50Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Simon Pegg doesn’t consider Shaun of the Dead a zombie spoof movie so much as a “zombie film that happens to be funny,” as Pegg told Kurt Anderson on the radio program Studio 360. Pegg made his debut feature with frequent collaborators Edgar Wright and Nick Frost. Shaun of the Dead indeed generates its laughs less from jokes on the page than situational predicaments and character, with Pegg playing the manager of an electronics store whose mindless existence making him a bit slow to awaken to the arrival of a zombie apocalypse. Film editor Tony Zhou, in his online video series “Every Frame a Painting,” credits director and co-screenwriter Wright for his unusually keen use of editing and staging to generate visual laughs where many contemporary American comedies don’t, for instance, bother to make scene entrances and exits funny, or use sound effects to garner a laugh.