So all the romantic trials and travails play out against the backdrop of a zombie plague in full swing, with a huge wall having been erected around London and estates like the Bennet home serving as oases of pastoral peace, where matters of the heart, not brains and guts, can come to the fore. It might have worked better to have the Bennet family and their various friends and suitors encounter the undead for the first time in this retelling, but that would have required another major revision of the text, perhaps too much for the producers to dare. But having everyone on screen take the zombies, and the need to fight them, for granted drains the tension, both real and comedic, from the movie.
On the page, the cheekiness of adding ambulatory corpses to Austen’s narrative no doubt spoke for itself, and Steers apparently felt the same would happen here, and plays everything completely straight. If the title were beholden to Writers Guild regulations, it would be Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, so separate does one element seem from the other for much of the running time.Īnother issue, despite a number of momentary pleasures, is that of the tone adopted by writer/director Burr Steers. But it doesn’t take familiarity with either tome, or with any of the past screen versions of Pride and Prejudice minus zombies, to recognize that the new film could and should have done more to integrate the flesheaters into Austen’s polite society.
I’ll confess that I haven’t read the book, co-credited to Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, the latter of whom took advantage of the original novel’s public-domain status to insert undead action into its text. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies illustrates the perils of pursuing fidelity-both for its characters and its creators. Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 5, 2016, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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