By Oliver Longden
The Crazies is 40, but should anyone care? It is usually considered one of George A. Romero’s lesser works, partly because it has had less of a solid legacy than his iconic zombie films, and partly because everyone always forgets about the real rubbish like Survival of the Dead, alongside which The Crazies looks pretty damn good. Although The Crazies lacks the genre-creating cache of Night of the Living Dead and doesn’t have the hipster credentials of films of like Martin, it was still considered iconic enough to be fed into the remake meat-grinder in 2010. While it is definitely a flawed film, it is a flawed film with something to say about madness, sanity, and the thin line that divides them. The remake, by comparison, has something to say about avoiding crazy people who want to eat your face. I think the 1973 original still has an important message, even if it doesn’t always say it was well as you might wish.
In some ways the plot of The Crazies is the prototypical zombie movie plot. A government experiment, a deadly bioweapon, is released into an area and the army moves in to try and contain the disaster. (The 80s classic Return of the Living Dead makes use of precisely this set up and owes a great deal of its structure to The Crazies.) The bioweapon is a virus that causes a brain mutation which drives people mad and ultimately kills them. Some people become crazed killers and others become empty shells staring blankly into space. We see the action unfolding from two perspectives: that of the army (and their attendant scientists), and that of a small group of people trapped in the middle of the action. As the small group of survivors tries to escape from the army cordon we witness their mental deterioration.
We see a lot of madness in The Crazies, and it isn’t clear just how much is the result of the virus, and how much is the result of the situation. Right from the start we are shown that the army is woefully under-prepared for the disaster and hobbled by layers of bureaucracy that seem to make decisions almost for themselves. A key scientist is flown inside the quarantine zone despite his insistence that he will be more use in his lab, only to find out that the commander agrees but can’t allow him to leave because that would violate quarantine. As the attempts to control the townspeople turn into a bloodbath, the small group of people attempting to escape the corral start to fall apart, but are they infected or are they just reacting to appalling stress? The horror is wound tighter by the fact that there is no clear definition for when someone has succumbed. Unlike a zombie film (with which The Crazies is doomed to be endlessly compared) there is no digital line beyond which you are lost, nor is there a clear set of behaviours that define those afflicted. While zombies are single minded cannibals, these are horribly damaged people who may attempt murder, regress to childhood, rant and rave, or lapse in mutism. Worse still, they may return to lucidity for a time, armed with the terrible knowledge of their own degradation.
Another theme that occurs in The Crazies is the idea that the military will always end up oppressing anyone they come into contact with, and that this is as much a product of incompetence as it is ideology. The soldiers are very much the bad guys despite the fact that their aim of controlling the spread of the infection is entirely laudable. By virtue of their faceless uniforms, their monolithic bureaucracy and their endemic paranoia, they automatically become an adversarial presence in the town almost as soon as they have arrived. Rather than the well-oiled machine we are often presented with in American depictions of the military, we get to see a confused and divided agency riven with its own internal power struggles, and reacting aggressively because it doesn’t know how to do anything else. As we have witnessed the appalling failures of the military in Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of those conflicts, this depiction of soldiers and their role in mediating conflict seems extremely relevant even 40 years later, which is colossally depressing.
It’s not all good news, however. The film has some quite serious problems, which may explain why it was never seen as an important Romero film and why it never had the impact it deserves. The soldiers, dressed in white hazard suits and gasmasks, all look exactly the same. While an army of faceless troopers ought to be extremely sinister, the fact that they look like they’re wearing bin bags does a great deal to mute their menace. There are also some real pacing issues caused by the cast being just the wrong size. It’s too big to tell a taut, psychologically harrowing narrative focused on a few individuals, and too small to do the full ensemble cast disaster movie. In addition, the middle third of the movie drags; the civilians are busy running here and there without much direction, and the army characters are repeatedly getting irritated with each other and indulging in testy exchanges with their superiors. It’s crying out for another group to focus on who can act as a bridge between the two main plot lines. This pacing issue isn’t helped by the very small budget. This causes a lot of the action to be quite repetitive because all the action sequences are shot with six people wearing bin bags as the antagonists. There are a number of night sequences where it is painfully obvious that there isn’t enough lighting to make more than a small area visible, which hugely reduces the scope for innovation. A bigger budget would have allowed for more variety in the action. The addition of a car chase and a few explosions would have helped enormously.
While far from a perfect movie The Crazies has some excellent moments, and the question of how you judge madness and sanity is an ongoing concern. The new edition of the DSM, the handbook which clinicians use to diagnose mental illness, is due out in May, and there are strong concerns that it may increase the risks of medicalizing normal human experiences. This difficulty is well explored in The Crazies with the effects of stress, trauma and pre-existing personality traits all combining to make it difficult to say for certain which characters are definitely infected. There is no shortage of good ideas in The Crazies and it seems a shame that it hasn’t been plagarised as heavily as some of Romero’s other works. I would love to see a really large scale disaster movie/horror crossover and I’ve got my fingers crossed that the troubled production of World War Z will finally scratch that itch and demonstrate the viability of the unique approach to horror proposed by The Crazies.