Movie Monthly - The Crazies

And so we reach the final film in the Month of the Zombie.  So far we’ve seen weird dehydration comet zombies, voodoo zombies, and resurrected mortician corpses so I thought I’d close things off with a much more contemporary film featuring a more modern understanding of the zombie: the infected.  The idea of “infected” rather than zombies is part and parcel to the explosion of zombie popularity that hit during the culturally defining years of 2007-2010. Zombies had been brewing for a come back in the nerd culture sphere since the early days of the 21^st century with popular cult hits like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the Dawn of the Dead remake feeding the flames.  However, from 2007-2010 we had the birth of Left 4 Dead, the Call of Duty zombie mode, Zombieland, Dead Snow, and The Walking Dead, a 5-way punch that cemented zombies as the defining cultural monsters of the 2010s.  However, with this resurgence came change as the idea of zombies as shambling corpses gave way to a more fast paced and destructive flesh machine zombie and the term “the infected” developed to describe them.  Suddenly zombies became infinitely more dangerous and powerful than humans but in only one film did they actually get smarter, 2010’s The Crazies. 

The Crazies, a remake of a 1973 George A. Romero horror film, is about a small town in Iowa whose water supply becomes contaminated by a military virus that turns people into bloodthirsty psychos.  The main focus is on the local sheriff, played by Timothy Olyphant and his wife played by Radha Mitchell trying to escape their town along with the sheriff’s deputy, played by Joe Anderson, and a handful of other survivors.  As the group desperately tries to escape the town they run up against both the homicidal inhabitants and a military contingent under orders to purge the population.  Cards on the table here, The Crazies is my all time favorite zombie movie, even if its particular brand of infected are more removed from the standard issue shambling zombies of the Romero years or even the raging power zombies of the modern era.  The Crazies, as they’re called in the movie, are a bit more in line with the villains you encounter in Dead Rising; they’re crazy murders who tend to put a unique spin on their killings based on who they were before they went crazy.  The only visual indication you have of someone going crazy comes from them acting a little funny at first and then getting kind of veiny and sick looking, they don’t foam or decompose, they just get kind of sickly and start brutally murdering people in psychotic fashion. 

However, the crazies themselves aren’t the most terrifying part of the film, that honor undoubtedly goes to the military guys.  The trope of the military killing of survivors to maintain a perimeter around a zombie outbreak is more than little worn nowadays but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done as well as it was in The Crazies.  The main difference in The Crazies is the context and visualization, a combination that has only grown to be more and more affecting in the hindsight of recent tensions between civilians and authorities here in the US.  The film’s depiction of military force exerted on a civilian populous is the slow evolution of American views towards soldiers that had been more or less souring since 2005.  Back then, the worst we might see is something like in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, where US soldiers are still allowed moments of glory but are also forced abandon civilians to horrible alien death.  Since then the concept of soldiers engaged with civilians have only eroded more and more, with more inhuman depictions in films like Children of Men or the tragically incompetent military forces of 28 Weeks Later. 

The Crazies serves as the capstone on this trend, the military having evolved into a literally faceless organization targeting a comically inferior civilian group who are deemed enemies of the state because of a mistake the military themselves made, with the final cherry on top being that despite all their efforts the military forces can’t contain the infection.  They’re faceless, amoral, self-serving, and just competent enough to murder people without actually accomplishing their goal.  This all reaches a truly terrifying crescendos when one of the main characters is gunned down at a military check point in a chillingly shot sequence.  The scene has only become more and more unsettling in hindsight as the whole sequence is punctuated by our hero approaching the checkpoint with hands held high shouting not to shoot. 

The other smart thing The Crazies does with the military is using them as part of an inversion of the classic zombie set-up.  It’s a generally accepted fact among critics and psychologists and philosophers that the soul of horror comes from indoctrination into the realms of cultural inhumanity, that we fear monsters because they rob us of our humanity in one way or another.  Classically speaking, zombies have always been about the inhumanity of death and its inevitability, with the true terror of Romero’s zombies coming from the fact that everyone would eventually become one regardless of whether or not they got bit.  However, that particular form of inhumanity has slowly fallen away as the super fast and super violent infected have come to supplant Romero’s shambling monsters.  Everyone has a pet theory on why America’s vision of the undead shifted so dramatically at the tale end of the 2000s, mine is that the infected are a direct response to fears of digitalization.  So much of our lives now is defined by sanding away uniqueness or idiosyncrasies in the name of streamlined efficiencies that we’ve become terrified that same fate will befall us and that humans is that fear brought to life, zombies are mp3s and we’re vinyl.

The Crazies takes this idea and turns it on its ear.  The titular crazies don’t actually lose their individuality, as I mentioned each of the crazies is insane in a completely unique and grizzly manner.  The inhumanity of the film comes from the military, who have had even the slightest ounce of empathy or humanity drained away from them to the point that we never once see a single military character without a gas mask to hide their face.  They’re the most inhuman characters in the film but they also force that inhumanity upon the remaining normal people and, by extension, we the audience.  There’s none of the glory in combat that comes from video game zombie apocalypses or even the descent into pure survival tactics that accompanies shows like The Walking Dead, we’re just targets for both the crazies and the military.  The film has the chilling effect of putting the audience into the position of collateral damage, we’re no longer the heroes fighting a war or people surviving the end times, we’re the price of safety, numbers on a casualty report sheet, with all the chilling dehumanization that implies. 


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