The initial script for The Crazies was written by short story author Paul McCollough. Cambist Films, which distributed Romero's indie romantic comedy There's Always Vanilla (1971), liked the first ten pages of the script but asked Romero to rewrite the rest of it to their satisfaction.

The movie was shot on location in Evans City and Zelienople, Pennsylvania

In the opening scene, the cinematographer for The Crazies, S. William Hinzman plays the insane father who murders his wife and torches the house. His own children play the terrified kids in the scene. The house was originally slated for destruction by the local fireman as a practice run and Romero got permission to film the burning of it. Hinzman was also the cinematographer on Night of the Living Dead (1968) and appeared as the first zombie in that movie.

The budget for The Crazies was approximately $270,000 and it was Romero's first Union film but he also employed a lot of actors from Pittsburgh and non-professionals from Evans City and Zelienople.

In several scenes in The Crazies, local cops, doctors, fireman and workers from other professions were hired to play themselves.

Composer Bruce Roberts rejected a conventional approach to scoring the film and choose to use drum tracks for the majority of scenes, underlining the militaristic aspects of the narrative. In some cases snatches of traditional songs are used ("When Johnny Comes Marching Home") and natural sounds (dogs barking, a radio announcer in the background, crickets chirping) were utilized to fill in a lot of the "dead air." Roberts went on to score the Barbara Streisand comedy, The Main Event (1979), directly after The Crazies.

The kinetic, rapid-fire editing style Romero employs in The Crazies prefigures the fast, almost subliminal style that MTV refined and became famous for in later years.

The Crazies was an extremely low-budget film in which very little footage was wasted. Romero found ways to work in what he calls "dog shots," which are cutaways and coverage which can be used for reaction shots or montage sequences.

A lot of the audio mixing in The Crazies, particularly the voices of soldiers and extras and specific sound effects, were completed in post-production in the basement of Romero's Latent Image Studio.

No Hollywood stuntmen were used in The Crazies. Local firemen and licensed fireworks professionals handled all of the action sequences, including the creation and employment of blood squibs.

Sources:
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
Incredibly Strange Films (Re/Search)
Dark Visions: Conversations with the Masters of the Horror Film by Stanley Wiater
The Cinema of George Romero: Knight of the Living Dead by Tony Williams
The Crazies DVD Commentary by George Romero (Blue Underground)

Compiled by Jeff Stafford