Simon Pegg on Shaun Of The Dead

Fans of Channel 4 television series 'Spaced' will already know that Simon Pegg has a thing for zombies. Back in 1999, in the first series of the slacker sitcom, Pegg's character Tim finds himself trapped in a live action version of the PlayStation game 'Resident Evil 2' after a night of taking speed. Fortunately for Tim, the blue-skinned ghouls turned out to be nothing more than figments of his frazzled imagination. If only Shaun, the luckless hero of Pegg's comedy feature film Shaun Of The Dead, could say the same.

Billed as a "romantic comedy, with zombies," Shaun Of The Dead is the zenith of Pegg and co-writer/director Edgar Wright's lifelong obsession with living dead movies. As the title so cunningly hints, it's a quintessentially British comedy tribute to Romero's unholy troika of zombie films (1968's Night Of The Living Dead; 1978's Dawn Of The Deadand 1985's Day Of The Dead) in which Shaun (Pegg) finds himself caught up in a zombie outbreak after his girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) dumps him.

In contrast to other contemporary updates of the zombie mythology - from Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2003) to Gary Znyder's big-budget remake of Dawn Of The Dead (2004) - Shaun doggedly sticks to a very old-fashioned concept of the living dead. These particular ghouls aren't raging, hyperactive sprinters, but painfully slow, shuffling dead men walking.