Shaun of the Dead mixes horror and comedy better than any other movie

In 2022, I was lucky enough to be approached by Sight & Sound Magazine to vote in its critic poll to crown the greatest film of all time. One of the first movies I added to my top 10 was Edgar Wright's exceptional horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead. This week, it returns to UK cinemas to mark its 20th anniversary.

Based on a spreadsheet put together by a very dedicated Reddit user, I was one of only two critics to include the film in their top 10. This came as a surprise to me because Shaun of the Dead is an absolutely perfect movie. It's a masterclass in screenwriting, with just about every early line providing a setup that will be paid off in the third act. Even a seemingly insignificant rug is a neat way to hint at the future.

But the true genius of Shaun of the Dead is in the work it does at a very fundamental level. It's a horror-comedy that, unusually for this common sub-genre, is equal parts comedic and horrific. Often, it's scary and funny at the very same time.

This made the movie a tough sell when Wright and co-writer Simon Pegg — who also, of course, played the title role — were trying to sell the project to financiers. At the time, they were best known for their work together on the sitcom Spaced, which also featured Pegg's Shaun co-star Nick Frost.

"We wanted to do something that could change its tone on a dime and make it work," Wright told Dread Central. "There were other companies who read the script and passed because they weren’t sure what the tone was and said it wasn’t all that scary and not that funny. They didn’t get it."

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In fairness to those financiers — who are almost certainly kicking themselves now — that tone was very unique. "A lot of horror-comedies were very broad, even the ones that I love," said Wright in Clark Collis's book You've Got Red on You. "What if we did a horror-comedy that had the deadpan tone of Spaced, even something bordering on a Mike Leigh movie? You're stuck in this surrealistic nightmare, but the performances and the characters are very naturalistic."

With its dad joke of a title and a team on both sides of the camera who were associated with the sitcom world, Shaun of the Dead's very existence is a miracle. But even 20 years on, there's something revolutionary about it. Certainly every attempt at horror-comedy made since has elements of Shaun's gory delights running through its bloodstream.

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Horror and comedy are, of course, perfect bedfellows. They might seem like polar opposite genres but, actually, they have a shared DNA in that they thrive on sudden, instinctive reactions — neither laughter or fear can be controlled. It's no coincidence that, following a mean jump scare, it's common for a cinema audience to break into nervous giggling. These responses are much closer than they seem.

In that interview with Dread Central, Pegg said: "If you look at jokes and or something like ghost stories, they’re structurally the same anyway. You set up the mood and pull it off with a laugh or a scare."

The danger with a horror-comedy hybrid, though, is that the comedy can prove to be too efficient as a tension release valve. Take that jump scare example we just mentioned. The jolt allows the tension to evaporate, replaced with laughter. The film is then tasked with rebuilding that tension from the ground up. In a horror-comedy, the best jokes can minimise the impact of the horror and the toughest horror can make it hard to crack a brilliant joke.

Shaun of the Dead doesn't have this problem. As Pegg put it to Dread Central, he and Wright "didn’t want at any point either of the genres to prevail". He added: "When it’s at its most funny, there’s still horrific things going on in the background."

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This is absolutely true. One clear example is the scene in which Shaun's mother Barbara, played by Penelope Wilton, dies as a result of a zombie bite she had hidden from the rest of the group. Dylan Moran's character aims a shotgun at Barbara, demanding that she must be shot before she transforms into a zombie and endangers the rest of them.

Watch: Barbara transforms in Shaun of the Dead

It's one of the most intense moments of the entire movie, but it's punctuated throughout with visual comedy — the group members engage in a circular Mexican stand-off using improvised weapons from around the bar — and some of the script's sharpest gags ("You're the one who's gone from being a chartered accountant to Charlton Heston").

Despite the comedy, the scene never loses its tension and horror elements. There's always the threat of Barbara's potential zombie reanimation in the background, which does indeed pay off. Mere moments later, Moran's character is torn apart in a sequence that is pure horror, but also maintains an element of grotesque slapstick. It's an impossible balancing act, but one that Wright is uniquely capable of managing.

Read more: Edgar Wright urges Hollywood franchise to 'take a breather' to avoid burnout (BANG Showbiz)

There have been great horror-comedy films since, but none have mingled the genres as well as Shaun. Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland duology is great fun and the British side of things got some enjoyable chaos in Cockneys vs. Zombies, but both of those movies skew comedic rather than horrifying. Leaning into the laughs means sacrificing the scares.

Shaun of the Dead's genius is in its understanding that horror and comedy can exist together without either having to diminish the impact of the other. 20 years on, Wright and Pegg's homage to the maestro George Romero packs every bit as much of a punch as it did back in 2004. That's why I had no trouble voting for it as one of the 10 best films ever made.

Of course, the Pegg/Wright scripting team would return for two more films in what became known as the Cornetto Trilogy. While both Hot Fuzz and The World's End are brilliant movies — and the former might even be funnier than Shaun — their genre homages lack the intricacy of what the team did with horror in their first feature outing together. This is a movie that deserves to be reanimated over and over again.

Shaun of the Dead returns to UK cinemas on 27 September.