YMMV / Shaun of the Dead

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is David really a selfish jerk, or is he just desperate to survive just like everyone else in the film? The film seems to portray both as true. Also, was his apology to Shaun in a deleted scene genuine, or was he only apologizing because Dianne pressured him to?
  • Is Pete just a complete asshole who's friendly with Shaun, or does he only act like an asshole to Ed? Is his mocking Shaun over his breakup with Liz showing his true colors or just the shitty day coupled with being furious with Ed influencing him? Or is his outburst the result of years of frustration finally boiling over as his friend Shaun, someone he genuinely cares about, fails to take the breakup of his relationship as the wake-up call he's needed for a long time? How much of any of it is just him suffering from The Virus after being bitten by a zombie, anyway?
  • Is Liz aware of David's love for her? And if so, was she leading him along intentionally, or was she trying to ignore him?
    • Judging from the fact that Dianne could see that her own boyfriend clearly still held a torch for Liz, Liz was probably well aware, but it is indicated that Liz was much closer to Dianne than David, seeing as David seemed to be The Eeyore even before the Z-Words started appearing.
  • Did David refuse to help Shaun fight the zombie in the garden because he was a coward? Or did he see an opportunity to kill off Shaun and refused to intervene?
    • It's clear that David harbours great envy towards Shaun for being with Liz because he had strong feelings for her since they were in college together. During the outbreak, David is a bit intrusive with Liz and Shaun's relationship, as he criticizes Shaun at every opportunity in order to make Liz see Shaun's shortcomings.
    • In the garden, David doesn't help when Shaun is tackled by a zombie and excuses himself by saying he "Didn't wanna' cramp your style". When Shaun is tackled, David looks more agitated than scared and then looks more upset about Shaun surviving the attack than relieved. David didn't plan the attack, it was just a golden opportunity to get rid of Shaun without pulling the trigger. He just didn't expect Liz to be brave enough or, at least, care enough to save him.
    • His line "Didn't wanna cramp your style" has two different meanings; did David expect Shaun to survive? Or did David enjoy the view of Shaun being so close to death?
    • David is characterised as someone who only talks tough behind a person's back, so it's not hard to assume that he wants Shaun "out of the picture" so he can supplant him as Liz's boyfriend. When Barbara succumbs to the infection, David is the first to draw the gun on her and he then forces Shaun to do it instead when his mum reanimates. When Shaun punches David for his callousness, David tries to shoot him but fails. When he tried to shoot Shaun; this was done after Shaun and Dianne had outed his feelings for Liz and after the latter had rejected him by angrily calling him "a twat". Considering these factors, the attempted murder may have been motivated more by David's heartbreak and boiled over envy.
    • It's also telling that he made the unwise decision of unlocking the front doors after seeing everyone's shocked reaction to his murder attempt, he's either deeply ashamed of his own actions or he's having a mental breakdown over his broken heart and he's trying to salvage what little is left of his relationship with Liz and Dianne by convincing them to join him in his escape.
• Awesome Music: Watch the movie and see how long you can go without skipping right to the "Don't Stop Me Now" scene.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The zombies attacking David and dragging him to his gruesome demise. While he was already an unlikable jerk prior, after he callously insulted Shaun's deceased mother, willingly tried to murder Shaun and leave the others for dead, many audience members were reportedly left cheering at his demise.
  • Shaun punching David after he tells him that he did the right thing killing his own mom also counts.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Shaun's plan to rescue his mother and Liz. Every scenario shows him and Ed apologetically killing zombie Phil, with each apology getting progressively less sincere every time Shaun rethinks the plan.
  • This one actually crosses it a few times. Shaun and his stepfather Phil make their peace right before the latter passes on, all the while in an overcrowded car that Ed is taking on a joyride. When Shaun tries breaking the bad news to his mum, she remarks that Phil's alive. Shaun turns and sees Phil has already zombified. When everyone scrambles out of the car and locks Phil in (accidentally turning on the radio full blast in the commotion), Shaun tells his mother that there's nothing left of the man she once loved. Zombie Phil switches off the radio seemingly in response to that, having shown disdain to loud music earlier when he was still alive and Shaun just flatly says "Let's go".
  • In the DVD extras it's revealed that Dianne, having already seen her boyfriend torn into a number of pieces, spent several days hiding in a tree for fear of being attacked by more zombies and survived by eating parts of David's severed leg...which turns out to have been completely unnecessary, since all the zombies in the area had already been wiped out by the army.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Ed shows some mild symptoms of autism, showing severe ADD and being unable to look people directly in the eyes when being spoken to directly.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Dianne is pretty popular for being one of the more competent characters (albeit still having some humorous blunders) her Pretend We're Dead strategy and being a nice person in general. Viewers worrying about her fate after she runs out of the pub are usually glad to to know that, according to the DVD extras, she survives the outbreak.
  • Jeremy Thompson appearing as himself got him a lot of recognition in the aftermath of the movie. In the context of the movie itself he is fairly likable for being a collected, useful media figure throughout the crisis.
  • Phillip is well-appreciated for the sense of pathos he brings and having a bit of The Comically Serious in him.
  • For a character who's seemingly meant to come across as a Jerkass, Pete has plenty of fans who take his side and find him to be a decent enough character; especially since all his harsher moments are reactions to Ed and Shaun being annoying/downright infuriating when Pete's already had a horrible day and has now been violently woken up in the middle of the night.
• Faux Symbolism: There's some level of social observation, and the apparent suggestion that in 21st century Britain many people live life in an unthinking, zombie-like state — the introductory footage of everyday life at the film's beginning, Shaun and Ed's first few zombie encounters - in which they fail to notice anything unusual going on, and the ending, where society becomes completely desensitized to violence, and Ed lives on, undead and tied up in the shed. Creepy. The fact that the first we see of Shaun after the opening credits is him shuffling around and yawning/moaning like a zombie sort of stresses the point.
  • Of course, George A. Romero made that point three decades earlier with Dawn of the Dead (1978).
• First Installment Wins: Easily the most well-known and beloved of the "Cornetto" trilogy, even managing to avoid the "Once Original, Now Common" effect long after pop culture grew so oversaturated with zombies that parodies and deconstructions practically became their own genre.
• Genius Bonus: Pete admits he once had a good time with Ed when they spent the night playing Tekken 2 together. He then crushes the sentiment by saying that was five years ago and he's sick of him now. A viewer familiar with video games would recognize that game was years old at that point (released eight years before the film's "present day") and realize the point Pete was about to make.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "I'm not laughing." Neither are we, Shaun. Borders on a Tear Jerker moment itself.
  • Shaun's mother does a very convincing zombie impression, even if she didn't mean to. Then you find out that she'd been bitten just moments before.
    • Then, as they are sneaking through the horde, she makes a highly unconvincing high pitched "ooo" noise as her "groan" when she turns, she makes the same noise.
  • Philip's dying request to Shaun was for him to take care of Barbara. He failed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • There's a zombie on your lawn!
    • Oh, and the Working Title for that game was Lawn of the Dead.
  • The scene where Shaun and the group end up running into their near-identical doppelgängers in Yvonne's group (who are all played by more famous actors than many of the people in the main cast) includes Martin Freeman as Shaun's doppleganger, Declan. Martin Freeman is part of the main cast of The World's End, the final movie in the Thematic Series that Shaun of the Dead started. He also played a Met Police Sergeant in Hot Fuzz.
    • Especially ironic, considering the whole joke behind that scene was the implication that Yvonne was the protagonist of a different zombie movie with a higher budget, and that the guys behind Shaun of the Dead could only afford a cameo from the more famous actors. By this point, Wright and Pegg's movies have become popular enough that they actually can afford the A-listers in the big roles and make The World's End a big-scale science fiction epic.
  • At the end of the movie, there is a brief shot of some talk show featuring a woman who insists of staying with her husband, who is now a zombie. A couple of years later...
  • Shaun does an impression of Bub from Day of the Dead when everyone takes zombie acting lessons. During his and Edgar Wright's cameo in Land of the Dead, it turns out Simon Pegg bears a quite uncanny resemblance to Howard Sherman as Bub when he's in zombie makeup.
  • Shaun and his group run into doppelgangers that mirror them. Enter 2019, where in Zombieland: Double Tap, Tallahassee and Columbus also run into two survivors that share similarities with them.
  • Peter Serafinowicz plays a character who turns into a zombie, then he would voice Lumpy Space Prince (the Gender Flip version of Lumpy Space Princess, who has also became a zombie in From Bad To Worse) in an episode of Adventure Time, The Prince Who Wanted Everything.
  • Simon Pegg and Peter Serafinowicz both appeared as flatmates in this film and are also part of Star Wars, Peter was the voice of Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, while Simon would cameo in The Force Awakens.
• He Really Can Act: Simon Pegg needs an award for that scene in the Winchester where Shaun laments his failure to save anyone. That or Shaun’s complete despair from Barbara dying to turning into a zombie.
• Ho Yay: It's hard not to see this between Shaun and Ed.
  David:Well, I wasn’t the one who was blowing our cover by having a tift with my boyfriend.
  Shaun:He’s not my boyfriend.
  Ed: [scoots past Davis, handing a drink over to Shaun] Might be a bit warm, the cooler’s off.
  Shaun: Thanks, babe.
• Mandela Effect:
  • While Shaun is attempting to convince his mom and Philip to join him and Ed at the Winchester, they almost begin arguing which is stopped by the sound of the tea kettle whistling. However, some viewers distinctly remember Shaun saying, "Mum, look", followed by a confused reaction shot of Philip and then an actual shot of said tea kettle whistling, rather than just hearing it.
  • Likewise, when Shaun snaps after David refuses to stop pointing the rifle at the recently-deceased Barbara, in one single shot, he grabs a bottle, smashes it on a table and holds it to David's neck, though some remember there being a quick close-up shot of the bottle being smashed on the table.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Yeah boyyy!
  • "Perfec"
  • And of course, "how's that for a slice of fried gold?"
  • "Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over," often used in response to real-world unpleasantries that one wishes to avoid dealing with.
  • References to "Zombie Phillip" picked up towards the end of 2019 when this image of Prince Phillip leaving hospital◊ became public.
• Moral Event Horizon: David could be seen throughout the film as pompous and insensitive but at times agreeable. However, for most viewers (including the first test audiences), the moment he points the rifle at Shaun and pulls the trigger as retaliation for punching him (thankfully the rifle was empty) is when he loses all sympathy and deserves whatever he gets.
• Narm: After the very sad scene where Shaun kills his reanimated mother, he slugs David across the face when the latter makes an off-colour comment. The comically stock sound effect used clashes with the tension of the rest of the scene and likely was not intended to be funny. Might be Narm Charm anyways for those who felt David really had that coming and the scene before and after nevertheless being greatly tense.
• Nausea Fuel: David getting gruesomely disemboweled and dismembered by the zombies. He may have been quite a Jerkass who had it coming to him, but it doesn't stop the scene from being rather repulsive to look at.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • For the Americans in the audience, Martin Freeman's split-second cameo as Yvonne's boyfriend is this. He was well-known in Britain at the time for his role in The Office (UK), but he wouldn't get major recognition in the States until he was cast as John Watson and Bilbo Baggins several years later.
  • Shaun's mother is played by Penelope Wilton, who later would become very well known as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister^note Yes, we know who you are and Lady Isobel Crawley.
    • Speaking of Doctor Who, Cousin Tom (the last person in Yvonne's group, played by Matt Lucas) is none other than Nardole!
  • Dianne is played by Lucy Davis, who would go on to play the role of Aunt Hilda in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina as well as the role of Etta Candy.
  • Noel is played by Rafe Spall, who would go on to gain steady supporting work in Hollywood projects such as Prometheus, The BFG, The Big Short, Life of Pi, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and become part of Wright's Production Posse by playing Andy Cartwright in Hot Fuzz and appearing in Don't and The World's End.
• Signature Scene:
  • Shaun walking to the convenience store, completely oblivious to the zombie outbreak.
  • Shaun and Ed fending off two zombies by throwing vinyl records at them... but only the ones they're willing to break.
  • When the zombie horde breaks into the Winchester just as Don't Stop Me Now plays on the jukebox, complete with Shaun, Ed and Liz beating the pub's zombified owner with billiard cues in sync with the music.
• The Woobie:
  • Though she doesn't let it get to her until an emotional outburst at the Winchester, Dianne is Liz's best friend, a failed actress and her boyfriend is only dating her because he's actually in love with Liz and is using Dianne as Replacement Goldfish, which she says she's "come to terms with", it's really easy to feel bad for her. The DVD extra reveals that though she survives the outbreak, she had to survive by eating parts of David's leg, which actually wasn't even necessary, and was so traumatized that she became a recluse and dropped nearly out of touch with Liz and Shaun, save for Christmas cards.
  • Shaun definitely needs a hug. His entire uneventful world falls apart. His stepdad Phil turns shortly after finally burying the hatchet with him. His mother gets bitten and he is forced to shoot her when she turns. And then his best friend Ed becomes a zombie. All in the space of one day.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Several examples of this can be seen in the film; if this were set today, Shaun, Ed and everyone else would likely hear the news via social media as opposed to exclusively TV/radio. The talk show 'Trisha' is also still on the air when this film is set, and Shaun and Ed frequently smoke cigarettes in the Winchester, and it's one of the main reasons they choose to take refuge there; smoking was outlawed in UK pubs in 2007.
  • In the aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic, seeing the characters act so reckless during a major viral epidemic (violating quarantine, failing to isolate, not telling other characters that they're infected) can make them seem Unintentionally Unsympathetic.