Shaun of the Dead

Edgar Howard Wright (born 18 April 1974) is an English film and television director and writer. He is most famous for his work with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost on the films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and TV series Spaced.

Wright was born in Poole, Dorset. He started directing his own films at the age of 14 when he was attending The Blue School, Wells, Somerset and working at the local tourist attraction Wookey Hole Caves. At the age of 20 he made a spoof western, A Fistful of Fingers, which was picked up for a limited theatrical release and broadcast on the British satellite TV channel Sky Movies. He then directed a number of television comedy programmes for the UK’s Paramount Comedy channel and the BBC, including Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes and Asylum, during the production of which he met writer-actors Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes.

In 1999 he joined Pegg and Hynes to create Spaced for Channel 4. Wright gave Spaced an unusual look for the sitcom genre, with dramatic camera angles and movement borrowed from the visual language of science fiction and horror films. Instead of shying away from these influences Wright makes an active effort to show his referencing, adding a ‘Homage-O-Meter’ to all of his releases, a device that displays each directorial nod he has made during shooting. In 2002, he made appearances as a scientist and a technician named Eddie Yorque during both series of Look Around You, a BBC programme created by a member of the Spaced cast, Peter Serafinowicz. He also made a brief appearance in Spaced, in which he can be seen, along with other crew members on the series, lying asleep in Daisy Steiner’s squat as she prepares to leave for her new house.

The critical success of Spaced paved the way for Wright and Pegg to move to the big screen with Shaun of the Dead, a zombie comedy which mixed a “Brit flick” romantic comedy style with homages to the horror classics of George A. Romero and Sam Raimi. The pair wrote a comedy action thriller, Hot Fuzz. Production started in March 2006 and the film was released in February 2007 in the UK and April 2007 in the US. It revolves around Pegg’s character, Nicholas Angel, a police officer who is transferred from London to rural Sandford, where grisly events soon take place. —wikipedia