Read about the battle to film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

So brazen a perversion of the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice, one of Britain’s best-loved novels, will doubtless give Jane Austen fans more than a touch of the vapours. One of the masterpieces of English literature has been retitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, rewritten with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action”, stripped of its considerable dignity and bloodied up for the delectation of the horror-loving masses.

Yes, the LA-based television writer Seth Grahame-Smith has reworked the famous romance as a brain-munching zombie yarn. In his mash-up, a plague of the undead haunts the placid villages of 19th-century England. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are now as ardent and effective as brutal zombie killers as they are as sparring lovers. The publishers hope this reimagining of the novel will broaden its appeal to “legions of blood-hungry new fans”.

Sitting, perhaps incongruously, in a Starbucks in Los Angeles one recent morning, Grahame-Smith, who has never been to England, admits to some pre-publication anxiety.

“I wonder about the Austenites being able to get through the zombie bits, because there’s some terribly gory stuff,” he says. “And there is frequent vomiting, because the idea of these proper, upper-crust English people politely vomiting into their hands is funny to me. But I wonder if zombie fans will be able to get through the language. Because, even in the wildest, bloodiest zombie sequences, I was still attempting to write it seamlessly as Austen would have written it. It will either work brilliantly or fail miserably.”

The new version, which is illustrated with line drawings of zombie-killing mayhem in the style of CE Brock (who illustrated the original), is on the verge of becoming a pop-cult phenomenon. Even before the book was published, it had shot up the bestseller lists, landing at No 12 on the Amazon charts last week. Natalie Portman has signed to star as Elizabeth Bennet in a film version to be directed by Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko).

Grahame-Smith, an effusive, boyish 33-year-old, admits that until he decided to rewrite Pride and Prejudice, he had been no fan of Austen. He hadn’t even managed to finish the novel when he read it in high school. “At the time, the language was just too much for me to crack,” he says. “I think that is a lot of people’s experience with Austen. They can’t power through until the language sort of fades away and you realise she’s a sarcastic wit and a brilliant caricaturist. When I reread the book, what surprised me most was the humour — almost a mean-spirited humour, which I love. She’s razor-sharp and isn’t afraid to cut the wealthy and privileged down to size. I just sharpened the razor.”

While much of the original novel remains — perhaps about 85% — Grahame-Smith, who has written five previous books, including How to Survive a Horror Movie, has taken liberties. The Bennet family still has five marriageable daughters, but we know we are in a terribly different, though somehow disconcertingly familiar, world when we learn that in the zombie-infested England of those times: “The business of Mr Bennet’s life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs Bennet’s was to get them married.” All five Bennet girls have been taken to Shaolin, in China, by their father to be trained in the deadly arts of zombie-killing by the Chinese master Liu. Grahame-Smith even throws in an amusing gloss on the original’s acute class-consciousness.

“I added the conceit that the really rich — the Bingleys and the Darcys — would have trained as warriors in Japan. And to the upper classes, the ninjas of Japan and the traditions of Kyoto were considered far superior to those of China. So, when people find out that Elizabeth, as talented a killer as she is, was trained in China, they devalue her skill.” In Grahame-Smith’s rendition, such brutal skills matter as much as needlepoint in Austen. So, when the Bennet daughters first meet Mr Bingley and his sisters at a ball, it is noted that the sisters are “fine women, with an air of decided fashion, but little in the way of combat training”.

In the original, Elizabeth turns against the arrogant Mr Darcy when she overhears him say, during a ball, that her looks are merely “tolerable”. In Grahame-Smith’s version, on hearing this, Elizabeth decides she must slit Darcy’s throat with the dagger she conceals beneath her dress, because “the warrior code demanded she must avenge her honour”. Before she can, though, a throng of hungry zombies overruns the ball. “Their flesh was in varying degrees of putrefaction; the freshly stricken were slightly green and pliant, whereas the longer dead were grey and brittle — their eyes and tongues long since turned to dust, and their lips pulled back into everlasting skeletal smiles.” These terrible creatures begin to take the lives and devour the soft brains of some unfortunate guests. The Bennet sisters quickly form a “Pentagram of Death” and kill the uninvited unmentionables: “The word ‘zombies’ is like a profanity; it’s too on the nose,” Grahame-Smith says.

He has already faced the wrath of Austen fans on blogs, but some scholars don’t seem to see his reworking of Pride and Prejudice as too much of a departure from the subtextual tone of the original.

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