By Sean Zucker –
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the apocalypse is closer than ever. While film and culture have long suspected and theorized the initial spark of our species’ demise, new information should shift the conventional thinking. Traditionally, the usual suspects have proved to be hyperintelligent aliens, fully conscious robots or a widespread zombie virus. But a new likely culprit possessing the strength of all three threats combined has recently emerged—crows.
According to STAT, crows are not only hyperintelligent but they may have true, self-aware consciousness. “Crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals,” it reports, or perhaps warns.
Newer research published in Science even saw crows performing high-level brain actions involving neurological activity that suggests they possess the ability to make decisions and act based on sense and reason.
Given this new information, it seems high time to do some revisionist history and reevaluate a few cinema classics to better reflect this monumentally obvious apocalyptic menace.
Planet Of The Crows
An astronaut crew crash-lands unexpectedly on Earth in the distant future where intelligent talking crows are the dominant species, and humans are the oppressed and enslaved, left to feed off garbage scraps and carcasses on the side of the road.
Night Of the Living Crows
A ragtag group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating crows that are ravaging the East Coast of the United States.
World War C
Former United Nations employee Gerry Lane traverses the world in various stylish scarves and a race against time to stop infectious crows that are toppling armies and governments, threatening to destroy humanity itself.
A Caw Caw Place
Most of Earth’s human population has been annihilated by blind crows with hypersensitive hearing that attack anything making noise other than a raspy “caw” call. One family is forced to live in silence while hiding from these monsters.
RoboCrow
In crime-ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded crow returns to the skies as a powerful cyborg hybrid haunted by submerged memories of corruption and mistreatment.
Termitenator
Crows, known for making meals of termites, have nearly wiped out the species from existence leaving the human race vulnerable to extinction without one of its most effective natural recycling tools that help break down fallen trees and dead wood into nutrient-rich soil needed for other plants to grow. But one human soldier is sent from 2029 to 1984 to stop a nearly indestructible crow killing machine, sent from the same year, dedicated to executing a young woman whose unborn son is the key to humankind and termitekind’s future salvation.
Mad Max: The Roadkill Warrior
Flying through a self-destructing wasteland, a vengeful Australian crow sets out to stop a violent motorcycle gang.
Invasion Of The Carcass Snatchers
When strange seeds drift to the ground from various crows’ nests, mysterious pods begin to grow and invade San Francisco, California, where they replicate the residents into emotionless automatons one body at a time.
The Day The Flock Stood Still
A group of crows land and tell people of Earth that they must live peacefully or be destroyed as a danger to other flocks.
The Birds
Even in death, Hitchcock is ahead of his time.
