Word: towns
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...Crazies, by George A. Romero, whose 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead has been the inspiration for countless remakes and rip-offs. (Romero's latest film, Survival of the Dead, may go direct to video.) The Crazies - about people whose minds are poisoned by the town's water supply - wasn't quite so trailblazing. It built on that potent science-fiction trope, the takeover of personality by an alien entity, that dates back to Philip K. Dick's 1954 story "The Father-Thing," in which an eight-year-old suspects that his father's not quite right...
Ogden Marsh, Iowa, is one of those remote towns even the flyovers don't fly over. But for decades its citizens' decency has matched the town's anonymity. Dr. Judy Dutton (Radha Mitchell) takes care of the births and the ordinary illnesses; her husband David (Timothy Olyphant), the local Sheriff, keeps the peace with the aid of his Deputy, Russell Clank (Joe Anderson). Nice town, y'know what I mean? Until that day during a school baseball game when Rory Hamill strode out of center field carrying a shotgun he wouldn't put down, and David had to shoot...
Romero expanded this premise into parable of a government experiment gone horribly wrong in wartime. He posited that a plane containing a deadly virus crashed in a lake near a small town; the military then takes drastic actions to contain it. Made during the Vietnam war, and just after the revelations of a My Lai massacre, the original Crazies had an unmissable Vietnam analogy: the military must destroy this village to save the country. The local folks could almost be seen as Vietnamese civilians, politicized by attacks on their village and fighting back by any means necessary. There's also...
...heroes didn't go a little gun-crazy, The Crazies wouldn't be a horror movie. The truly radical approach would be to depict an ordinary place, let its people stay ordinary and find meaning and drama in their lives and deaths. But nobody wants to remake Our Town. Everybody wants to remake Romero...
...quiet morning two years ago, residents of the Danish town of Jyderup awoke to an unusual sight: a military tank driving down their main street. The tank baffled the Danes at first, but then they laughed and cheered and generally acted as if a circus had come to town. A Turkish artist, Koken Ergun, had organized the stunt to make a point: most Westerners have no idea of what it means to wake up to a coup, with tanks rumbling through the streets, TV stations seized and a sense of fear...