Shaun of the Dead is a blend of several different genres, mixed together to create a tale of interest.
It's a sitcom, a romance and, most obviously, a zombie movie. The film uses its fusion of different
genres to address problems and rebalance the balance. The horror to using inside the horror helps this film to tell even darker things than if the film were to stick to one genre. Uses Edgar Wright uses
Visual humour to tell the storey inside this film, a key example of this in the open by using a gore.
When Shaun and ed find a girl in their garden they are still clearly unaware of being ripped from the world of rom-coms and thrown into a zombie movie, before Shaun impels the zombie with garden furniture (the deadliest of all weapons) through the chest. By making the framing expose them in the circle through the chest of the zombie, Edgar Wright literally places Shaun and Ed inside the zombie.
The movie then uses traditional zombie conventions to play into the movie's comedy element.
The zombie, who is understandably irritated at being rejected and assaulted within the same five
minutes, is now holey (get it, as it were, because she has a hole within her Stomach) based on Ed and Shaun, but the film plays on the stereotype that zombies are usually very slow and not very smart, allowing them to go inside, get Shaun's records, get back down and have time to choose which ones they can use as weapons and which ones they can't.The film also uses film type to foreshadow what will happen, as well as show the tensions throughout the film, e.g. in the scene where Shaun and Ed are leaving the bar, and they have one of their first encounters with a zombie. This shot if framed in such a way that the zombie is directly between Ed and Shaun, foreshadowing the problems the zombie outbreak would create between them Fraternity. Shaun starts to get more and more irritated with Ed through the series, with the tension increasing, and reaching the point of breaking outside the Winchester surrounded by zombies, resulting in Shaun yelling at Ed. The scene where Shaun and Ed leave the Winchester is also a foreshadowing of how the zombies can help save the relationship between Shaun and her. As They're going, we see a few "making out" against the wall, but in fact we realise she's trying to eat his brains. It is a hint of what is coming, because where Shaun struggles in the genre of romcom, he starts fixing inside the horror zombie portion of the movie. Shaun of the dead uses the combination of genres to address the problems facing the protagonist in a different way
And initial way of doing it. The film explicitly uses the character principle of Propp to assist in this.
Shaun is the traditional hero and Liz is the princess, as she has these traditional characters that allows her to switch between genres, if Shaun can't be the hero in the romcom (failing to book a date for Liz and himself at a luxurious restaurant), the film will use the horror part of the film to solve it. A balancing act. For example, when Shaun goes to visit Liz for the first time, she doesn't climb the wall up into her apartment, but once the genre of the film has been changed and he has to escape the zombies, he manages to climb up into her apartment, showing that the zombie apocalypse is Shaun's trigger for change and giving us hope for his relationship.
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