SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)

By: Amy Keyishian
November 14, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD | d. EDGAR WRIGHT | 2004

I’m going to tell you why Shaun of the Dead is the movie that keeps me up nights. But first, I’m going to tell you about the state of aging in America.

The population is aging at a rate that by 2030, there will be more people over the age of 65 than any other population in the U.S. At any given moment, 10% of the over-65 crowd live in a state of dementia. All in all, the number of people with dementia — currently 47 million — will triple over the next 30 years.

The more people we have, and the longer they live, the more people with dementia are shuffling along the world’s corridors and activity rooms. All three markers have increased steadily over the past 30 years, and will continue to increase by orders of magnitude year by year by year.

You know what else has increased over the past 30 years? Pop culture about zombies. I posit that this obsession with zombies is a sublimated terror of dementia — of it happening to us, of it happening to the people we love.

Before you get all pissy-mad and clutch your panties, let me just get it out there: My mom had dementia and died in 2021, and my older sister — yes, sister — has it now. My mom — well, of course that was terrible, but she just got quieter and happier till she was just a little smiling creature reciting bits of poetry till she quietly passed.

My sister, though. Woof. She spent about a year terrified, when I’d need to hold her as she wept, “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” and I cried “I know, hon, cancer would have been a lot easier.” Then she let go of that rope, and she was just pissed. Livid. Furious.

And now she’s just… I don’t know what you’d call her. The old sister would have been enchanted by the eclipse, holding up crystals and communing with the universe. This new sister just pouted because she wanted to go to the mall. The new sister is basically a cranky 10-year-old who insists a guy at Whole Foods is her boyfriend because he says hello to her.

But the fucked-up thing is that she looks like my sister. She feels like my sister when I hug her. She smells like my sister. But when I look in her eyes, there’s no sister.

It’s as if she’s a… oh.

So the scene that makes me want to cry and shit and wake up in the middle of the night in a freezing panic is the one where Shaun realizes his sweet mum has been bitten by a zombie. And we all know how that goes. And his shitty friend David wants to shoot Shaun’s mum! But David is just being practical.

“But that’s my mum!”

“She’s not your mum anymore! In a minute she’ll be just another zombie!”

Zombies are us, subtracted. Zombies are our loved ones, absent of their consciousness. Zombies are a safe world that’s gone to shit. Zombies are fake. But losing our loved ones to dementia? Turning into a zombie ourselves, because there’s no one else to care for them and it’s a 24-7 job? That’s real.

There. I ruined Shaun of the Dead for you.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)

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