Vengeance makes for gripping storytelling, especially when the story is a first of its kind. The 1981 TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow spearheaded the killer scarecrow horror movie trope while weaving a compelling tale of a wrongfully killed man exacting revenge on his vigilante murderers. While not exactly made for TV – it was intended as an independent feature before CBS bought the rights and broadcast it a week before Halloween – this film from director Frank De Felitta uses the censorship limitations of network television as a strength, utilizing atmosphere and grisly implied violence in place of onscreen gore.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is such a satisfying horror film because the monster isn’t malicious, but rather just giving a foursome of misguided aggressors what they’ve got coming to them. From the start, town postman Otis Hazelrigg (Charles Durning) has it out for Bubba (Larry Drake), a kindhearted man with a developmental disability. Ostensibly, he disapproves of Bubba spending so much time with young Marylee (Tonya Crowe), spying on the Bubba and the girl with binoculars and scheming with local farmer Harless Hocker (Lane Smith) to find a “permanent solution” to the Bubba problem because they “know what he’s liable to do.”
When Marylee is attacked by a dog and delivered back home unconscious and bloodied in the arms of Bubba, Otis rounds up a small posse and the vigilantes track Bubba with dogs back to his mother’s house. She’s tried to protect Bubba by having him play the “hiding game,” disguising himself as a scarecrow in a field ‒ a method that has worked in the past, when Otis and his goons didn’t have the benefit of dogs with which to track him. Upon discovering he’s hiding under burlap and tattered clothes and fastened to a post, the makeshift firing squad executes him on the spot, only for Harless to moments later hear on his CB radio that it was all a misunderstanding and Bubba had actually saved the girl.
Because Otis planted a pitchfork on Bubba’s bullet-riddled corpse and lied on the stand about self-defense, the foursome gets off scot-free. But then strange occurrences begin. Harless spots the same scarecrow, only this time filled with straw, mysteriously erected in one of his fields. He correctly surmises this is a harbinger of doom, and soon the wheat thresher he’s been working on turns on by itself and does some nasty business. As mentioned, the death occurs offscreen, as do most of the film’s grisliest bits, but it’s an effective scene, as Harless desperately dangles from a hanging light fixture, dropping his scythe into the metallic churn of the thresher, the squeal of the machine presaging the sound it will make moments later when Harless falls in himself.
Then another of the killers, Philby (Claude Earl Jones), sees the scarecrow shortly thereafter, and in one of his silos, he encounters machinery turning on by itself as well. All the while, Otis is slowly unraveling. He alternatingly blames the district attorney, Marylee and Bubba’s mother (Jocelyn Brando) for messing with them, and even at one point even suspects that, despite 21 bullet holes, Bubba isn’t really dead. He causes more deaths, unintentionally in one case and with malice in the other (which is another offscreen kill deftly shot with a red ballcap sticking to a shovel used as a murder weapon). In both cases, Otis goes to great lengths to hide the evidence in hopes of saving his skin.
A notable character actor, Durning excels in essentially a lead role here, subtle facial expressions dripping with smugness, contempt or fury. It’s even heavily implied he’s a pedophile, a detail that perhaps unnecessarily tries to cast him in an even more sinister light, but Otis’ scheming and cowardice alone make him detestable enough that his eventual death in the film’s climax, delivered by the tines of the very pitchfork he planted on Bubba, is immensely gratifying.
Through impeccable sound design, the film creates an ominous agricultural atmosphere not unlike that found in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre seven years earlier. While certainly an inferior film, Dark Night of the Scarecrow utilizes incessant insect noises, the clank and thrum of heavy machinery and the kind of implied gore that made Tobe Hooper’s classic seem much bloodier than it actually was. Likewise, the agricultural setting allows the film to turn pastoral landscape into expansive, dread-laden spaces, where a grim inevitability lurks and steadily closes in on a supernatural form of justice. It even ends on a portentous note, with a reference to the “hiding game” soon turning into the “chasing game.”
Like many TV movies first broadcast 40-plus years ago, Dark Night of the Scarecrow isn’t currently on a lot of radars, which is especially unfortunate given that it’s recognized as the first feature film centered on a killer scarecrow. Fortunately, in an era where network TV is about the last place people look for horror movies, you can now turn to Peacock and even YouTube to stream this hidden gem.
The post From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Dark Night of the Scarecrow appeared first on Spectrum Culture.