#55 – Shaun Of The Dead: An Appreciation

The Shaun Of The Dead prosthetic team reunites and talk through the movie effects shots.

The best thing about (SOTD) Shaun of the Dead for me was that I was already a Spaced fan – the TV show from Edgar Wright which had put the cast into public consciousness and rekindled the (at the time) quiet Zombie genre.

---

To listen to the podcast, you can stream or download from here, or simply subscribe through your favourite podcast app – we are on many, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, IHeartRADIO , STITCHER , Luminary and Google Podcasts.

---

To ‘top and tail’ the SOTD experience for me was the fact that a few years earlier, I had applied a fake chest to Simon Pegg for Guest House Paradiso for one of the many gags in the slapstick storyline.

He told me they were editing a show he’d just finished called Spaced, which of course at the time meant nothing to anyone. It went on to be a much-loved cult classic and I urge to track it down if you haven’t seen it!

Within that show was an episode (called ‘Art’, series 1, ep. 3) which centred on the sleep-deprived characters (having spent all night playing Resident Evil) hallucinating and mixing zombie attacks into an otherwise routine day. The glorious sequences helped align the stars and planets to create what became SOTD.

I thought it would be fun to chat with Stuart Conran and Dan Frye, two FX buddies who I have known and worked with for many years on many projects. I rewatched the movie to refresh my memory, and listed the effects in chronological order.

---

Anyhow, the list of effects we chatted through are as follows:

• Head flips back outside the pub.
• ‘There’s a girl in the garden’. Mary falls back onto an umbrella support base.
• One-armed groom beat to (another) death with an ashtray.
• Hulk and Mary attacked with records and beaten to a pulp.
• Philips’s head smashed in the now-famous montage.
• Dead Pete in the shower.
• Philip neck bite by a zombie – gushing blood.
• Zombies are seen through a window when fuses flipped.
• Barbara’s arm bite.
• Headshots in the pub skirmish with a Winchester rifle.
• Barbara’s headshot (spoiler alert).
• David’s gory dismembering and disembowelling after being pulled through the window (my screen debut!)
• Zombie hordes – out of the kit zombies.
• Zombie Pete bites Ed’s arm (another spoiler).
• Pete’s headshot.
• Pickups at Shepperton (Near Christmas 2003) squibs and out of the kit zombies for the finale.
• Ed’s neanderthal zombie look (spoiler).

I’d recommend the Shaun Of The Dead DVD, as there are lots of great extras with behind the scenes video clips and diaries. Anyhow, download the free booklet to go along with this podcast episode. Listen here or subscribe on any of the podcast places linked here.

Cheers for checking in!

-Stuart