Zombie Theology 2 – Shawn of the Dead

I finally watched Shaun of the Dead this weekend. Brilliant, violent, hilarious, vulgar little movie. I adored it.

Like most great cultural artifacts, it’s got some gems of truth hidden inside. There is a long stretch at the beginning of the movie when Shaun doesn’t catch onto the fact of the zombie apocalypse all around him. He wanders down the street past zombies without noticing them stumbling and moaning and wanting to eat his brains. He clicks through the TV channels so quickly that he never gets the full story that zombies have taken over London. He doesn’t notice the hand-shaped blood stains on the grocery freezer door when he buys his morning Coke. He doesn’t even notice that the owner of the grocery store has mysteriously disappeared. At one point, he and his friend sing scat with a stranger, not realizing the stranger is a zombie. Finally, when they face their first zombie, they think she is just an extremely drunk woman.

Two lessons here. The movie makes the first one: Most of us stumble through life little with so little purpose that we might as well be zombies.

But I see another lesson about sin and evil.

Sure, I’ve got plenty of zombie in me. But I’ve got some Shaun too. I’m walking around every day a little bit like Shaun, blind to the death everywhere. I don’t know, maybe this is a stretch. But sometimes, my friends and I find ourselves singing scat with monsters that want to eat us.

And we never know it.