Mad Max: The Secret Reason Fury Road’s War Boys Spray Chrome

Mad Max: Fury Road features many odd, unexplained details in its nightmarish dystopia, but there is an explanation for the War Boys’ habit of spraying chrome on their mouths before battle. The Mad Max movies are not overly concerned with explaining their fictional universe. Broadly speaking, George Miller’s post-apocalyptic action-thrillers let viewers fill in the blanks and rarely stop to outline exposition.

The Mad Max franchise’s stripped-back, dialogue-light storytelling has proven effective throughout the series, with Fury Road being so economical in its plotting that Miller’s approach was cited as an influence by Parasite helmer Bong-Joon Ho. However, this type of storytelling does sometimes leave details unexplained and elements of the movie unclear. For example, few viewers are likely to understand why the War Boys spray chrome in their mouths before battle—but there’s a clever explanation for this strange ritual.

The process of spraying chrome-colored spray paint across their bared teeth is seemingly just a tribal display of power and courage, but Immortan Joe’s actor once offered an answer for why the character’s devotees do this. In an interview with CraveOnline, recurring Mad Max series villain Hugh Keays-Byrne said that although the War Boys think what they’re doing is purely ritualistic, it actually involves inhaling “a very euphoric drug” which makes them suicidally devoted to his character. ”Chrome” and “chroming” are Australian slang terms for inhalant abuse, while around the time of the movie’s release Isis members used Captagon for much the same reason.

As such, this process is both believable and rooted in reality, while also being left ambiguous enough for viewers to see the ritual the way Max would—as a surreal, unexplained oddity no one stops to clarify. The sheer pace of Fury Road, as well as the plot pivoting to Furiosa’s perspective for much of the movie, means Max’s Fury Road voiceover is almost all of the insight viewers get into the sequel’s backstory. From that cryptic, brief introduction onwards, audiences are thrust into a wild dystopia wherein nothing is explained onscreen, but everything has a canny explanation for viewers willing to look hard enough.

Despite their devotion, the War Boys are ultimately unable to save Immortan Joe. While Fury Road’s action depicts the creepy warlord as nigh-on immortal right up until his gruesome demise, the tie-in comics explain Immortan Joe is a very much mortal, and deeply devious, former general who used his military experience to lead a violent militia in the wake of the apocalypse. Thus, even the motivations of Immortan Joe and the War Boys can be discovered even though, like their odd habit of huffing chrome, no such clarity is offered during the Mad Max movie’s runtime.

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Cathal Gunning
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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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