Clark Collis - Youve Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life

Simon Pegg paced around the kitchen of his home in the north London neighbourhood of Crouch End, waiting for the phone to ring. It was the evening of 26 March 2004, and the 34-year-old stand-up comedian and TV actor had just entered a new phase of his career or hoped to have done so portraying the title role in the low-budget horror-comedy film Shaun of the Dead .

Pegg had co-written Shaun of the Dead with the films 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 .

The chances that the movie would get made, let alone be a success, were slim. There was no guarantee that Peggs small-screen fame would translate into box-office takings, and Wrights sole previous movie, the comedy-Western A Fistful of Fingers , had been released for just one week at a single London cinema almost a decade earlier. British horror films were a rarity at the time, and zombie movies had long fallen out of fashion. They went quiet after Michael Jacksons Thriller, says Pegg of Jacksons 1983 hit song and its John Landis-directed video. Everyone had seen zombies body-popping, and it took the wind out of their scary sails. They became something of a joke, and the zombie genre went a bit dormant. It came back to life, if youll pardon the pun, with the Resident Evil games. And thats what inspired us.

The decision to take time out to write Shaun of the Dead was a particular gamble for Wright, who was an in-demand TV director, even though he was still in his 20s. I was getting a lot of offers, he says. I was saying No to all of it because I wanted to concentrate on the script. At one point during the lengthy process of getting the project off the ground, Pegg lent Wright money so his friend could pay his rent. I was completely broke and borrowing money off friends, Wright says. I still owe Simon Pegg 500. He refuses to let me pay it back because he wants to hold the debt over me forever. Absolutely true.

The interest is insane now, notes Pegg. Im sure its more like 900.

Eventually, producer Nira Park secured the films 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 capitals famed Ealing Studios.

In the movie, Pegg plays Shaun, who works as assistant manager at an electronics store, where his younger subordinates treat him with contempt. At night, he and his best friend, a small-time drug dealer named Ed, hang out at a pub called The Winchester Tavern, close to their home in north London. Shauns fondness for the hostelry and his general fecklessness irritate his girlfriend Liz, who dumps Shaun when he forgets to book a restaurant table and then gives her flowers that were clearly intended for his mother, Barbara.

Heartbroken, Shaun embarks on a night of drinking at The Winchester with Ed. When the pair awake, they belatedly realise that they are in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, with the streets of London full of the undead. After making the dubious decision that The Winchester is the best place to wait out the disaster, Shaun and Ed pick up Liz, Barbara, Shauns dreaded stepfather Philip, and a couple of Lizs friends, and head to the pub. There, in traditional zombie-movie style, the group is gruesomely whittled down. At the films conclusion, the zombie plague has been contained and Shaun and Liz are living together in domestic bliss, with the zombified Ed dwelling in their garden shed.

Shaun of the Dead was due to receive a wide release in the UK, but its future across the Atlantic was less certain. Wright and Pegg had written a defiantly British movie whose hero, at least initially, fights the undead with a cricket bat. At that point, we never really thought it would come out in America, Park recalls.

The movies 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 Wuligers assistance, the executive producer eventually got a print to somewhere where George Romero could see it.

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 Id bought with my then-girlfriend, now wife, says Pegg. I was pacing up and down like I was expecting test results.

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. Romeros zombies were a much more alarming species: revived corpses hell-bent on devouring the flesh of the films 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, Romeros zombies can only be stopped when they are shot in the head or receive some other significant brain trauma.