9 Classic Horror Films That Spawned Countless Imitators
3. Shaun Of The Dead
In 2004, Edgar Wright brilliantly combined the comedy and the zombie film in a way we had never seen before. Sure there were zombie movies that had a goofy side to them like Evil Dead II and Braindead, but there were never any with the structure of a comedy and with actual jokes.
Naturally, its success ushered in an immeasurable number of similar films.
The most recent entry was Cooties, an enjoyable zombie movie that so desperately wants to be the next Shaun Of The Dead. It has the same sense of humor, the same group dynamic, similar gags, and it even makes use of Edgar Wright's style of quick zooms and frantic editing.
Inevitably, every time one of these comes out, it's declared the next Shaun. With Stalled, a zombie comedy following a janitor during the zombie apocalypse, the poster declares it's “a worthy successor to Shaun Of The Dead.” Sure it is...
There have even been a lot of zombie romantic comedies recently, something that was really unique about Shaun of the Dead but now seems pretty standard. Throughout the 2000s, zombie comedies began to far outnumber actual zombie movies, in fact.
Outside of The Walking Dead and the occasional film like World War Z, it's now far more popular to have fun with zombies rather than to make them scary.