You've Got Red on You

How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life

Clark Collis

• Publisher: 1984 Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781948221207
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

As featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, MovieMaker, SYFY, Fangoria, Yahoo's "It List", SFX, Mental Floss, Total Film, Mashable and more!

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?"

CHAPTER 1

ORIGINS OF THE DEAD

Edgar Wright was 10 years old when he saw the film that would change his life. More accurately, he was 10 years old when he saw half of the film that would change his life, before his parents sent him to bed.

The date was 16 February 1985, and the film was the horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London. Written and directed by John Landis, the movie received its British television premiere that night on BBC1, one of just four networks available to watch in the UK at the time.

An American Werewolf in London stars David Naughton and Griffin Dunne as David and Jack, a pair of backpackers from New York who get lost on the moors of Yorkshire while visiting England. Their wandering ends in tragedy when Jack is killed by a wild beast and David is badly mauled by the same ferocious creature. Naughton’s character is transported to London and cared for by a nurse named Alex, played by Jenny Agutter, with whom he begins a relationship after being discharged from hospital. David endures a nightmare in which members of his family are shot by monsters wearing Nazi uniforms, one of whom slices open David’s throat. He is visited by the grotesquely rotting ghost of his friend Jack, who informs David that he will transform into a werewolf unless he kills himself.

Unable to take his own life, David does indeed turn lycanthropic, murdering several people while in werewolf form. They, too, return as scarred ghosts to castigate their murderer and urge him to take his own life. After causing further werewolf mayhem in Piccadilly Circus, our tragic hero, still in animal form, encounters Alex, who tells David that she loves him. He is then shot by policemen and, in death, becomes human once more. Landis cuts from shots of Agutter’s weeping face and David’s naked corpse to the movie’s end credits, soundtracked by The Marcels’ jarringly upbeat 1961 version of ‘Blue Moon’. This conclusion is both surprising and merciless, as Landis leaves the audience no time to grieve for Naughton’s David or to empathise with Agutter’s Alex. It is also, in its own twisted way, unforgettably brilliant.

In time, Wright would come to love the ending of the film, along with many other aspects of Landis’ movie. Back in 1985, however, he was only able to dream about (and have nightmares concerning) the werewolf tale’s conclusion. Wright and his older brother Oscar had been allowed to stay up and watch the film because their mother and father, Leslie and Chris, knew that the two children were fascinated by science fiction and horror. The parents were both art teachers, and were mostly encouraging of their children’s interests. But they believed that the Nazi-monster sequence was too much for their offspring, so Edgar and Oscar were sent to bed, the sight of Naughton’s bloody slashed throat lasered into their formative brains.

“At that point, my mum was like, ‘Okay, that’s enough! Bed!’” Wright recalls. The plan backfired, though, as Wright’s subconscious set about filling in the rest of the film while he slept. “Because I hadn’t seen the end of the movie, I had terrible nightmares,” he says. “I probably had worse nightmares than if I’d seen the ending, because it was unresolved in my head.” Wright was now more fascinated with Landis’ film than he had been before: “It was a point of obsession.”

Wright was born in the town of Swanage, on the south coast of England, on 18 April 1974. The first film Wright watched at the cinema was Star Wars, which his parents took Edgar and Oscar to see on its UK release in December 1977. “Mum and Dad did a great job of feeding us the really creative stuff that was coming out,” says Oscar, who is two years Edgar’s senior. “Star Wars left a huge impression – probably more on me than on Edgar, because he was, as Mum likes to say, in nappies at the time. I’d never been to a cinema before, and at that particular one, the walls were plush black velvet with pinpoint stars. Then the film started, and it was the star field with the spaceship coming over. I just thought that’s what cinema was – that the whole cinema was decked out like the film.”

Soon after, Leslie Wright suggested a trip to see Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated movie The Lord of the Rings. “Mum was a massive Lord of the Rings fan,” Oscar says. “So when the Bakshi film came round, she basically told us, ‘It’s a bit like Star Wars’, and got us to go and see that. Edgar was a big Doctor Who fan, so we were loving all that sci-fi and fantasy stuff. I was feeding off a lot of the design stuff, and Edgar, I think, right from an early age, was working out how he could tell these stories. We went through a Dungeons & Dragons phase, and he became a very young Dungeon Master very quickly.”

According to Wright family lore, young Edgar first showed an interest in becoming a director when comedy duo Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett – better known as The Two Ronnies – visited the area to shoot a portion of their 1982 TV movie By the Sea. “That was the first film set I visited,” says Wright. “I sat on Swanage beach, watching them filming. My mum swears that I pointed at the director and asked, ‘Who’s that man?’, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s the director.’ I said, ‘I want to do what he does.’”

When Wright was 7, his family moved 70 miles north-west to Wells. Technically a cathedral city because of the massive medieval church which sits at its centre, the settlement is a sleepy grouping of 12,000 souls in the rural heart of the West Country. For the most part, Wells offered little to distract the young Wright from his growing obsession with TV shows and movies. Wright’s parents loved films, and Edgar, listening in on Chris and Leslie’s conversations, learned about directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone. His mother also often talked about Busby Berkeley, the Golden Age of Hollywood-era choreographer and director, famous for the lavish dance sequences he oversaw for films like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.

At the same time, Wright began checking out his parents’ record collection, listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, and various Motown releases. Wright’s obsession with movies and music combined in his love for the 1976 gangster musical Bugsy Malone. Directed by Alan Parker, with music by actor-songwriter Paul Williams, the film features a cast of child actors – including Jodie Foster and Scott Baio – playing mobsters and molls. When he was around 12, Wright even appeared in a school production of Bugsy Malone, portraying a member of the gang ruled by the character Fat Sam.

He started reading up on movies, poring over the magazine Starburst, which covered science fiction and horror films. “Starburst was so gory in those days,” says Wright. “I was 7 years old, reading descriptions of Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery.” It was via Starburst that he first became aware of An American Werewolf in London. Issue #40, published in the autumn of 1981, featured on its cover a photo of Naughton surrounded by the butchered victims of his character. It was the bloodiest image Wright had ever seen. The substantial review inside, by writer John Brosnan, similarly caught Wright’s interest. “This is a revolutionary movie,” Brosnan began. “It pushes the art of the horror movie into new areas. It pulls off the difficult trick of revitalising the genre while parodying at the same time.” Brosnan went on to describe the film’s plot before keying into one of its chief delights, the movie’s realistic treatment of the central character’s preposterous situation. “These days, the idea of someone turning into a werewolf has become something of a joke,” he wrote. “It’s the stuff of old Universal movies… But what Landis does in his movie is say: right, we all know it’s a joke, but just imagine what would happen if you were forced to accept it as being true even though you didn’t want to.”

Film magazines like Starburst and the horror journal Fangoria also introduced Wright to Romero’s zombie movies. “There were a lot of films that I’d read everything about without actually seeing them,” says the director. “I was obsessed by zombie movies just through reading Starburst, and later Fangoria. I would read about Romero films and want to see them. My mum and dad weren’t very well off at all, and they didn’t have a VCR. You have to remind young people that, back in those days before the internet, you could go years without seeing a film. If it wasn’t on your TV and you didn’t have a repertory cinema near you, tough shit. So I could maybe read about Night of the Living Dead at age 7 in Starburst, and then not actually see the movie until I was 15, 16. I read a lot about it through Starburst, and Fangoria, and books that I would get, like The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael Weldon and Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies. I’d buy those books and just memorise them all.”

As a teenager, Wright attended Wells’ Blue School, which housed around 1,500 pupils aged 11 to 18. At various points, he was taught by each of his parents. One day in class, Leslie Wright mortified Edgar by calling him ‘Pickle’, the pet name she used for him at home. Wright got a part-time job at the Gateway supermarket on Wells’ High Street, where he would work for five years. This employment accidentally kickstarted his interest in modern music, when a colleague slipped him a cassette tape of an album by indie-rock quartet the Pixies.

Neither Wright’s education nor his job prevented him staying up half the night should a film he felt he needed to watch receive a TV airing. He finally saw Romero’s 1968 classic when the film screened on television at a very late hour. “It was on at 3 in the morning,” he says. “I drank coffee before, so I could stay up until 4.30 watching Night of the Living Dead. Then I either went to school or worked at Gateway on three and a half hours of sleep.” When Wright was around 14, he finally got to watch An American Werewolf in London through to its conclusion, at the house of a friend of his brother. Incredibly, Landis’ movie matched the expectations he had built up in his head over the years.

Wright’s consumption of films went into overdrive when he was around 15 and bought his own video player, using the pay from his supermarket job. “As soon as I got the VHS, I went a bit crazy watching all of these movies that I previously hadn’t had a chance to see,” he says. But it would still be several years before he had the opportunity to watch Dawn of the Dead. “That wasn’t easily available on VHS,” he says. “I think I saw Dawn for the first time when I was at art college.” As far as Wright was concerned, both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were worth the long wait. “By the time I watched them, I knew everything about them,” he says. “You’d wonder if that would quell your excitement. But the films lived up to their reputations.”

Around the same time that Wright managed a complete viewing of An American Werewolf in London, he also watched an episode of the British documentary series The Incredibly Strange Film Show. Hosted by movie-loving TV personality Jonathan Ross, the show detailed the careers of such cult directors as John Waters and ‘Godfather of Gore’ Herschell Gordon Lewis. But it was the final instalment of the show’s initial 1988 season ...