Shaun of the Dead

Shaun of the Dead was the breakthrough feature for the so-called Three Flavours Cornetto trio of director Edgar Wright and co-writer/star Simon Pegg, alongside Nick Frost. The three had developed their working relationship through Channel 4's Spaced sitcom (1999-2001), and the film essentially extends the show's combination of pop-culture saturation and visually precise comic editing into feature length. The screenplay is credited jointly to Wright and Pegg.

The film opened in the UK in April 2004 and the United States in September; against a budget of around £4 million it grossed roughly $30 million worldwide, becoming one of the most profitable British films of its year. It was nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film and won the Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture in 2005, given by the Mystery Writers of America. George A. Romero (the genre's foundational figure) publicly endorsed the film and cast Pegg and Wright in cameo zombie roles in his own subsequent Land of the Dead.

The cast (Pegg, Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton) was assembled largely from British television comedy circles. Wright shot the film in Crouch End in north London, where he and Pegg were living, and many of the locations have since become tourist destinations. The trio's two follow-ups, Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World's End (2013), completed what is now the canonical reference point for British genre comedy of the 2000s.