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.