into a talking corpse and the use of subtitles in popular modern slang to translate Shakespeare’s words into something the kids might eat up. Other horrible ideas follow, such as the casting of Jason Mewes as Hamlet, the insistence of one producer that they remove “all the talkie stuff” from Shakespeare’s play, the re-casting of the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. Naturally, this horrible idea is very reluctantly agreed to by the otherwise conscientious director and the production moves forward. While the location has been secured, the money isn’t so certain until someone jokes that they could pack the film with Zombies to ensure a monetary return. The film starts out with a young director named Osric Taylor (Travis Wester) attempting to get his Civil War era version of Hamlet funded intact. This confusion is, in fact, part of the point of Zombie Hamlet. Surely the very idea of mashing up Zombies with arguably Shakespeare’s best known work would seem to be a travesty or, at least, one of the many recent classic/ horror mash-ups like Pride, Prejudice and Zombies or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This is why a title like Zombie Hamlet is not necessarily the appalling turnoff that it could have been. My favorite idea? A science fiction version of Titus Andronicus called “ Saturn Nine”. Indeed, take any given Shakespeare play and set it on another planet in the far future and not a single line would need to be changed.

King Lear and MacBeth have been adapted into samurai films by Akira Kurosawa, Hamlet has been adapted into a World War I era film by Kenneth Branagh and recently Much Ado About Nothing was re-set in the modern age by Joss Whedon (as an unlikely follow-up to The Avengers).

Ben Jonson, rival poet and friend of the Bard, once said “Shakespeare is not of an age, but for all time.” Over the centuries since his friend Will’s plays were first staged, Jonson’s words have proven true over and over again.

Zombie hamlet full movie