(Credit: Netflix)

Shaun of the Dead has rightly taken the top spot when it comes to horror comedies. The film is one of the country’s finest cinematic exports, blending horror and comedy seamlessly. In the 20 years since its release, the film has remained a firm favourite, kicking off the beloved ‘Three Flavours Cornetto’ trilogy, including Hot Fuzz and The World’s End. 

Directed by Edgar Wright, who had risen to prominence as the director of the popular Channel 4 sitcom Spaced, the film featured a cast of young British actors, such as Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Jessica Hynes, and Peter Serafinowicz. Taking an almost aggressively British approach to the horror genre, the film follows Pegg’s titular character, an electronics salesman, who wakes up to discover that a zombie apocalypse is destroying London.

With a group of his friends, he tries to survive the apocalypse, taking shelter in the Winchester pub. While the movie is centred around zombies and features a decent amount of blood and gore, it is hard to even consider the film a horror when Wright infuses it with so much comedy. Take the record collection scene, for example; while zombies approach and Shaun resorts to throwing vinyl records to fend them off, he spends most of his time deliberating which ones he wouldn’t mind getting destroyed.

Shaun of the Dead is a legendary piece of British cinema that helped to cement Wright as a cinematic heavyweight, and part of the charm of the film can be found in the fact that it pays homage to many other well-loved classics. Besides the obvious fact that the movie references Dawn of the Dead, it also pays direct homage to films like An American Werewolf in London, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

However, Wright also took inspiration from a classic 1980s comedy that doesn’t feature any horror but proved to have a massive impact on the film regardless. In an interview with Letterboxd, Wright revealed that Raising Arizona by the Coen brothers shaped Shaun of the Dead.

“When I first saw it as a teenager, I watched it immediately again afterwards,” he said. “I just couldn’t quite believe that a comedy could be that stylish and that dense in terms of its visuals and its dialogue.”

The film stars Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter and follows the unlikely couple (one’s a useless robber, the other’s a police officer) as they kidnap a child after discovering they can’t have kids. As a result, they’re pursued by the child’s father. Comical and fast-paced, Wright took the film’s snappy and polished approach on board when making Shaun of the Dead.

He called it “so funny in so many different ways,” adding, “I just think that film is a miracle.”

For Wright, “It’s always a film that I look to when I’m about to make a movie, and certainly, it was that movie that me and Simon talked a lot about before we made Shaun of the Dead. Even though it’s not a horror film, there’s a lot of things in that film in terms of the pace and the drive that really inspired Shaun of the Dead and the use of callbacks within the script.”