The Crazies (1973)

After the success of Night of the Living Dead (1968), George A. Romero made the romantic comedy There’s Always Vanilla (1971) and the only-borderline horror Hungry Wives/Season of the Witch (1973) before returning to familiar territory with The Crazies, another tale of a small group of people struggling to survive and make sense of a viral outbreak that turns its victims into rampaging killers. Gloriously stream-lined, it wastes no time setting things up and acts as much of a mystery thriller as science fiction/horror hybrid.

In the small town of Evans City, Pennsylvania, locals are starting to act violently and fireman David (Will McMillan), his pregnant girlfriend Judy (Lane Carroll) and fellow fireman Clank (Harold Wayne Jones) try to flee the town when heavily armed U.S. soldiers arrive and impose a quarantine. Unknown to them, a few days earlier n military transport aircraft had crashed nearby, an aircraft carrying samples of an untested and highly contagious biological warfare weapon code-named Trixie which has leaked into the local water supply. Those infected by Trixie either die or become homicidally enraged and start attacking others. As government officials contemplate nuking Evans City to contain Trixie and the army becomes increasingly trigger happy, the trio of survivors team up with teenager Kathy Fulton (Lynn Lowry) and her father Artie (Richard Liberty), continuing to evade the occupying forces with looking for a way out of Evans.

For many years, The Crazies was largely seen as an inferior copy of Night of the Living Dead which is extremely unfair. Yes the film is superficially very similar but as one might expect from “classic” era Romero, he takes it off in directions that keep it fresh and compelling. Like all of his best work, The Crazies is about something, a film with a subtle message lurking not far beneath the action-packed, blood-spattered surface. There had been traces of a critique of America’s involvement in the Vietnam war in Night of the Living Dead but here’s it’s much more up front and central. Images abound that would have immediately triggered the appropriate memories and feelings, particularly in American audiences – soldiers hunting down poorly resources civilian insurgents in the countryside, for example, or the shot of a Trixie-infected priest setting himself on fire. The military has been a frequent target for Romero and never more so than here – “The army ain’t nobody’s friend, man,” Clank tells Artie, “we know, we’ve been in it,” a reference to the fact that both he and David are veterans. There are also dialogue references to other key socio-political events of late 60s and early 70s America, including references to the killing of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970.

Elsewhere, politicians are targeted – as the outbreak runs out of control in Evans, in Washington the politicians simply talk, seemingly unconcerned about or unaware of the actual severity of the problem in Pennsylvania. At one point the calmly suggest using nuclear weapons against their own civilian population, seemingly more concerned about how they’re going to tell the president what’s going on than the appalling implications of what they’re suggesting. We never do get to see them use nukes in Romero’s film (possibly due to budget issues perhaps?) but in his-not-as-bad-as-one-might-have-feared 2010 remake, Breck Eisner had no such qualms and the government carries out its threat as a last minute act of desperation.

Here, the only hope for Evans City (and by implication the rest of the country) is provided by angry scientist Dr Watts (Richard France), part of the original team that developed Trixe, who constantly butts heads with his military handlers Major Ryder (Harry Spillman) and Colonel Peckem (Lloyd Hollar) while searching for an antidote (it’s telling that the US military developed a virulent bio-weapon but never thought to bother with an antidote). He seems to have found an answer only to lose it in the chaos that has descended on the town.

In a curious bit of foreshadowing, the group of survivors take refuge in an abandoned country club near the edge of town, finding inside everything they need to take refuge, if only for a short time: “there’s all kind of goodies around this place,” notes Clank. Five years later, Romero would develop the idea of a well-stocked place of safety into a central thread in his actual follow-up to Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (1978).

Romero retains some of the quasi-documentary feel that informed Night of the Living Dead, most notable perhaps in the scenes where the bio-suited troops descend on the town, rounding up residents and forcibly removing them to the high school where they can better be contained. The running battles between the invading military forces and the crazed locals would again have recalled television news coverage of the battles in Vietnam, shot through with a realism that was a hallmark of Romero’s earlier films.

And then there’s that rich seam of irony that Romero always mined so well, particularly in the downbeat finals. David disguises himself in a bio-suit to evade capture by the military only to fall victim to the ever-growing pack of crazies. The last we see of him, we know that he has a natural immunity to Trixie but are overlooked by the exhausted and over-stretched medical team, just as the antidote is destroyed by a riot triggered by the very military forces sent to contain the problem. The final moments have a strangely haunting quality to them as an equally exhausted and broken Peckem boards a helicopter, surveying the mayhem in Evans from air with dismay as he makes his way to a neighbouring town where the first reports are coming in of a possible Trixie outbreak.

The performances are creditable enough, mainly from a cast of unknowns, though Lynn Lowry would become a genre favourite with the likes of I Drink Your Blood (1970), Shivers (1975) and Cat People (1982). Elsewhere there are some awkward moments but Lloyd Hollar, Richard France and Harry Spillman are particularly good. They’re gifted with a degree of convincing technobabble and some cracking dialogue exchanges.

The Crazies wasn’t as successful at the box office as Night of the Living Dead though over the years its critical stock has risen and today it’s seen as a fascinating and effective companion piece to Romero’s genre-defining debut. As noted, it became popular enough to warrant a remake in 2010 and has belatedly become almost as imitated as the Romero zombie films, with accidents involving biological weapons occurring on screen with some regularity since the 1980s.