Book Review - Clark Collis's You've Got Red on You
Published by: 1984 Publishing
Publication Date: November 23rd, 2021
Format: Hardcover, 424 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy
Shaun of the Dead is one of those films like Twister that whenever you catch it on TV while flipping the channels you can't help but keep watching it. The humor, the pacing, the pathos, the music, everything is perfection. I dare you to listen to "Don't Stop Me Now" without wishing you had a pool cue in your hand. Of course it wasn't an easy film to make. At the time Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg were only known for their quirky cult comedy Spaced and here they were pitching a major motion picture that was very zombie niche. In fact, they would have been happy had this film only had an audience of one if that audience was George Romero. And if he liked it. They really wanted him to like it. This was an epic love letter to the man and the aesthetic he had created. But it took a lot of convincing to get everyone on board with their vision. At times the studio was pushing for "names." Which means, in an alternate universe Nick Frost isn't in this film but for some reason Gillian Anderson is. Which could have been a little awkward given how Tim Bisley felt about Dana Scully.... With new interviews from the cast and crew and complete access to Edgar Wright, You've Got Red on You shows a detailed behind the scenes picture of how this zomromcom came to life. The long hours shooting without air conditioning. The people whose entire job was just to maintain blood spatter continuity. What it's like being covered in blood spatter in that heat. The fact that David Bowie was really "funny" about the Labyrinth soundtrack and therefore a zombie was attacked with the Batman Soundtrack instead. I mean, Prince was their first choice, but it didn't hurt to have a backup. And then once the film was wrapped, would anyone watch it? Thankfully George Romero approved and anything else was a slice of fried gold. They didn't realize though that it would be so successful. But this was down to clever marketing. In order to break the US the trio of Pegg, Wright, and Frost toured the US. They did an old fashioned hard sell going town to town, and because of this they didn't just create a fanbase, they created true fans. Fans that would come out on their next two tours when they promoted Hot Fuzz and The World's End. Fans that would repeatedly buy all the different versions of the film that were released and would follow them to the ends of the Earth. Or at least to the pub on a Sunday afternoon.
I don't know how I first heard of Shaun of the Dead, I'm guessing a trailer before another movie in the summer of 2004, but I was an early convert. I was a member of the "Shaun Street Squad" which was a website designed to spread the word about the film and where you could earn sweet sweet swag by doing fan art and fanfic. And yes, I actively participated, cashing in my points for a pint glass and then some. And then opening day I was there in the theater having dragged my friend Matt along with me to see this film everyone was talking about. After that first viewing I became an acolyte of Simon Pegg's. Spaced, Hippies, Asylum, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and branching out, Black Books, and Little Britain, where Monty Python, Red Dwarf, and Blackadder were my formative years of British sitcom, Simon Pegg came in to inform my early post college years. So I had one question going into this book, could it give me any revelations? The answer is not really. Aside from David being written for David Walliams, which makes everything make sense to me. But it's such a well laid out and eminently readable history of the film that a lack of anything new didn't really bother me. It was also, for the most part, pretty unbiased, showing Edgar warts and all with an ongoing feud he had with the director of photography David Dunlap. And while Edgar admits to this feud Edgar himself might be the only real problem with this book in that it was Edgar's voice that was predominate. His view of how things happened. Yes, others were interviewed, but Edgar's voice and Clark Collis's reverence for him carried the narrative. And as for Collis.... It's his inferences in the end that make the book not achieve it's full potential. Because in the final analysis the author places too much cultural importance on Shaun of the Dead. Yes, it's was culturally important in bringing about the more romcom side of zombies, but was it THE REASON that zombies because popular again? No. That would be 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead comics, which were released in 2002 and 2003 respectively, whereas Shaun of the Dead was released in April 2004 in England, us in the states had to wait for a fall release. Also, I found it odd that Collis never once mentions iZombie which in comic and televisual form were both heavily influenced by Shaun of the Dead. And of course THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT was omitted from this book. Because of Shaun of the Dead we got Hot Fuzz, perhaps the most perfect movie ever.
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