When Woody Harrelson received a copy of the screenplay for Zombieland last year, he stuffed it into his duffel bag of unread scripts and promptly forgot about it.

Even after his agent started pestering him, Harrelson couldn't be bothered to dig it out and have a look.

``I just thought `It's a zombie movie; it's gotta be stupid,' '' the actor says. But Harrelson changed his mind when he finally read Zombieland, in which he plays one of four survivors of a plague that turns the United States into a country overrun by the flesh-eating undead.

And even though Harrelson describes his experience on the set as wonderfully collaborative and fun, he still had doubts about the finished film. ``When I went to see the movie at a screening in Orange County, I was really worried it was going to be terrible, because you never know,'' he says, chuckling. ``But I was delighted. It turned out great. I'm really jazzed about it.''

Harrelson's concerns are understandable. For every halfway-decent zombie flick, there are two dozen others so wretched and lame you probably have never heard of them. Within the horror genre, only slasher films boast a higher ratio of bad-to-good.

But Zombieland, which opens Friday, shares the crucial element that elevates many of the best zombie movies. Scary? Yes, in spots. Gratuitously gory? You bet. But, first and foremost, Zombieland is a comedy.

Although there would seem to be scant possibility for amusement in rotting bodies that rise from the grave to eat the living -- there was certainly nothing funny about director George A. Romero's exploration of the concept in his 1968 black-and-white drive-in cheapie Night of the Living Dead -- filmmakers have discovered that zombies are also natural-born comedians.

Humor crept into the zombie genre gradually, beginning with Romero's 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead, in which the X-rated, unthinkably graphic violence and gore gradually segued into a satire of consumerist culture (the zombies gravitated toward a gigantic mall, because even the dead want to window shop). When members of a biker gang invaded the mall, they chopped off the zombies' heads with machetes -- but also smacked them in the face with cream pies.

``One of the great thing about zombies is that they don't really have a distinct personality, so they can stand in as a metaphor for anything,'' says Glenn Kay, author of Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide. ``They're a really adaptable sort of monster, and the fact you can project onto them lends itself to comedy.

``The idea of a dead relative coming back to try to eat you is very scary. But they also move very slowly in a lot of films, so the sight of a zombie shuffling around and tripping over something results in a little moment of comedy. Romero's Dawn of the Dead acknowledged the absurdity of the premise. Then came other films such as Lucio Fulci's Zombie a year later, in which a zombie walks across the ocean floor and tussles with a live shark. That was an amazing sequence from the point of `Geez, that must be incredibly dangerous.' But as an audience member, you can't not see the humor in that.''

Later zombie films, such as 1985's The Return of the Living Dead or Peter Jackson's 1992 gore epic Dead Alive, pushed the humor further, delivering the horror goods but always with an eye toward making the audience laugh. By the time the British import Shaun of the Dead shambled across movie screens in 2004, the zombie comedy -- or zombedy -- had become a veritable sub-genre. Even straightforward zombie pictures that merely aimed to frighten, such as Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, made room for bits of funny business, such as a sequence in which the heroes start picking out celebrity lookalikes among the undead hordes to shoot in the head (``Look, Jay Leno!'').

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