Starring: Lane Carroll, W.G. MacMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar, Lynn Lowry, Richard Liberty

After the experimental outings of There’s Always Vanilla and Season of the Witch, George A. Romero returned to full-on horror with The Crazies—a spiritual successor to Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead.

When a plane carrying a secret biological weapon crashes in the vicinity of a small, rural town, the area descends into chaos. Infected with a virus that sends them into a homicidal frenzy, the locals turn on each other in an orgy of bloody violence. Starring cult icon Lynn Lowry (Shivers, I Drink Your Blood), The Crazies is a stylistic and thematic precursor to everything from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.