The Crazies: Analyzing Film Through Social Psychology
Hollywood has been using cinema as a way to promote cultural norms, traditional,
non-traditional values and hidden agendas since the beginning of motion pictures. Children
and adults develop in part our basic knowledge and cultural values from what we see and
observe. The importance of what story tellers portray on-screen can be construed as almost
a rudimentary subliminal message. One could view these movies as a modern day myths:
Stories that transmit the values and beliefs of the culture (Roberts, 1995). We seek these
types of entertainment to feel good and share collective beliefs, or good will always defy
evil, or the kid sees dead people. But are we really seeking entertainment or trying to
rationalize our human drama? In this paper there will be discussion of both films George
A. Romero’s The Crazies filmed in 1973 and Breck Eisner’s The Crazies filmed in 2010.
Material and events in the two films will be analyzed through terms of Social Psychology.
Although both movies are vastly different given made in two different eras nonetheless
they both have a similar basic story. Both movies start out in a small rural town where life
is quiet and unremarkable. A government biological weapon is accidentally unleashed on
the town in the form of a virus called “Trixie” that turns its victims into sadistically violent
killers. The government swoops in and uses deadly force to take over the town in hopes of
containment. A small group of townsfolk escape the deadly clutches of the strong arm
soldiers and battle their way to freedom from the victims of the virus as well as the town.
At first looking at the context of both films a key idea, anti-establishment, comes forth like
a flashing red light. The 2010 remake of The Crazies portrays the government in the most
imaginable negative exposure. The government leadership persists exclusively faceless
with but most seen by the viewers through the lens of long range cameras and satellite
surveillance as well as faceless gas masked soldiers. This portrayal of the government and
how the characters react and think in this movie directly represent how the cultural stigma
society was feeling at the time. In 2011, “The government more than quadrupled its use of
secret court subpoenas, known as 215 orders, which give the government access to “any
tangible thing,” including a wide range of sensitive information such as financial records,
medical records, and even library records. In 2010, the FBI made 96 applications, up from
