashers to do- I won't call any of them good (I'm not sure any slasher movies outside of Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be considered "good"), but they're audacious enough that it sort of ceases to matter. And they're miles better than the last sputterings of those respective franchises in the late 80s/early 90s, and each tries to take an inherently limited subgenre in new directions, and I think a lot of that is down to Scream's influence.
But I'm wondering how "heralded the return of the slasher movie" became "heralded the return of the high-quality, artistically significant slasher movie" in your original comment. Surely you're not claiming that the "zombie everything" Shaun of the Dead helped bring back is anything more than a handful of good films in a much larger pile of uninspired dreck? Your comment seemed to say "Shaun of the Dead came along, and then a bunch of other zombie movies came along. Scream came along, and hardly anyone made a slasher movie afterwards." This struck me as patently wrong, so I listed a few movies obviously inspired by Scream. I don't know how this makes me a person who loves 90s slasher movies, as opposed to a person who was 12 on Halloween at one time, which happened to be in the 90s.
Berberian Sound Studio is totally a horror movie!!! Haaha, and, for that matter, so is Shaun of the Dead. I think mentioning it in the same breathe as Army of Darkness is very smart. Most of Raimi's horror movies can be considered in the same vein, even Drag me to Hell.
But what really got me thinking was the recent Hell Baby. Shaun is way smarter, a better movie, and more of a convential horror flick than Hell Baby, but Hell Baby does something very similiar to Shaun by using over the top gore, and disgusting monster makeup. It's (Hell Baby) way more of a spoof, and closer to the scary movie style, but there are plenty of things it does really well.
Also want to echo Rob's sentiment toward The World's End. Great movie, and a fitting capper to the whole "trilogy."
The teaser photo you picked is such a wonderful shot in that movie. The satisfaction of the bartenders in the background is fantastic.
I disliked Shaun of the Dead, not because it wasn't scary (I know it wasn't meant to be) but because it wasn't funny.
Yep, Rami is sort of the Zen guru of it. I liked Drag Me to Hell, for whatever little that matters. Not great, but it had some solid funny bits. I have not seen Hell Baby yet, I need to.
I totally agree, Len. That's all Rob Morton. He snagged that shot and it made me laugh just looking at it and new it was perfect.
