The Crazies (1973)

Without George A. Romero's The Crazies, I genuinely don't think we get the 28 Days Later franchise. Not in the form we know it, anyway. This film is the missing link, the scrappy, sweat-soaked template for every "virus turns people feral while institutions crumble" horror story that followed. And the fact that it's still not talked about in the same breath as Romero's more celebrated work is a genuine mystery to me.

Think of the bleakness he brought to Night of the Living Dead, that suffocating sense that society is one bad day away from eating itself alive, and then imagine swapping out the undead for something even more unsettling: your neighbours, your soldiers, your government, all tipping incrementally into madness. No slow shuffle, no rotting flesh. Just ordinary people, wrong in ways that are hard to pin down until it's too late. The virus at the centre of the story doesn't just kill, it unravels. And Romero is more interested in watching the institutions sent to contain it unravel right alongside it.

The military presence here is not reassuring. It's suffocating, clumsy and ultimately just as dangerous as the infection itself. The quarantine doesn't feel like protection, it feels like a lid being pressed down on a boiling pot. Romero doesn't let the authorities off the hook for a single frame, and that political bite, the distrust of top-down power, the sense that the people in charge are improvising badly while ordinary lives burn, gives the film a weight that outlasts its budget.

And the budget really is minimal. But Romero turns that into a weapon. The handheld camerawork and natural lighting strip away any sense of Hollywood polish and leave something that feels uncomfortably close to documentary footage. The gore is restrained by later standards, but the deaths land because of texture and atmosphere rather than spectacle. Splattered walls, twitchy behaviour, the score cutting in like a panic attack in musical form. Church bells and discordant noise, not music so much as the sound of civilisation losing its rhythm. It's genuinely unsettling in a way that a slicker production might have smoothed right out.

The acting is uneven, I won't pretend otherwise. Some performances tip into territory that's closer to local news broadcast than genuine distress. But oddly, that inconsistency feeds the chaos rather than undermining it. When everything feels slightly off-kilter, the occasional scenery-chewing moment doesn't stick out as badly as it might elsewhere. And the town itself carries the film when the performances wobble. Claustrophobic, grimy, every corner suggesting something worse just out of frame.

The pacing does drag in places, particularly through the middle stretch, and that's a fair criticism. But it's worth sticking with, because the ending is pure Romero. Nobody escapes clean. Nobody wins. No cathartic rescue, no last-minute redemption. Just the machinery of failure grinding on, indifferent to the individuals caught inside it. It's the same nihilism he'd sharpen into something even more pointed with Survival of the Dead decades later, though that film went in stranger directions. Here, it's raw and unadorned.

What I keep coming back to is how prescient it all feels. The government-engineered catastrophe, the communications breakdown, the way ordinary people become threats simply by existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Romero wasn't just making a horror film. He was sketching out a paranoid vision of how quickly the social contract dissolves when something goes wrong at the top and nobody at the bottom is trusted with the truth. That's not clever in retrospect. That's the whole point, baked in from the start.

Three and a half stars. Rough around the edges, yes. But essential Romero, and far more influential than its reputation gives it credit for.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1973  | Watched: 2025-06-26

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from George A. Romero: Creepshow (1982) · Jacaranda Joe (2022) · BIOHAZARD 2 TV-CM (1997) · Survival of the Dead (2009)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)