Review: Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

Directed by: Frank De Felitta
Starring: Larry Drake, Charles Durning, Tonya Crowe
Written by: J.D. Feigelson
Music by: Glenn Paxton
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray/DVD (VCI Entertainment)
IMDb

There are maddeningly few horror movies that use scarecrows well. They’re so inherently unnerving, instinctively conjuring autumnal spookiness. Yet the amount of decent films based on our straw-stuffed field friends can be counted on one hand, probably. One of those is the made-for-television flick Dark Night of the Scarecrow, about a small-town disabled man (Larry Drake) who is killed by a mob that incorrectly suspects he’s murdered a child. As the members of the mob start dying under weird circumstances, they fear a pissed-off spirit might be responsible. Despite being strongly implied by the title and marketing art, this is not a horror movie about a supernatural scarecrow out for blood. That may be somewhat disappointing at first, until the film’s other charms compensate.

Thought the script by J.D. Feigelson isn’t particularly nuanced — the film is essentially a morality play; the lessons to be learned aren’t buried in subtlety — it’s emotionally in tune in a way most horror or films made for TV are not. The story leverages this to amplify its eerie aura in lieu of gruesome kills and monsters. Viscerally, Dark Night is hampered by its small-screen genesis, but director Frank De Felitta and his cast and crew find other ways to keep the audience unsettled, a task made so much easier by Glenn Paxton’s supremely chilling score, the musical equivalent of drying leaves scratching against lonely fenceposts as they tumble in a fall breeze at dusk, of approaching the old, disused house on your street on Halloween night, as it’s getting later and the tricker or treaters are thinning. Though the movie was shot in California, its characters and desolate stretches of farmland conjure dust bowl desperation in the fading summer. The film harnesses its derelict buildings and decaying soul into a viscous, potent, gloomy ambiance.

The acting is stellar all around. Larry Drake, generally cast as a villain, is only in the movie for about 15 minutes, but he manages to cull a generous bounty of sympathy in that time — enough to carry through the remaining 75 minutes. His on-screen mother, played by Marlon Brando’s older sister Jocelyn, is a force, fiercely defending her son from a cruel smear campaign and calling out the foul skeletons in the darkness of her town. Charles Durning, though a second choice for the role of mailman, scoundrel, and implied pedophile, Otis P. Hazelrigg, is remarkably nefarious. There’s a refined balance of personalities in this town, illustrating the spectrum of humanity’s moral bounds, all collaborating to ensure everything impacts as it should.

There are a lot of stellar Halloween-themed horror movies out there, but Dark Night of the Scarecrow is near the top, due to its canny understanding of what makes the season so morbidly alluring. It works best as an autumn appetizer, for a September evening when you start to feel the summer heat die earlier, the sun setting sooner, giving way to those leaf-loosening breezes and a mischievous moon.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10