Warm Bodies TrailerTwilight did it with vampires. So, why not zombies? writer/director Jonathan Levine, who brought us the delightfully affecting serio-comedy 50/50, recently finished his latest film called Warm Bodies that looks to be a mash-up of romance and monsters… with a healthy dose of comedy thrown in a la Shaun of the Dead.

While Levine's no Simon Pegg (nor Edgar Wright for that matter) the first trailer for his Warm Bodies looks to be an hilarious revisit to the self-aware zombie movie that pokes fun at the genre as well as romantic comedies.

Based on Isaac Marion's novel, the story has Nicholas Hoult as R (he can't quite remember his real name), a zombie stumbling through a post-apocalyptic America that has been destroyed by decades of wars, natural disasters, and other bad things we breathing humans inflicted upon our planet. While eating a man's brains, R meets his dinner's girlfriend Julie (Teresa Palmer) and makes the unexpected choice to save rather than eat her. But of course, this means hiding her from the roaming zombie hordes. For an unknown reason, R begins to slowly realize that he's a zombie, but more importantly, begins to feel emotions for his captive warm-blood.

From what we see in the film's first trailer, traditional zombie movies fans may get themselves a little worked up as it appears to move more towards a Rom-com than a zombie pic, but the tongue-in-cheek humor we're treated to shows promise of it being more like Shaun of the Dead and less like Twilight. Just consider the line as R begins to realize his own consciousness "They'll eat anything with a heartbeat. I mean I will too… but at least I'm conflicted about it" or the depiction of TSA airport screeners as wand-waving zombies. What's more, with the romance angle, maybe it'll be much easier to get our more feminine other halves to accompany us to a zombie movie. At least we can hope so.

Regardless, you can check out the trailer below - courtesy of Entertainment Tonight:

Warm Bodies is scheduled to invade theaters nationwide on February 1, 2013. While we're not too thrilled about the dumping-season release date, plenty of unexpected gems have come from the slot.