OUR CULTURE, WHAT’S LEFT OF IT: Shaun of the Dead. Nobody told me Theodore Dalrymple made zombie flicks!

No, this is terrifically fun–and genuinely poignant, sad in the absurd and heartfelt and helpless way that the best horror is always sad. (I’m thinking of the scene in the car with Shaun’s stepdad.) Horror so often exposes our most naked feelings and then ravages them; this film does it with a miserably funny compassion. It gets almost all its humor from the thing you and I know well: the knowledge that the weird stranger might be our deaths. It’s a movie in the genre I associate with the late ’70s or the ’80s, in the United States–it’s Escape from New York, but hilarious and with English zombies. Its antecedents are the many Agatha Christie novels in which her murderers are able to hide in small country villages because the Second World War has disrupted all the old ways of life.

The most striking thing about Shaun of the Dead is how long it takes him to figure out that he’s in a zombie movie. He’s so used to threatening, muttering strangers, people nobody knows, people he doesn’t recognize… that actual zombies are only the extreme case of his usual way of dealing with modern life.

I loved this, maybe in part because it’s the horror-comedy counterargument to my upcoming American Conservative column about the virtues of D.C. life.