| Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns |
Shaun of the Dead plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, June 7th, through Tuesday, June 9th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. Happy Pride!
It may have been the video game, Plants vs Zombies (2009), that made kids fall in love with the undead. Ever since, there has been a slew of inappropriate and almost appropriate zombie content directed at young people. But zombies are scary as shit. They are truly the things of nightmares and, bonus: unlike other terrifying things, the people you love can become them.
Into the zombie universe came our eldest child. We’ll call him Z. We are a low-screen family, but let the kids choose whatever they want to read. Z reads a variety of genres and content, and has taken it upon himself to find such gems as Last Kids on Earth, Night of the Zombie Zookeeper, Zombie Haiku, The Maker’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, A Handbook for the Newly Undead, and Economics of the Undead. This last one was actually written and edited by economics professors, so strangely he gained financial literacy along the way. One of them had a chart about zombie films and the qualities of the zombies therein. This is what led Z to begin asking questions about watching zombies eat people instead of just reading about it.
We watched Last Kids on Earth (2019-2021, created by Jennifer Muro and Joshua Pruett), which is an animated series and pretty mellow. I even did the CDC Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic lessons with him.
We were in the car and Z began listing off zombie movies and asking if I had seen them. I knew what would come next, “Can I watch them?” he casually asked. In my amazing parenting style, I said, “Ah, um.”
And then entered into the conversation, Shaun of the Dead (2004, directed by Edgar Wright). It felt like a good introduction to zombie films for Z’s generation. It is new enough that the setting and characters don’t need to be explained, it melds comedy and sincerity, and the blood and gore are obviously fake. Also, and this one is perhaps the most important, the zombies are slow. The only thing scarier than your ma turning into a zombie, is your ma turning into an undead creature with super speed and strength. All of these together are not a good enough reason to show a young person a zombie movie.
My parenting superpower is the ability to say a firm “No,” and mean it. There are many good reasons to hold off showing young people films whether they contain zombies or not. There are the judgements from grandparents, friends asking their parents to watch the movie thereby putting other parents in tricky situations, nightmares, turning your child into a prepper, and that time you forgot about the somewhat intense sex scene in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999, directed by John McTiernan) or the gory sword scene in Equilibrium (2002, directed by Kurt Wimmer). In my defense, Z loves heist books and films and we had just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, for which there is no good movie adaptation.
Bigger than all of these reasons is that child development has many stages. Showing a kid a movie when they’re too young can ruin it for them forever. We try to wait just long enough so they appreciate and understand the content enough to make a real judgement.
A quick check on Common Sense Media, just to make sure I am not a complete monster for showing Z this film. Parents and kids on the site agree that most 13 year olds can watch this film. The powers that be on Common Sense Media suggest 15.
Z is 14, so we split the difference. That’s how those ratings work, right? Just kidding. Z is more mature than most 14 year olds, he is deeply interested in zombies as showcased by his reading list, he is a weapon enthusiast, yet a pacifist, he is not a kid who has nightmares, and he has a very good sense of real versus fake. Plus, when I asked him to pose for these drawings, he didn’t ask any questions.
So, my wife, Z, and I watched Shaun of the Dead. Z laughed where appropriate, complained that the protagonists were making terrible decisions, and in the end summed it up with, “Pretty good. Kind of absurd. They should have stayed in the flat.” Seems like he’s more prepared than most of us.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon