Edgar Wright’s issues with the 21st century zombie movie: “I didn’t like that”
If you want to spark chaos at a horror convention, one divisive topic is sure to ignite the crowd. Just assemble a bunch of hardcore gore fans and pose this simple, seemingly innocent question: should zombies be fast or slow? This philosophical divide has long split fans of cinema’s beloved brain-eating undead—and Edgar Wright definitely knows where he stands. His purist views meant he had serious reservations about two of the early 2000s’ most popular zombie films.
Between 2002 and 2004, three films were released that catapulted the humble zombie right back to the top of the horror movie power rankings. First up was Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, which hit UK cinemas in 2002. After that came Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004, followed by Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead a few months later. Over this 18-month period, the undead captured the imaginations of the public in a way they hadn’t since George Romero’s heyday in the 1970s and ’80s. There was just one issue for English director Wright, though – he didn’t think 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead were truly zombie movies at all.
During an interview with Film Freak Central, Wright was asked if he liked Snyder’s version of Romero’s horror classic, and he began his answer by admitting, “Listen, the new film is good. It’s well-directed, isn’t it? And it has a lot of smart stuff – the celebrity stuff in there is really funny; a couple of really nice lines.”
Once he’d said a few nice things, though, he articulated his beef with both Snyder’s film and Boyle’s Cillian Murphy-starring pandemic thriller: their zombies are just too fast on their feet. “Fast zombies, man,” lamented Wright. “They’re not zombies anymore if they’re fast, are they?”
To Wright, neither Snyder nor Boyle’s efforts were true horror movies. He mused, “The new Dawn of the Dead, though, it’s really not a remake, is it? It’s more like a good action movie than a zombie movie.” Wright also had a genuine problem with Boyle, who purposely distanced himself and his film from the horror genre in interviews leading up to its release.
A disappointed Wright noted: “My beef with 28 Days Later, though, is that Danny Boyle really tried to take the air out of the genre. He said he didn’t like them – like he didn’t respect them or something – and insisted on calling his film a ‘thriller’ or something like that. I didn’t like that.”
When Wright and star Simon Pegg began to put Shaun of the Dead together, they stuck to their purist inclinations and made their zombies slow and shuffling. They had initially bonded because of their shared love of Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, so even though they knew Shaun was going to be a comedy, they specifically avoided parodying zombie movies. Instead, they wanted to spoof rom-coms but within the context of a true zombie film. In a 2017 Entertainment Weekly oral history, Pegg revealed, “Richard Curtis is a lovely man. But we pitched it as ‘Richard Curtis shot through the head.'”
It was only in the middle of their writing process that Wright and Pegg found out Boyle was making 28 Days Later, which they assumed would take the wind out of Shaun’s sails. Wright chuckled, “I vividly remember Simon calling me and saying, ‘Hey, you know Danny Boyle’s doing a zombie film.’ I was like, ‘Oh, we’re fucked!'”
