George A. Romero, who created the zombie subgenre with Night of the Living Dead<\/em>, wrote and directed another movie in 1973, one which most scholars and fans lump in with his cycle of Dead<\/em> films. Yet The Crazies<\/em> is far more intriguing and insidious once you let it into your mind. In place of shuffling ghouls consuming the living where the fear of mortality and decay literally runs rampant, The Crazies<\/em> follows the accidental outbreak of a US military bioweapon, code named \u201cTrixie.\u201d Those infected by the virus, if they don\u2019t die immediately, are driven insane to the point of murder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Just over a decade later, director Graham Baker took a script by Nicholas Kazan and Don Carlos Dunaway and made it into a movie called Impulse<\/em>. On his director\u2019s commentary track on the film\u2019s Blu-Ray release, Baker openly admits that his film is a riff on Romero\u2019s Crazies<\/em>, with both movies using essentially the same premise of an experimental bio-weapon mistakenly unleashed on a small, rural town (in The Crazies<\/em> it\u2019s due to a plane crash; in Impulse<\/em>, an earthquake). Yet a premise isn\u2019t the only thing the two films share. Both effectively depict the breakdown of society in a small-scale fashion, using their small town settings as stand-ins for America in a petri-dish sort of way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Night of the Living Dead<\/em> brilliantly combines the social strife, bigotry, cold war anxiousness and infighting of the late \u201860s, its walking dead are, by design, no longer human, only hollow facsimiles of beings that once were. The infected victims of Trixie in The Crazies<\/em> go in nearly the opposite direction \u2014 they\u2019re almost too human in their reactions and behaviors, their emotions and justifications disturbingly recognizable. The harrowing opening sequence demonstrates the film\u2019s horror in microcosm: a young boy is attempting to scare his little sister late at night when suddenly their father begins smashing up their house, eventually setting fire to it. The children barely escape the man\u2019s rampage; their mother is not so lucky. It\u2019s a scene that presages the cold brutality of Michael Myers in Halloween<\/em> just a few years later, and that film\u2019s tale of \u201cold Charlie Bowles\u201d<\/a> could almost be a recounting of the Crazies<\/em> opening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sequence has an eerie quality of unreality \u2014 the juxtaposition of the children\u2019s playacting with their father\u2019s insane actions make a point of how the infected in the film aren\u2019t so easily identified as a walking corpse in the Dead<\/em> saga. Some have compared Danny Boyle and Alex Garland\u2019s 28 Days Later<\/em> to The Crazies<\/em>, and while that comparison isn\u2019t unwarranted (Boyle and Garland were undeniably riffing on Romero), the rage-virus victims of that movie are far closer to the zombie hordes of Dawn of the Dead<\/em> and the like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The truly upsetting thing about The Crazies<\/em> lies in how its infected aren\u2019t necessarily violent by default (something the 2010 remake mostly did away with). The most notable example of this is in the characters of teenage Kathy (Lynn Lowry) and her father, Artie (Richard Liberty). At the start of the film, Artie is an average protective and loving father to his innocent daughter, but when infected, Artie begins to become overprotective while Kathy regresses and reaches out for comfort from anyone who\u2019s around \u2014including her father. The incestuous sexual assault that follows is shocking, yes, but made more disturbing because neither character realizes it is incestuous assault until it\u2019s too late. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Baker and his co-writers further develop these ideas in Impulse<\/em>, which is more of a thriller\/drama when compared to The Crazies\u2019<\/em> thriller\/action-adventure. Where Crazies<\/em> kicks off with fire and explosions in Evans City, Pennsylvania, the infected victims of Impulse<\/em> demonstrate their insanity in insidiously subtler ways. The behavior of the townsfolk of Sutcliffe, California escalates from people urinating wherever they wish to public sexual polyamory (and yes, more incest) to theft to physical abuse to casual, nonchalant murder. Baker depicts most of these events with a chilling matter-of-factness, with some instances barely registering or unnoticed until a second viewing. It\u2019s quiet where The Crazies<\/em> is loud, the insanity of the town\u2019s new reality creeping up on you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is, obviously, a parallel to a pandemic in both films, and in the wake of the world\u2019s mostly poor response to COVID, both movies carry a more immediate sense of relevance. The government forces in Impulse<\/em> are as (mostly) unseen as they are uncaring, sweeping the problem of an outbreak under the metaphorical rug with cold maliciousness. The government of The Crazies<\/em> are more present and active, but are arguably more loathsome due to how pathetic they are. While certainly calloused, their feeble attempts to find a cure for the virus become waylaid by disorganization and bureaucratic nonsense, culminating in the scientist who actually discovers a solution (Richard France) being literally lost in the shuffle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The terrifying cherry on top of both films is the fact that, unlike the living dead or out-of-control rage virus victims, the infected are at times disturbingly self-aware. Sure, both films have protagonists who are spared: in The Crazies<\/em>, David (Will McMillan) finds himself naturally immune to the virus, forced to witness his pregnant girlfriend Judy (Lane Carroll) succumb to insanity, while in Impulse<\/em>, Meg Tilly\u2019s Jennifer, who did not drink the tainted milk like the rest of the town, sees her boyfriend Stuart (Tim Matheson) go mad. But both Judy and Stuart have moments of clarity, realizing their infection if not the impact of the things they\u2019ve said and done, as do other characters in the films (including, most awfully, Artie as he\u2019s raping Kathy). <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s this aspect of both The Crazies<\/em> and Impulse<\/em>, one that depicts the horror of such shifting perceptions of morality and reality, to strike closest to home. In my case, that\u2019s a literal strike: my father is currently suffering from a condition known as Lewy body dementia, and it\u2019s the second most common type of dementia after Alzheimer\u2019s. Earlier this year, he and I had a conversation in which he couldn\u2019t remember how we knew each other, and his diseased mind concocted a radical and preposterous story for itself, where he believed that I was estranged from him for years before meeting now. Speaking to someone whose perception of a fictional reality is as clear as that is a thoroughly disquieting experience, and it, like The Crazies<\/em> and Impulse<\/em>, serves to illustrate just how society and reality itself hangs by a precarious thread every single day.\u00a0 These two horror films, made a decade apart, depict the breakdown of society to a degree where reality loses all meaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":19202,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21820,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19200\/revisions\/21820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/impulse-1024x576.jpg\")
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