Textual Analysis of Opening Scene - By Tom Fifoot

Shaun of the Dead opens with a close up of the main protagonist’s feet as he walks into the living room. The camera slowly pans upwards as he is walking, already the director has used these camera angles, along with the diegetic sound of the protagonist yawning and how he walks to trick the audience into thinking that he is an antagonist zombie. With this scene, there is some upbeat music, possibly showing that everything is normal, this music is non-diegetic as the actors do not seems to acknowledge it.

 The camera then cuts to a long shot of the protagonist sitting down on the sofa, after this long shot, there is then a two shot of the protagonist and another character. With the main protagonist being shown lower than the other character, we can assume that in this scene, the other character has more dominance over the main protagonist. This evolves as the other character tells the main protagonist to go to work, leaving the camera to zoom into the other character as the main protagonist leaves the room.

 After this scene, the camera shows a series of fast paced close ups of certain actions that the main protagonist is doing, each of which zoom in very fast and use synchronous sound to enhance the action the character is performing. These fast close ups cut to an over shoulder shot of the main protagonist looking into a mirror where another character soon appears, also with synchronous sound to show the genre of the film.

 There are a few more fast paced shots of the characters actions until the pace slows down with a two shot of two characters, on being the main protagonist, again, the main protagonist is show lower than the other character, having his dominance again lowered over other characters in the scene. Overall, the genre isn’t fully established as much as in other films in its genre, but there are still some features that shows the audience the film’s horror genre.