Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Genre

Horror & Comedy

The original Pride and Prejudice was a comedy because (spoiler alert) everything turned out A-Okay in the end. Everyone falls in love and gets married and lives happily ever after, and then Beyoncé sings while fireworks shoot off.

Okay, that last part doesn't happen, but you get the picture. A comedy has your standard happy ending.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a comedy, too, because our heroine still falls in love and finds her Prince Charming with 10,000 pounds a year. Except this time Prince Charming carries a musket and beheads unmentionables in his spare time. No biggie.

Since this version is a mash-up, you could call it a horror-comedy. Basically, it has scary elements, like zombies attacking and eating people's brains, but as a whole, the book isn't really meant to terrify you. You're supposed to be laughing, not clutching your smelling salts in fear.

In a way, adding zombies to Pride and Prejudice kind of makes twisted sense. Elizabeth Bennet has always battled metaphorical monsters: her own prejudice, society's expectations of her as a woman, her mother's constant harping. Oh, and then there's the looming possibly that when her father dies, she'll be left alone to fend for herself with nowhere to live and no man to care for her.

Holy crud. We might have to sleep with the lights on tonight.

But in this version, Elizabeth gets to take charge and roundhouse kick a different set of monsters right in the face. Reading about it is oddly satisfying. And totally hilarious.