Fridae

Of all the remakes of George A Romero horror flicks from the 70s, The Crazies has the honour of actually surpassing the original material, and by a wide margin too. It’s a zombie apocalypse flick, like much of Romero’s output. Following American horror tradition, the original was also a social allegory on the equal parts malice and ineptitude that is the military industrial complex.

Breck Eisner’s highly competent approach to the remake is to keep the horror premise and ditch the anti establishment ranting. Frankly, we don’t miss the rants or the uncharacteristically unsubtle (for the genre’s standards) social commentary from the original. That the characters in the remake are far more accessible and credible is a plus. The price though is the script does nothing new at all for the zombie apocalypse genre.

Does it matter that for this film, the zombies are created through contaminated drinking water? Or that they retain their higher functions and carry out homicidal rampages with all sorts of weapons? It ought to matter in a way that Shaun of the Dead, Fido, 28 Days Later and Zombieland played out, but Eisner’s craftsman-like approach concentrates on the textbook zombie scenario with prerequisite plot points – the slowly dawning realisation, the quarantine, the escape from both authorities and zombies – while tuning the social commentary to below the threshold for hearing, and giving up entirely on saying anything new for the genre.

While there’s nothing new, everything is so superbly done. The upshot of this approach is the detail Eisner lavishes to his set-pieces – both in the build-up and the execution. While modern Hollywood horror has tended towards visceral gore, The Crazies (and also Vacancy and even The Losers) prove that less is more: horror works best when things are implied rather than shown outright; the monstrous is truly monstrous when it is hidden and then revealed; the imagination is the one thing that can reliably make us jump out of our skins.

It seems almost criminal and unfair that a horror film can be made with such high production values. Surely, Breck Eisner is finally going places.