You'll Laugh, You'll Scream: Shaun of the Dead (Dir Edgar Wright, 1h38m, 2004)
The zombie has long been a creature of metaphor; one only has to look at the work of their most infamous proponent, George A Romero, to see them as everything from stand-in for racism, to consumerism, to the horrors of war and even the advent of mobile telephones and the always-on nature of our society. Doubtless, was Romero here to continue making his fine homages to the shambling undead, AI, celebrity culture, and our ever-more zombified political classes would make for fine fodder, the latter taken up, albeit via aliens, by the short-lived political satire BrainDead. Away from the godfather of the zombie, 28 Years Later (2025), the latest in Danny Boyle's series, sees the undead as confrontation of masculinity, of religion and the British psyche, whilst the long-lived Walking Dead series, and the popular Last of Us games and HBO series leans into a decidedly American sense of personal survival against the unified hordes of the ...
