Warm Bodies is a 2013 American paranormal romantic[5][6] zombie comedy film written and directed by Jonathan Levine and based on Isaac Marion's 2010 novel of the same name, which in turn is inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

[7] The film stars Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco, Lio Tipton,[a] Cory Hardrict, and John Malkovich.

[7] The film focuses on the development of the relationship between Julie (Palmer), a young woman, and R (Hoult), a zombie, and their eventual romance, causing R to slowly return to human form.

As a zombie, R does not have a heartbeat and constantly craves human flesh, especially brains, because he is able to "feel alive" through experiencing the victims' memories when he eats them.

He rescues her from the rest of the pack by wiping some zombie blood on her face, masking her scent, and takes her to an airplane he resides in to keep her safe.

The two bond, listening to LP records and playing games to kill time, causing R to begin to come to life; his heart starts beating, and he is slowly able to communicate with more words.

"We're encouraging people to be open-minded, because it does take some liberties with the mythology, but at the same time, it's very grounded in the science of zombie-ism and uses that as a springboard for a more fantastical story.

[8][18] Hoult explained, "There were some days with the Cirque du Soleil people and we would take our shoes off in a dance studio and we would kind of grow out of the wall and make our bodies feel very heavy.

"[18] Hoult told another reviewer that he "drew a lot of his inspiration from Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands," saying he thought of that movie "as a zombie film, whether it was or not.

[23] Richard Larson of Slant Magazine wrote "The ubiquity of Shakespeare's original template [of Romeo and Juliet] allows Warm Bodies some leeway in terms of believability, where otherwise it sometimes strains against its own logic.

But the film's persistent charm encourages us to look past a few festering surface wounds and see the human heart beating inside, which is really what love is all about."

[24] Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times deemed the film "a well-paced, nicely directed, post-apocalyptic love story with a terrific sense of humor and the, um, guts to be unabashedly romantic and unapologetically optimistic."

But those are minor drawbacks..."[9] Mary Pols of Time called it "an inventive charmer that visits all the typical movie scenarios of young love amid chaos and disaster...

"[25] Stella Papamichael at Digital Spy gave it three out of five stars and called it "a truly deadpan romantic comedy" and "a witty reinvention of the genre like Shaun of the Dead before it, drawing parallels between the apathy of youth and the zombie masses," adding, "Hoult gets to deliver a wickedly dry voiceover.

"[27] Michael O'Sullivan said in his one-and-a-half star review for The Washington Post that the film is "Cute without being especially clever, it's as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero ...