Crazies Director Breck Eisner Stokes the Zombies-Infected Debate

One of the more difficult debates in the zombie world is what constitutes a zombie. Clearly, the base definition is a dead person rising from the dead, but there was an undeniable sea change that occurred when Danny Boyle unleashed 28 Days Later in 2003. Now these folks running around a apocalyptic London weren't dead, but still seemed the victims of a zombie-like plague. Does reinventing the zombie movie mean that the movies that follow are no longer zombie movies?

Adding to the debate is director Breck Eisner, who has remade George Romero's The Crazies, which in itself was not really a zombie movie to begin with, but trailers of the remake look more like a zombie movie than Romero's original. In a recent interview, Eisner vehemently denied that the movie has zombies in it.

Obviously, when you think of The Crazies and you hear that it was a Romero movie, you look at some of the performances and some of the footage and you assume "well, it's Romero; it must be zombies." But The Crazies is clearly not zombies and I didn't want them to be zombies. So we went out of our way to make sure that the design and the look of them, although having some kind of visual representation to it, was not one that seemed too much like a zombie. People are not turning grey; they're not decaying, but more important than that, is the way that the disease is manifested in the actions of the infected people. With zombies, they are dead, they've come back to life, and they all have a singular goal. Whether it's to eat brains or infect the people who aren't infected, all zombies typically have the same goal; they act as one.

In The Crazies, people who get infected end up unlocking this inner rage and the inner demons in people, and sometimes this causes them to act out against their family or act out against students who they've been dealing with for life. Or sometimes it might cause someone just to ride a bike or sing a weird song, but most of the times in the film, it turns them into a rage state. But their individuality and their purpose and their reasons for existence are still there; it's just they're mutated.

Eisner continues to say he's a horror fan, citing films "like Exorcist, Omen, Rosemary’'s Baby, or John Carpenter's The Thing" as references for his proclaimed "horror-thriller."

Feels like Eisner's heart is in the right place, but I still can't help but think that this a zombie movie without zombies.

The Crazies opens this Friday.

Source: Collider