Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
How did a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub become a beloved global pop culture phenomenon?
You’ve Got Red on You details the previously untold story of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, the hilarious, terrifying horror-comedy whose fan base continues to grow and grow. After speaking with dozens of people involved in the creation of the film, author Clark Collis reveals how a group of friends overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to make a movie that would take bites out of both the UK and the US box office before ascending to the status of bona fide comedy classic.
Featuring in-depth interviews with director Edgar Wright, producer Nira Park, and cast members Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Bill Nighy, Lucy Davis, and Coldplay singer Chris Martin, the book also boasts a treasure trove of storyboards, rare behind-the-scenes photos, and commentary from famous fans of the movie, including filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth, Walking Dead executive producer Greg Nicotero, and World War Z author Max Brooks.
As Pegg’s zombie-fighting hero Shaun would say, “How’s that for a slice of fried gold?”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948221191 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | 1984 Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/18/2022 |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Sales rank: | 144,776 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
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 film’s 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 Pegg’s small-screen fame would translate into box-office takings, and Wright’s 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 Jackson’s ‘Thriller’,” says Pegg of Jackson’s 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 you’ll pardon the pun, with the Resident Evil games. And that’s 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. “I’m sure it’s more like £900.”
Eventually, producer Nira Park secured the film’s 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 capital’s 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. Shaun’s 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, Shaun’s dreaded stepfather Philip, and a couple of Liz’s friends, and head to the pub. There, in traditional zombie-movie style, the group is gruesomely whittled down. At the film’s 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 movie’s 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 Wuliger’s 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 I’d 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. Romero’s zombies were a much more alarming species: revived corpses hell-bent on devouring the flesh of the film’s 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, Romero’s zombies can only be stopped when they are shot in the head or receive some other significant brain trauma.
Night of the Living Dead was a box-office hit, and Romero returned to the zombie genre with 1979’s Dawn of the Dead, in which a quartet of survivors – a TV producer, a helicopter pilot, and two SWAT team members – hide away from the apocalypse in a mall. Six years later, the director revisited his undead universe again with Day of the Dead, about a group of scientists and soldiers attempting to find a solution to the zombie problem in an underground silo.
Pegg and Wright were huge fans of Romero’s zombie trilogy. For the most part, the pair had diligently followed the undead ‘rules’ laid down in the filmmaker’s saga when constructing their own tale. While Danny Boyle’s 2002 horror movie 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake – which was released in the UK shortly before Shaun of the Dead – depicted fast-moving ghouls, Pegg and Wright’s zombies were resolutely slow of pace. “Edgar said that there was a certain fitness level you needed to be a running zombie,” says Wright’s friend, Cabin Fever and Hostel director Eli Roth. “With a slow-moving zombie, you can have old people, you can have fat people, you can have little old ladies. It’s a really astute point. The casting opportunities are much wider.”
The pair regarded Shaun of the Dead not as a parody of Romero’s films but as a love letter to them, with the humour coming from the collision of this apocalyptic scenario with humdrum London life. “I have, for many years, reiterated the fact that every zombie film, they’ve all stolen from George Romero,” says Pegg. “The cannibalistic viral zombie was entirely his idea, which was so brilliant and scary, and the most contemporary classic monster. They stand alongside vampires and werewolves, but those things have been around for hundreds of years. George came up with this in 1968.”
Romero was a famously avuncular character whose benign disposition stood in direct contrast to the gory mayhem of his movies. Still, it was by no means certain that he would warm to a comedic retooling of his vision, even one intended as a valentine to the genre he had created. Night of the Living Dead’s distributor had neglected to add a copyright symbol to the film’s title card after the movie’s name was changed (from Night of the Flesh Eaters) at the last minute before its premiere. As a result, Romero and his collaborators lost out on a fortune. It was easy to imagine the director regarding Shaun of the Dead less as a valentine than as a dagger through the heart. Park, for one, was worried that Romero might come down against Shaun. “Do we definitely think this is the right thing to be doing?” she wrote in an e-mail to Wilson ahead of the Florida screening. “Might Romero hate it?
There was also the possibility that Romero might be irritated by the manner in which he’d watched the film. The director was accompanied at the Island Cinema by a security guard hired by Universal Pictures (which held the film’s American distribution rights) out of concern that the auteur might be tempted to bootleg the film. “I remember thinking, well, George Romero’s not going to pirate it,” says Wright. “Even if he did, he’s the one person who’d be entitled to some share of the profits!”
There was another reason why a thumbs-up from Romero was so important to Pegg. Shaun of the Dead was a very personal movie for its co-writer and star, one that mined his own life to an extraordinary extent. The troubled relationship between Shaun and his stepfather Philip echoed real-life issues that Pegg had had as a child with his own stepfather. The pub in the film was directly inspired by an actual London hostelry named The Shepherds, which Pegg had made a home away from home. Most importantly, Shaun and Ed’s friendship was heavily based on the bond between Pegg and his best mate Nick Frost, who played Ed in the film. Together with Wright, Pegg had written the part of Ed specifically for his friend, despite Frost having little acting experience. For Romero to give Shaun of the Dead a thumbs-down would be a rejection not only of Pegg’s film, but also, in some ways, of his life.
So Pegg waited and paced, and waited and paced. And then, at last, the phone rang.
Table of Contents
PrologueChapter 1: Origins of the Dead
Chapter 2: Best Friends of the Dead
Chapter 3: Script of the Dead
Chapter 4: Money of the Dead
Chapter 5: Cast and Crew (and Zombies) of the Dead
Chapter 6: Shoot of the Dead
Chapter 7: Pub of the Dead
Chapter 8: Return of the Shoot of the Dead
Chapter 9: Release of the Dead
Chapter 10: Release of the Dead 2
Chapter 11: Cornettos of the Dead
Epilogue
