It’s easy to forget what a phenomenon Edgar Wright’s “Shaun Of The Dead” felt like when it emerged as one of the major sleeper hits of 2004, earning a whopping $30 million on an estimated $6 million budget. Wright’s anarchic, surprisingly sweet horror-comedy earned raves from genre heavyweights like Quentin Tarantino (who would go on to become a pal of Wright’s), Robert Rodriguez, Peter Jackson, and, naturally, the granddaddy of American zombie cinema, George A. Romero. Once you’ve been given a blessing from the genius who directed “Night Of The Living Dead,” you’ve pretty much been handed the keys to the kingdom, no?
This happens often: a director makes a film that qualifies them as an overnight success, earning enthusiastic praise from cinephiles and filmmaking contemporaries, only to either fall off the map entirely, or fail to eclipse the magic that so many saw in their debut. This is not what happened to Wright. If anything, hopefully our list of Wright’s most essential films will go to show that most of the pictures that the breathlessly imaginative writer-director has gone on to make since his 2004 breakout just keep getting better and better: it’s as difficult to resist the kinetic bromantic gunplay of “Hot Fuzz” as it is to say no to the blissed-out gamer romance of “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World,” but every fan of the British filmmaker’s can conceivably make a case for each entry in his greater filmography, from the instant-classic Cornetto Trilogy, to 2017’s delicious cinematic mixtape, “Baby Driver.” In other words, every Edgar Wright film is an act of authorial reinvention, and also a world unto itself.
Wright is undeniably something of a pastiche artist: each of his films takes a well-known and well-liked genre (balls-to-the-wall action flicks in “Hot Fuzz,” ’50s-style sci-fi pulp in “The World’s End,” nerve-shredding woman-in-distress psychodrama with this year’s “Last Night In Soho,” the director’s first foray into outright horror, etc) and flips it on its head, finding subversive invention in familiar machinations. Alas, Wright doesn’t always receive the requisite credit for what a sneakily emotional filmmaker he can be: “Shaun Of The Dead” is a ruthless comedy about a self-centered, emotionally stunted man-child that’s disguised as a zombie bloodbath, while the rubber-burning “Baby Driver” is a chase thriller about how we lean on pop music to suppress traumatic memories and shape the narratives of our lives. Like all great pop deconstructionists, Wright adores genre, but he’s primarily interested in it as a tool for exploring fundamentally human issues: how else to explain that “Last Night In Soho” is a slow-burn chiller about the exploitation of women, or that “The World’s End” turns the maxim “you can never go home again” into a dire, surreal, and hilarious look at middle-aged alcoholism?
Edgar Wright is nothing less than one of our most essential filmmakers, so an Essentials list makes sense, particularly in time for the release of “Last Night In Soho.” Grab a pint, grab a Cornetto cone, crank up some Sex Bob-omb, and read on.
“Spaced” (1999-2001)
On paper, the elevator pitch for “Spaced,” the beguiling Channel4 sitcom directed entirely by Wright and created by the director’s platonic muse, Simon Pegg, along with Jessica Stevenson, sounds simple enough: a single-camera situational comedy where Pegg and Stevenson star as two aimless London inhabitants sharing a flat and frequently dealing with a gallery of eccentric chums. Alas, that was about as prosaic as “Spaced” ever got, as the show ultimately served as a testing ground for what we can now identify as the trademark Edgar Wright style. “Spaced” is filled with all forms of geekery – movie geekery, TV geekery, sci-fi and fantasy geekery, military-action movie geekery, really, just geekery of any sort – where entire, imagined sequences unfold as homages in miniature to Wright’s favorite film genres. In spite of the show’s referential, pop culture-dependent style of comedy, the spoofery of “Spaced” never felt top-heavy; it’s no wonder that the show eventually built up a robust cult following and remains an adored staple by Wright’s day-one fans. Plus, like pretty much every Edgar Wright project to date, it’s purely hilarious, light on its feet, and has a killer soundtrack.
“Shaun Of The Dead” (2004)
Having a long-term relationship crumble can make one feel as though the world is ending. The genius of Wright’s gory, giddy, endlessly rewatchable zom-com, “Shaun Of The Dead,” is that the film effectively asks: what if you went through a breakup, and the world actually WAS ending? Such is the unenviable plight that befalls poor Shaun, the gormless working-class slacker protagonist of Wright’s silly, shambolic debut, who is played in a star-making turn by the then mostly-unknown Simon Pegg. Pegg plays Shaun as a sweet, well-meaning man-boy, one who must juggle romantic woes, family obligations, and other assorted low-stakes obligations over the course of a frantic day in which the undead just happen to be violently taking over London. Nick Frost, a familiar face to “Spaced” fans, provides Pegg with an uproariously vulgar comic foil, and more than anything, “Shaun” ultimately exists as the true introduction of Wright’s now-unmistakable signature shtick – the breathless visual wizardry, the quippy British banter, the pitch-perfect needle drops – to the world. Plus, have you really lived until you’ve seen a pub full of zombies get utterly decimated to the sounds of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now?”
“Hot Fuzz” (2007)
Edgar Wright’s “thing,” as it were, has always involved the understanding that one can theoretically sew many different film genres together, so long as one does so with the requisite degree of gusto and confidence. If “Shaun Of The Dead” re-imagines zombie horror through the lens of rom-coms and buddy flicks, and “Baby Driver” is a car-chase jukebox musical, then “Hot Fuzz” is surely one of Wright’s most dauntingly impressive hybrids: a fusion of balletic, John Woo/Tony Scott-style action, creepy-crawly British folk horror (“The Wicker Man“), and the clever, visually adroit comedy that Wright and co-stars Pegg and Frost had already perfected with “Spaced” and “Shaun.” “Hot Fuzz,” the story of a straight-laced London copper who gets a lot more than he bargained for when he relocates to a sinister borough in a sleepy British village, also functions as a cautionary tale that warns against the temptations of middle-class conformity; it’s also a film that understands the sheer, unholy terror of seemingly harmless old Brits who live in the countryside. The final twenty minutes – a dazzling orgy of blood, bullets, and cartoon carnage – includes some of the most imaginatively staged action of Wright’s career to date.