Edgar Wright is a master of foreshadowing. In the opening scene of Shaun of the Dead, Ed outlines the whole plot of the movie in an early scene.
When he’s trying to cheer up a recently dumped Shaun at the Winchester Pub, Ed comes up with a plan to spend the following day drinking. He unwittingly describes the following day perfectly, despite the unexpected arrival of the undead. Here are all the spoilers hidden in Ed’s Winchester monologue.
We’ll Have A Bloody Mary First Thing
Ed’s speech begins by saying, “We’ll have a Bloody Mary first thing...” Knowing that they’re guaranteed hangovers from the current night of drinking, Ed plans to start the day off with a cocktail so that he and Shaun can recover with a “hair of the dog” remedy. As it turns out, they do start off the day with a “Bloody Mary,” but not a tomato-based alcoholic beverage.
Mary is the name of the first zombie that Shaun and Ed find in their backyard. She can also be seen pre-infection during the opening credits, idly bagging groceries. At first, Shaun and Ed think she’s drunk and that she’s hitting on Shaun. He pushes her out of the way and she falls back and gets impaled on a gazebo holder. Then, she stands up, showing off her undeadness, and Wright frames Shaun and Ed through her torso hole.
Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright wrote an eight-page comic book titled There’s Something About Mary that detailed Mary’s backstory and how she got infected.
A Bite At The King’s Head
After kicking off the day with a Bloody Mary, Ed plans to have “a bite at the King’s Head,” meaning they’ll go to a gastropub called the King’s Head for something to eat. Since the dead rise from their graves overnight, Shaun and Ed never get out to the King’s Head, but there’s still a bite in a king’s head.
Shaun wants to just pick up his mom Barbara – with the hilarious Night of the Living Dead paraphrase, “We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” – but she won’t abandon her husband, so Shaun has to save his stepdad, Phillip, too. The pressure of surviving an apocalypse makes Shaun realize that Phillip has always tried to be a good father figure, but the best version of their relationship is short-lived. On their way out of the house to the car, Phillip gets bitten on the head by a zombie. So, Shaun and Ed never got to enjoy some pub grub at the King’s Head, but there was still a bite at the king’s head.
Couple At The Little Princess
After getting a bite to eat at the King’s Head, Ed says that he and Shaun will have a “couple at the Little Princess,” meaning they’ll have a couple of pints at another pub called the Little Princess. This, in the plot, is picking up Liz, the love of Shaun’s life (or the “princess” of the story), and the couple she lives with, David and Dianne.
Since Liz broke up with Shaun the day before the apocalypse, Ed doesn’t think they need to worry about her. But Shaun wants to make sure she’s safe, so he insists that they bring her (and, unfortunately, by extension, David and Dianne) along to the Winchester.
Stagger Back Here
Ed says that after having a Bloody Mary, eating at the King’s Head, and drinking at the Little Princess, they’ll “stagger back here,” as in back to the Winchester. When Ed says they’ll “stagger” to the pub, he just means they’ll be a little tipsy from their pints at the Little Princess. In reality, they literally stagger to the pub so they can move through a horde of the undead undetected.
Since Dianne is a struggling actor, she seizes the opportunity to give everybody acting lessons. Shaun pins a zombie to a tree so she has a model for the zombies’ behavior. The plan goes off without a hitch until they find that the pub is locked and Ed takes a phone call from a friend of his.
It’s a wonder more characters in zombie movies don’t do this, because it’s surprisingly effective, but other filmmakers probably avoid it because The Walking Dead, but they had to smear themselves with blood and guts to really ingratiate themselves into the horde.
Bang! Back At The Bar For Shots
Ed concludes his plan for the day with, “Bang! Back at the bar for shots.” What he means is that they’ll end a long day of drinking by knocking back shots at the Winchester, but what actually happens is that they end a long day of apocalyptic survival by using the Winchester rifle hanging above the bar to shoot zombies (poorly).
This pays off another moment of foreshadowing from earlier in the movie. In one of the first Winchester scenes, Shaun and Ed debate whether or not the gun is actually functional. Shaun is surprised to learn that the rifle actually works – but dogs can look up.
