All I know is that I don't know.

This week, Romero, Lowery, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (medium spoilers for The Crazies, quite light spoilers for the rest) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ The Crazies, dir. George A. Romero, 1973.

All the colors of the dark. The Crazies opens with a scene that mirrors the iconic opening of Romero’s most famous work. Like the “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” cemetery scene in Night of the Living Dead, this opening sees a brother scaring his sister in a silly way up until a moment where the scene turns into something else—into a situation where they really are in mortal danger. It’s a shift that highlights the range of emotions we call "fear." Among them, there’s fun fear (around the campfire, at the movies) and there’s real fear (an actual zombie, your actually crazy father going berserk). These scenes, straddling different fear registers, provide a kind of emotional overview of what to expect in each movie. In The Crazies, for instance, we’re engaging safely with a fantasy scenario, but we’re also thinking about real viruses, real bioweapons, government incompetence—threats that were then, and are now, worth worrying over.

The living. The logline of The Crazies points toward a familiar horror scenario—an accident has released a virus that's making people violent and insane—and yet the primary antagonist of the movie is not these violent people. The actual focus is more directly suggested by the film’s original title: Codename: Trixie. It's the hazmat suit-clad soldiers who are the major threat, forcing the population of Evans City into the high school and hunting those who have so far avoided containment. There’s a lot more avoiding the military operation here than there is avoiding the “crazies.” The infected are also a threat—consider the pure horror of a kindly looking lady rising from her rocking chair to calmly stab a soldier with her knitting needles—but the attention is on the military, and the looming possibility of nuclear destruction as the last-ditch containment plan, rather than on the people with the virus. When we learn that the virus itself is military-made, The Crazies comes into focus as a movie about fear of the military and political leadership. Night of the Living Dead's indelible ending has a zombie clean-up posse killing our protagonist. The Crazies doesn’t aim its camera at American racism in the same way, but it is a kind of feature-length treatment of ideas that overlap with that final scene. It’s all heavy-handed, inhuman, armed response to a real disaster.