Family Trees: The Town That Went Mad
| The Gas, Charles Platt (1970) |
The trope of a crowd uncontrollably at the whim of their most base instincts1 is a relatively modern one, although
we might draw a line from the Divine Marquis and Les 120 Journées de Sodome. The
earliest example I can find is Charles Platt's "The Gas" (1970), in which a leak from a British military bio-research lab
causes the people of Southern England to deteriorate into lust and carnage. Although Romero stated that "The Crazies" (1973)
was based on a script "The Mad People" by Paul McCollough about a bioweapon plane crashing2, there are clear similarities,
as there are in 1984's "Impulse" – one of the
lesser known but better examples of the genre, in which a village has its milk supply tainted.
Perhaps the most brutal example is the long running comic series "Crossed"3, which combines this with the running zombie trope with little relief (in turn an influence on the non-Zombie 2021 virus film The Sadness). Conversely, perhaps the most interesting and intelligent treatment is that by Grant Morrison in two 1990 issues of the D.C. comic "Hellblazer" ("#25: Early Warning" / "#26: How I Learned to Love the Bomb") in which an English village revisits the themes of rural festival, apparently under the control of a nearby military base. For earlier influences we might look to three real world events made famous in the 1950s and 60s: the chaos in the 17thᴄ Ursuline convent of Loudun made famous by Aldous Huxley's extraordinary "The Devils of Loudun" (1952) (see also the film "The Devils", 1971); the unusual events in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951, as outlined in John Fuller's much maligned 1968 study "The Day of St Anthony's Fire", which proposed the case was one of mass ergot poisoning; and the Minamata disaster of 1956. Pont-Saint-Esprit possibly influenced Jean Rollin's (1978) The Grapes of Death, in which a bad wine harvest drives a rural area insane (on which, see Vincent Orst's (2017) Le périple); however, there is no evidence these directly influenced Platt as far as I know. |
| The Crazies (1973; 2010) | |
| High Rise, J.G.Ballard 1975) | |
| Shivers (1975) | |
| Les raisins de la mort (1978) | |
| Impulse (1984) | |
| Hellblazer #25-26 (1990) | |
Notes:
1Here we exclude similar themes where control is exerted on a population from outside to perform violence, whereof we might include (1927) "Color out of Space"; (1957) "The Midwich Cuckoos"; (1958) "Quatermass and the Pit"; (1971) "Dr Who and the Dæmons"; and (1987) "The Tommyknockers", to name but a sample. Nor do we include books of religious insanity such as (1977) "Gaudete", or the pacification of a population à la (1972) "The Stepford Wives" or (1976) "Children of the Stones". We also exclude crowds where a moral code has been willfully abandoned, such as Assassination Nation or the Purge series.
2 DVD director's commentary track.
3 Crossed is very specifically balanced between the two tropes by including a good deal of lust. The running zombie trope is a more likely origin for modern films focused purely on irrational violence, such as Cell.