Line #11 Headscratchers/ShaunOfTheDead


1	* If the zombies ("Don't say the zed-word!") followed Shaun back to the Winchester after he tried to lose them and therefore knew where he was, why did they wait until he opened the window shade to attack? What the hell were they waiting for?
2	** He disappeared into the pub, it was dark, they aren't very bright... presumably they forgot why they were there but just milled around the pub anyway. It was only when it got all bright and noisy when their attention was re-attracted.
3	** Even though they did see Shaun very briefly, immediately after he noticed them he shut off the outside lights and went right back inside. So even if they did see him, it was likely too fast for them to process and react before all went dark again. Unlike the later lights bungling by David which caused an almost strobelike light show which only served to agitate and draw them in.
4	** I don't think they did follow him. We know that the Zombies retain impulses associated from their life (Phillip and the stereo, Ed and the computer games, etc), so chances are they just shambled down to the pub like 90% of the population would in the evening.
5	*** An extra on the DVD clarifies this - they did follow him. He hid in a trashbin until the zombies walked by, however the final undead did notice him running back the way that they all came.
6	* It's all very well that Dianne leapt into a crowd of zombies wielding her boyfriend's severed leg, but why doesn't the movie even try to show us what happens to her after that? The DVD extras tell us, but I can't be the only one who was left scratching his head after seeing the movie the first time.
7	** Without the DVD extras, I don't see what there is to scratch your head over. If you walk into a horde of zombies, you get eaten. What I'm curious about is how someone wades into zombies and somehow manages not to be bitten even once.
8	*** Shaun managed it when he was luring the zombies away from the broken window...
9	*** Not remotely the same. Shaun was acting as bait; i.e., he was running away from them. Dianne walked right ''into'' them and was surrounded and within arm's--and teeth's--reach as soon as she walked out the door.
10	*** A leg's a fairly hefty thing to be swinging at someone, animated corpse or not; she could have clocked enough to clear a path, come to her senses and scarpered like mad.
11	*** In the ending scene where Liz was cozying up to Shaun on a couch you can see Dianne's photo along with Shaun's mom's and David's on a shelf behind them, implying she's dead as well. Also, they forgot Phillip.
12	** The DVD extra is very tongue-in-cheek, significantly sillier even than the film itself. I think it is pretty clear that she is dead, dead, dead, and there is no need to show what happens to her afterwards because she's... well... dead.
13	** Considering how the zombies had just ripped David apart before she charged in, their attention may have been solely focused on the fresh body, ripped into chunks and spread across the crowd, that got their attention so well that Dianne could march right through them and survive unscathed since in the zombies' heads, there were way easier food to get within reach and in limited supply so it was "First come, first served", until Shaun and company made enough ruckus inside the bar to draw them in as well.
14	* Since the title of the movie is a parody of ''Film/DawnOfTheDead1978'', shouldn't Shaun's name be spelled "Shawn"? Is there something about English names that I'm missing here?
15	** According to Simon Pegg, as quoted in Clark Collis' 2001 book ''You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life'': "We weren't quite sure about the spelling. We didn't want it to be S-E-A-N, because people who didn't know that spelling would go, '''Seen of the Dead''?' We thought, should we spell it the way that has a 'w' in it, so it was even more of a play on ''Dawn of the Dead''? [But] we didn't want it to be too obvious, so we made it ''Shaun of the Dead''. That's how we got there in the end."
16	** Most people in Britain spell it 'Sean' anyway, I'm British and have never met a 'Shawn', and only rarely a 'Shaun'. So maybe 'Shaun' is meant to be a halfway point: punny enough that the joke is obvious on the DVD cover, but British enough not to confuse people. Just seeing the cover of the film, I'd take a while to realise 'Shawn' was meant to be someone's name.
17	** Plus, a certain spelling of a name in Britain as opposed to America might be preferred or more common, but it's hardly a set-in-concrete rule or unbreakable law of the universe or anything. Shaun's parents might simply have preferred that spelling when naming him. For all we know Shaun might be one of those people who constantly have to correct others when they try to spell his name because they're used to the more common versions, but we just don't see it because there's simply not a situation in the film where it logically comes up or is important.
18	* It's very touching and all that Shaun keeps Ed shackled in the tool shed at the end of the movie so he can still have his best friend around, but Shaun must seriously be out of his mind. For one thing, all it would take is one bite, and it would be all over for Shaun; Ed may be complacent ''now,'' but having battled dozens of zombies already, Shaun knows damn well that they only have one drive, which is to feed. For another, one would think that the government would pretty quickly pass laws against harboring undead. And finally... [[FridgeHorror What the hell is Shaun feeding Ed to keep him alive, anyway?]]
19	** [[TrademarkFavoriteFood Cornettos]].
20	** Did you see the TV montage right before it? Clearly the government hasn't passed such laws. And watch what happens when Shaun sits down to play: Ed leans over, as if to bite, Shaun scolds him, and Ed backs off immediately and goes back to playing the video game. As for what, or even if, he's feeding him? It's entirely possible, even probable, that the zombies don't ''only'' eat human meat, and for all we know it's not even necessary to feed him.
21	*** I admit my negligence; I forgot about those details.
22	*** Also, when Shaun is buying the flowers, there was a zombie getting a pigeon to eat. So we know the zombies don't eat only human meat.
23	*** There's also the "Fun Dead" game show in the TV montage - the zombies are trying to get at a large chunk of meat. That can't be human meat, so they must eat things other than human flesh.
24	** But still, did you see how close Ed got to biting Shaun? True, he did back off when scolded, but it was still too close. At the very least, he should be wearing some kind of muzzle or gag. All the zombies should.
25	*** Well, there does seem to be some pretty heavy duty collar and manacles on him. A muzzle would be a good idea, though.
26	*** RuleOfFunny.
27	*** More like Rule of Heartwarming really, stops the film from having a Bittersweet Ending.
28	** And anyway, Ed explains in the plot hole fillers on the DVD bonus features that he no longer gets the urge to eat Shaun, although he "wouldn't mind giving Liz a nibble."
29	*** You can kind of tell this in the ending anyway; when Zombie Ed leans over to 'bite' Shaun it seems kind of... half-hearted. Like it's something that on some level Zombie Ed feels is expected but which he doesn't really want to do.
30	* FridgeLogic Why did the zombie early in the film ''walk away'' when the owner of the Winchester shouted "Sorry, we're closed!" to it? Later in the movie, the characters point out that loud noises would attract a zombie.
31	** Perhaps for the same reason Shaun's zombie stepdad would switch off a car stereo -- force of habit.
32	** The zombies only seem to get really active when they're in groups. Recall that Ed has to throw a stone at Mary before he and Shaun get her attention and the zombified Pete just stands in the shower whilst clueless Shaun has a one-way conversation with him. Also, it's never entirely ruled out that the thing at the door ''wasn't'' an actual drunk.
33	** They're sort of like regular people, except slower, deader, stupider and hungrier.
34	** The zombie could have turned his attention to someone outside and the timing with the "we are closed" line being completely accidental. Alternatively alternatively, RuleOfFunny.
35	** Also, we never see for certain that it ''is'' a zombie. Given that the first half of the movie makes a pretty big point of hammering home the message that "people in 21st century Britain might as well be zombies!" it could legitimately have ''been'' a drunk who was utterly paralytic.
36	* I know this is a very very small detail, but who was the guy who called Ed when they were outside the pub. Was that guy not aware of the ZombieApocalypse, was he trying to get help, or was he just TooDumbToLive like Ed.
37	** It's implied that it's Noel, the obnoxious assistant from Shaun's work, trying to score some weed. He speaks on the phone to a friend of his during work hours, mentioning that "I spoke to him; he ain't got nuffin'," (the conversation which prompts Shaun to upbraid him for personal conversations in work hours, only to receive a call from Liz). We know Ed "deals a bit of weed," and in that conversation outside the pub he repeats that he has "nuffin'." I am pretty sure that you can hear Noel's voice if you listen closely enough. He turns up in the final TV montage as the zombie pushing trolleys in the supermarket car park.
38	*** Just to add, Ed specifically says "I've only got a henry meself," and later in Shaun's work, Noel takes a phone call during Shaun's speech, noting to his coworker that "He's only got a henry." Also, Ed calls the caller 'Noodle' which seems like a fairly simple extension of the name Noel as a nickname. The second call Ed gets outside the Winchester also starts with a barely audible "'ello maaaate" similar to Noel's earlier interruptions at the shop.
39	** This would mean Noel was oblivious to the plague, alive and well when he contacted Ed outside the pub, and wasn't infected until after that.
40	** As for not noticing, considering that Shaun was hours earlier able to walk to the corner shop, buy a Cornetto and a can of Coke and walk back again completely oblivious to the fact that the street was completely trashed and almost everyone around him was an animated corpse, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that there were plenty of people who were completely oblivious to what was going on (especially if, as was probably likely in the case of someone who was calling a dealer to get more supply, they'd been smoking weed). The zombies also didn't really seem to cause much of a fuss unless there was a crowd of them and they knew there was food inside the place they were surrounding; assuming you had a quiet Sunday in, didn't get seen by a zombie and didn't turn the TV on, you could probably go about your day blissfully unaware about what was going on.
41	** One premise of this movie is that people are pretty zombielike already. Remember all the shots at the beginning? The horde of teenagers bopping in unison to headphones? Mary scanning groceries with a vacant expression? That kid mechanically bouncing his soccer ball? Number one, after being turned they don't act too much differently, and Shaun's morning routine is not disrupted enough to grab his attention, even with the bloodstained corner store and zombie kid throwing a ball at his head. Number two, Shaun isn't the only one to be so caught up in his own trouble that he strolls right through the apocalypse, automatically repeating the same things he does every day. And in the end, zombies (Noel included) are proven to do very nicely in the sort of wage-slave jobs that regular people were doing all day without thinking before Z-Day.
42	** There is also the implication that people outside of Shauns group are slightly more GenreSavvy than most Z-word media, we are never really shown anything outside of Shaun's area, that area might have been just ''really'' unlucky, and most of the UK was already handling the dead problem really well, perhaps the guy on the other end of the phone was in an area already cleared by the army.
43	* When Shaun is buying flowers for his mum, outside the window we see Shaun spot a zombie grab a pigeon to eat. A bendy bus drives between the zombie and Shaun and a split second later, the zombie's gone. Stylistically, this is suitable enough for an Edgar Wright film, but it does beg the question: where (or more importantly, how) the hell did he go so quickly if he's a zombie?
44	** Maybe it caught the bus?
45	** RuleOfScary?
46	** Maybe it quickly staggered off after some of the other pigeons. Or maybe the first wave of zombies were capable of being runners if they suddenly had need to be, and it's just the second wave of infections that were more traditional shamblers.
47	** The film had lots of visual and sound effects to establish the zombie mood leading up to the outbreak that may or may not have been actual evidence of anything yet. Mentioned above was the zombie that knocked on the pub door may well have just been a drunk, and so the pigeon eater may have just been a crazy homeless lady. I will attest that that would hardly have been the weirdest thing I've seen in London in RealLife.
48	* When Ed and Shaun leave the house for Shaun's mum, a zombified boy throws a football at them. Where did a zombie get the muscle strength to even pick up a ball, let alone throw it?
49	** It still has muscles that function. If Shaun's step dad can reach over and turn off a car radio, then I assume a kid can toss a football.
50	** If it has the muscle strength to lift its own arms it has the muscle strength to lift an air-filled ball and throw it.
51	*** Never mind that, the zombies are able to break the window and drag David out of the pub. If a few of them can haul a struggling, fully functional adult human out of a window, one zombie can pick up a ball.
52	** The ball comes flying at Shaun from offscreen, so we don't know it was thrown. It's supposed to be an echo of when the kid punts the ball at Shaun earlier in the film, so most likely he kicked it. I'd say it's well within the film's established reality that a) Zombie-kid retained his habit of kicking around a soccer ball or b) a well-timed stumble caused him to kick it without meaning to.
53	* When we see Shaun and Liz at the end, they're living in Shaun's house. Fair enough, except with Shaun's mum and stepdad dead, wouldn't he inherit their house? Why wouldn't they live there? It's much nicer than the ''rented'' house Shaun was living in.
54	** Nice or not, many people sell their parents' houses after they die partly because they've made their own lives and homes outside of the parental one and partly because they simply can't face living / being there with so many constant reminders and memories of their deceased loved one(s). Given how close he was to his mum, it's fairly safe to assume that Shaun would be one of the latter especially, and he and Liz simply stayed on in the rented house until they found a new place. Alternatively, they could have ended up buying the rented place -- there's a reasonable chance that Shaun's landlord could have been a victim of the ZombieApocalypse and it was going cheap in the post-apocalypse confusion. And they seemed to have done the place up fairly nice by the end, probably no doubt partly due to having a 'woman's touch' now that Liz is living there instead of three guys living together like previously.
55	*** I was under the assumption that the house wasn't a rental, but that Pete owned it, or perhaps Pete and Shaun had gone in on it together. It would explain why Pete didn't just kick Ed out on his ass; if Shaun owned half the house, he could let anyone he wanted stay over as long as they wanted to.
56	*** No, it's definitely a rental. When Shaun bumps into Yvonne the first time, before everything gets going, he seems surprised that she's bought a house in the local area, whilst she seems surprised he's still renting a place. Presumably Pete just doesn't evict Ed himself because he expects Shaun to man up and do it himself.
57	*** Either way, it was probably either dead (haha) easy to buy in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse that would have significantly thinned out the population and thus left the real estate market in somewhat of a glut. Hell, that's assuming they even bothered to buy it, if whoever did own it got eaten and there were no immediate heirs to take over, Shaun may just keep living there without bothering to establish ownership. In the new world, possession of a home that no one else is contesting ownership of is probably 9/10ths of the law.
58	*** It may be that Shaun picked up and put Philip in the house, seeing as wives of the dead seem to be able to keep their husbands, it's probably that due to how apparently easy it is to control them families are allowed to house their deceased loved one in a pseudo pet/help status à la Film/{{Fido}}.
59	** In that vein, what happened to his step father's Jaguar?
60	*** Any number of things, really -- it got crashed into and wrecked in the chaos, it was nicked by some opportunistic car thieves who didn't mind tangling with the zombie in the back, or something similar to the explanation about the house above; post-apocalypse it was recovered by whatever authorities were in charge of that kind of thing (since someone would have to remove all the abandoned cars from the streets in order to clear them and it would be easy to check who the owner was through the license plate), Zombie!Philip somehow removed from it and, since as heir Shaun is legally the rightful owner, returned to him to sell or keep however he pleased. For all we know it's sitting outside Shaun and Liz's house as they speak at the end.
61	* I'm just throwing this out there but could Shaun and Liz's Sunday plans conversation in the epilogue, about going 'to the Phoenix for a roast', actually be a sly clue that the (renamed) Winchester has risen from the ashes and is still, despite everything, Shaun's favourite haunt?
62	** I think that's almost definitely the implication.
63	* How did Barbara know the flowers were for her? She only found them in a bin, and the card only said, "To a wonderful Mum"... which could be anyone's mum.
64	** I had the same thought, but presumably they also had "From Shaun" on them. Which is still a bit of a stretch, but she's a bit doddery, so hey.
65	** Maybe it said "To a wonderful Mum" in ''Shaun's handwriting''.
66	*** It didn't. The cashier at the flower shop asks him if he wants a card saying, "To a wonderful Mum" or "Pow! Super Mum!", meaning the card was printed before Shaun got it.
67	*** Yeah, but presumably Shaun still wrote 'From Shaun' under that.
68	** I always assumed that she didn't know, at least not in any lucid sense. She just picked up a random bunch flowers, saw the gift tag and due to the confusion caused by the onset of zombiefication, assumed they were for her. That this was in fact the case was just a bittersweet coincidence.
69	** I always thought she put 2 and 2 together that there was a fresh bouquet of flowers with a "To a wonderful Mum" card in the bin outside her son's favorite haunt on the day he was supposed to visit her.
70	* How did they do the effect with the girl with a gaping hole (the one that is perforated with a pipe)? It's not just a wound - it's a ''hole'' - you can clearly see Shaun and Ed through it, could they even do that with CGI? It's a single shot, and her movement seem too fluid for a puppet, and the hole is right through her abdonement, so it doesn't look like a prop or make-up either. So, how did they do it?
71	** It might have been CGI; having the actress with [[ChromaKey a green spot on her back in front of a green backdrop]], then shooting that independent from the actual scene with Nick and Simon, which is then shot on its own with their reactions. Or she might have been (surprisingly good) CGI altogether.
72	*** Quite definitely CGI - it's actually shown in one of the SFX extras on the DVD. The actress is flesh-and-blood, the hole is an effect added (with some other effects, like blood and entrails and such) in post-production.
73	*** Not even new CGI either. Death Becomes Her did it 12 years earlier (I remember seeing a making of to how it was done).
74	*** Not only is it definitely CGI, it's not the most convincing CGI. If you follow the position of Shaun and Ed's heads. They appear in the hole several inches lower than they otherwise should.
75	* Why didn't that same pipe turn the zombie into a paraplegic? It looked like it went right through her spinal cord. It seems like a missed opportunity for a crawler in my humble opinion.
76	** Writers can pick whatever rules they want for the biological effects of zombification. Conventionally, they can go with zombies being able to tank injuries which would cripple regular humans, or if they prefer they can take a more realistic approach. They went with the former here. This also has the effect of establishing clearly to the protagonists (and perhaps less GenreSavvy members of the audience) that this isn't just a shitfaced member of the public, or even someone on PCP (that wouldn't prevent paralysis as much as it can delay the effects of injury reaction) but an actual, card-carrying and unionised member of the undead.
77	** Half RuleOfFunny, half RuleOfScary. Funny in the sense that it's almost comical the amounts of punishment these suckers are capable of taking and just proceeding to get back up, and scary in the sense that seeing them getting back up after taking that kind of damage and still gunning for your flesh would probably make you shit your pants if you saw it for yourself.
78	* I haven't watched the DVD commentary, so I'm not sure if this was ever addressed there, but if acting zombie-like allowed for Shaun and the rest of the group to move freely among actual zombies without being noticed, couldn't they have done it again to get away from them when stuck inside the Winchester? Are we supposed to assume it wouldn't have worked since the zombies had already been alerted to their presence?
79	** That's exactly it. The zombies as presented in this movie clearly aren't very bright and don't seem to be inherently aware of humans in the immediate vicinity unless/until said humans give themselves away as being human rather than zombies. Since the horde who end up trapping the group in the Winchester are the same ones who were either in the group that Shaun originally led away from the Winchester or else are others that the group has encountered throughout the day (and the group itself were all panicking at the point the horde began attacking thanks to the whole thing with Barbara turning and then David trying to kill Shaun), pretending to be zombies just wouldn't have worked.
80	* It's all very well and a little unfortunate that Pete turned in the bathroom before he could shower, but why does he remain standing there until Shaun mentions they're borrowing his car? All the commotion downstairs regarding the one-armed groom zombie, plus Shaun and Ed literally calling out his name several times, should have gotten his attention and drawn him downstairs well before then. I know that zombies by themselves aren't all that aware of their surroundings, hence Mary not paying Shaun and Ed any attention until Ed literally flings a rock at her, but the zombified couple who owned the pub clearly heard the gang through at least one door.
81	** Zombie Pete presumably doesn't associate the various noises he / it hears with the concept of "something I can eat" until Shaun actually enters the bathroom, so has no reason to move. They'll be muffled by various doors, walls, ceilings and just generally occurring on different levels of a multi-storey house, remember.
82	* Ed and presumably Shaun know about the cellar under the Winchester, so once John the barman has been dealt with, why don't the group just quickly hide there before the zombies can break in, rather than trying to hold them off with one rifle? They know they've only got 29 shells and that's not going to keep the horde at bay for long; if the zombies don't see them going into the cellar and they've apparently vanished without a trace, they can just sit tight and wait for the zombies to go somewhere else. And yes, Barbara would inevitably have turned and Shaun's grief and the resulting stand off between the characters would likely have attracted attention from upstairs, but the characters don't know that, so there's no reason for them not to have decamped to the cellar in the first place.
83	** The real answer is probably somewhere between "they're all panicking and a bit too charged with adrenaline to think of it", "it wouldn't have been as exciting to watch" and "it would have been a little bit ''too'' close to what happens in ''Film/NightOfTheLivingDead1968''. But do note that things start happening fairly quickly once John the Barman's been taken care of; they get the gun, the zombies start breaking in, Barbara reveals she's been bitten, dies, turns into a zombie, Shaun is forced to shoot her, the blow-up with David happens, and then the zombies crash in and shit really hits the fan. No one really has time to bring it up and discuss it as a possible option before something else happens to get their attention until they're trapped behind the bar.

Context Headscratchers / ShaunOfTheDead