OUR CULTURE, WHAT\u2019S LEFT OF IT: Shaun of the Dead<\/em>.<\/strong> Nobody told me Theodore Dalrymple made zombie flicks!<\/p>\n No, this is terrifically fun\u2013and genuinely poignant, sad in the absurd and heartfelt and helpless way that the best horror is always sad. (I\u2019m thinking of the scene in the car with Shaun\u2019s 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\u2019s a movie in the genre I associate with the late \u201970s or the \u201980s, in the United States\u2013it\u2019s Escape from New York<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n The most striking thing about Shaun of the Dead<\/em> is how long it takes him to figure out that he\u2019s in a zombie movie. He\u2019s so used to threatening, muttering strangers, people nobody knows, people he doesn\u2019t recognize\u2026 that actual zombies are only the extreme case of his usual way of dealing with modern life.<\/p>\n I loved this, maybe in part because it\u2019s the horror-comedy counterargument to my upcoming American Conservative<\/em> column about the virtues of D.C. life.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OUR CULTURE, WHAT\u2019S LEFT OF IT: Shaun of the Dead. Nobody told me Theodore Dalrymple made zombie flicks! No, this is terrifically fun\u2013and genuinely poignant, sad in the absurd and heartfelt and helpless way that the best horror is always sad. (I\u2019m thinking of the scene in the car with Shaun\u2019s stepdad.) Horror so often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n