How Wikipedia Got The Crazies (1973) Wrong

This post contains spoilers for the 1973 film The Crazies.

Several years ago Shaun (né and Jen) released a video complaining about Wikipedia’s summary of the 2014 film Ex Machina at the time. I have been holding a similar grudge about the article for George A. Romero’s 1973 The Crazies and like Shaun instead of fixing the article myself I am just going to complain about it.

The Crazies, filmed between Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, is sometimes described as a quasi-zombie movie. A virus called trixie, created by the U.S. military as a bioweapon, has leaked into the water supply of Evans City and is spreading rapidly throughout the town. The military attempt to quarantine Evans City but struggle to deal with the rapidly spreading virus and the panic and violence that the virus is both inspiring and directly causing and the ambiguity of the two. I think ambiguity is an important part of the film and the Wikipedia summary, in trying to be a flat description of the plot, ends up removing that ambiguity and presenting a simple and wrong view of the story.

The virus causes mental degradation in its victims. As the current Wikipedia article puts it causes “victims to either die or become hysterical and homicidally insane.” This is, I think, the first way the article gives a misleading picture of the plot. Trixie does not simply make people into mindless killing machines, it is not the rage virus from 28 Days Later. People infected with it do end up killing a lot, but it does not necessarily inspire bloodlust: It generally seems to cause irrationality and a complete loss of moral perspective. In one scene three infected men charge towards the protagonist David, who is wearing a stolen military biohazard suit, wildly shooting at him. He tries to shout that he’s not part of the army quarantine, that he is not a threat, but when they hit Judy, a woman David was trying to protect, David returns fire, killing two of them. When the last one reaches David and sees him he simply stops, causally mutters “Hey coach, I didn’t know it was you,” and sits down without a single care about his two friends that were just killed or the woman dying in front of him and not even reacting when actual army troops show up.

People infected with it are still capable of thought and communication and this is, in fact, a huge problem and one of the core tensions of the film is the uncertainty of infected. One does not have to be hiding an obvious bite mark to be a risk in this movie and the military are in many ways just making things worse, packing everyone into the high school as an attempt at quarantine and shooting everyone who won’t comply. Within this effort a doctor named Watts, who was involved in the creation of trixie, is desperately attempting to find some sort of cure or vaccine. He hopes to find someone amongst the residents of Evans City who has a natural immunity from which antibodies can be taken but lacking that still attempts research into a cure throughout the film. He eventually develops a potential cure but is killed and the samples are destroyed in a stampede of infected townspeople breaking free from quarantine, while David realises that he is immune to the virus but decides to keep it to himself and not co-operate with the military.

That last sentence is at least how Wikipedia describes it. I disagree. Watts, throughout the movie, gets increasingly agitated, desperate and irrational. He tears off his gas mask in frustration while working on samples because it is too cumbersome to use a microscope while wearing it. He starts to see something in his samples that his colleague does not see or understand the significance of. When challenged he tells her to “Just have faith.” It is very clear that Watts is acting, at best, extremely irrationally. The Wikipedia article states that he is killed in a stampede of people breaking quarantine but this is not simply a co-incidence, it is because when he runs into a group of soldiers and starts telling them that he’s a scientist they just think he’s as crazy as everyone else and shove him in with the rest of the population. Whether Watts has actually found something, is having a breakdown from stress, or has become infected either from general spread or from mishandling samples is unclear. When he dies he may losing a potential cure, but there is also the potentially worse possibility that he had absolutely nothing and now the rest of the researchers, assuming him to be brilliant, are chasing after shadows he was casting on the wall. A doctor reassures Peckem, the colonel in charge of the quarantine, that “Our boys have checked the slides [Watts] left in his microscope, but we can’t make heads nor tails of it. He was on to something. We’ll dope it out sooner or later.”

As the colonel and doctor leave, David is taken in and the soldiers ask the doctor if they want to test David for immunity. The doctor takes one look at him and dismisses him as one of the crazies. David, as the Wikipedia article notes, keeps his believed immunity to himself, cutting off a potentially fruitful route for a vaccine. That is, if David is actually immune. He thinks he is, but he has hardly been a perfect beacon of rational behaviour either. Peckem is ordered to move out to Louisville, where there are “reports of symptoms.” The quarantine seems to have failed. Though perhaps panic is just spreading as news gets around of the military rounding up the entire population of Evans City and shooting a third of them. It’s going to be hard to tell the difference between the virus spreading and the news of the virus spreading.

I think this lack of clarity is a huge strength of the film and makes the closing shot of Peckem’s point of view as he is taken away by helicopter of the light of a small, illuminated landing pad being swallowed by the darkness of the night around it much more bleak.

And the Wikipedia article is bad.