THE CRAZIES: George A. Romero’s Deep Distrust of Authority

The Crazies. In Evans City, Pennsylvania, a macabre crime occurs: a man murders his wife and sets fire to the house where his children are sleeping. That same night, units of the United States Army, commanded by Major Ryder, arrive in town. Soldiers in hazmat suits and gas masks declare martial law, place Evans City under total quarantine, and herd the townspeople into the school to wait out the crisis; those who resist are hauled away by force—or shot.

It turns out that a few days earlier a military plane carrying a biological weapon code-named Trixie crashed near town, allowing a deadly virus to seep into the water supply. The infected either die or descend into a murderous rage.

Two firefighters, David and Clank, a nurse named Judy, and a teenage girl and her father try to escape the chaos of a town under the shadow of nuclear-armed bombers. If the situation spins out of control, the President of the United States will have no choice but to order an atomic strike on Evans City.

After the success of Night of the Living Dead (1968)—a low-budget horror that became a midnight-movie smash and one of the most influential films in cinema history—George A. Romero could pick and choose his projects. Hollywood producers offered him more horror, but Romero was not then interested in further exploring the genre, and for his next film he chose the romantic comedy There’s Always Vanilla (1971), of which he would later speak very poorly. His third film, Hungry Wives (1972), also known as Season of the Witch, fared little better.

Both pictures were commercial failures that left Romero deeply in debt.

Desperate, he accepted an offer from producer Lee Hessel of Cambist Films, who put up $275,000 to shoot a screenplay titled The Mad People by Paul McCollough—on the condition that Romero add more action. It did not help: released in only a handful of U.S. cinemas, The Crazies grossed barely $140,000 and nearly drove Romero to bankruptcy and the end of his career. The Crazies is not one of those films that failed undeservedly.

It is truly a bad movie, unworthy of the master of horror title Romero once held—unless one counts its amateurish production values as “masterful.”

Everything reeks of cheap B-movie and lower-tier filmmaking: cookie-cutter characters, wooden acting, absurd dialogue, a disjointed plot, an unbearable soundtrack (marching drums every time the soldiers appear!), snail-paced editing and jumpy cuts lifted straight from the advertising work Romero did in the 1960s.

But the greatest flaw of The Crazies is the utter absence of any tension, a direct result of a story devoid of development or dramatic structure. The film’s structure consists of three sequences repeated in rotation: (1) the townspeople flee from the soldiers; (2) the military debates in the crisis bunker; (3) politicians attempt to predict the course of events. These scenes are completely interchangeable—no matter how you reorder them, nothing changes.

One cannot deny Romero’s ambition, for it seems The Crazies was intended as a satire of the military, government, and bureaucracy.

The social context is key: the director made the film shortly after the Watergate scandal broke and the Kent State University protest was bloodily suppressed, where four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen (students were protesting U.S. intervention in Vietnam, planned invasion of Cambodia, and the draft).

Romero wanted to show that the greatest threat to the townspeople was not the virus but the soldiers—the crazies who not only unleashed the epidemic but also shot civilians and stole their fishing poles (yes, there is a scene for that).

The plot thus grows from a deep distrust of authority, fitting squarely into the countercultural spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet this ideological underpinning loses its impact in the face of the many flaws in The Crazies, which cause the satire to collapse almost immediately.

In 2010 Breck Eisner directed a remake of The Crazies that is, surprisingly, better than the original.