Shaun of the Dead

Shaun of the Dead showed a zombie film could be a comedy without being a parody, and Zombieland is the American film that followed it into that space. The shared move is to take the apocalypse seriously as a setting and play the characters for comedy inside it: people who are underqualified, arguing about domestic things, in a world where the rules of survival are real and breaking them has consequences. Zombieland's on-screen rules are its own invention; the register it uses them in is the one Wright's film established five years earlier.

Both take the undead entirely seriously as a practical problem and play the comedy from the domestic admin around it: what to tell the neighbours, whose turn it is to deal with the body, and whether the relationship survives. Shaun of the Dead established that the joke works best when the gore is not softened, and Santa Clarita Diet keeps that rule: the violence is explicit and the register stays deadpan suburban. The variation is point of view. Shaun is about people avoiding the infected; the series is about a family whose mother is one, and who decide to manage it. Filing as LOW as it is a discussed influenced but not aknowledged by the creator of the series.

The title is the acknowledgement. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have named Romero throughout, and Romero liked it enough to cast both of them as zombies in Land of the Dead. What the film is built on:

• Romero's rules, kept exactly: slow zombies, bites convert, destroy the brain, and no explanation offered
• The siege structure, with a small group barricaded in an ordinary consumer space. Romero uses a shopping mall, Wright uses a pub, and both are chosen because the survivors would have gone there anyway
• The satire in the same position: Dawn of the Dead is about shoppers who barely change behaviour when they die, and Shaun opens on commuters filmed to be indistinguishable from the infected
• Specific shots and beats restaged, including the walk to the shop that the audience can see is wrong and the character cannot

Filed HIGH: without Dawn of the Dead there is no joke to make.