DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW: The Real Monsters Live In Our Minds

In the 1970’s and early 1980’s, some of the best cin­e­matic frights could be found on the small screen.  The net­works were doing their best to keep view­ers at home dur­ing this era by cre­at­ing their own films to com­pete with the­atri­cal releases.  As it hap­pened, they were pretty good at hor­ror:  despite hav­ing seri­ous lim­its on how graphic or adult the sto­ries could be, the best efforts rose to the occa­sion with strong sto­ry­telling that tricked the audi­ence into think­ing they saw more than they actu­ally did.  Some of them even worked in a mes­sage amongst the scares.

One of the best exam­ples of t.v. hor­ror is The Dark Night Of The Scarecrow.  Originally tele­cast in 1981, it has remained a favorite with enthu­si­asts of small-screen scares because it offers the com­plete pack­age:  it is scary, it has a strong sto­ry­line, the per­for­mances are excel­lent and, best of all, there’s more going on here the­mat­i­cally than a few frights in the night.

Set in an anony­mous small town, Dark Night Of The Scarecrow begins with a mur­der of an inno­cent.  Mentally hand­i­capped Bubba (Larry Drake) is scorned by the rest of the town and takes solace in the care of his kind-hearted mother (Jocelyn Brando) and the friend­ship of a lit­tle girl named Maryann (Tonya Crowe).  When a dog attacks Maryann, rumors that Bubba killed her spread like wild­fire.  Local busy­body Otis Hazelrigg (Charles Durning) rounds up a posse to kill Bubba and when they find the poor gen­tle giant hid­ing in a scarecrow’s clothes, they shoot him dead.

Moments later, the posse learns that the girl was injured but not killed — and Bubba actu­ally saved her life.  Hazelrigg talks the other men into rear­rang­ing the mur­der scene so it looks like Bubba tried to attack them.  They are acquit­ted of mur­der charges and it seems they will get away with their crime until a scare­crow sud­denly appears in the yard of one of the con­spir­a­tors.  That night, some­one — or some­thing — begins to bump off the other men.  Otis strug­gles to take con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion and becomes unhinged when Maryann tells him she knows what he did to Bubba.  She also claims that Bubba is the one who told her so…

It all adds up to a taut lit­tle creep­fest that is as smart as it is scary.  J.D. Feigelson’s script is care­fully con­structed and never over­plays its hand in terms of shocks.  He uses the power of sug­ges­tion to great effect, never show­ing the phan­tom killer and keep­ing the ulti­mate rev­e­la­tion care­fully con­cealed until the last few moments.  Better yet, he uses his tale as a vehi­cle to com­ment on how so-called defend­ers of moral­ity often barely have a rein on their own per­sonal demons.

The film also directed in a pre­cise and skill­ful man­ner by Frank DeFelitta.  He’s often thought of as an author thanks to hit hor­ror nov­els like Audrey Rose and The Entity but he also had a par­al­lel career as a screen­writer and film­maker.  Some con­sider this film his finest work as a direc­tor and it’s easy to see why.  He makes effec­tive use of an eerie score from Glenn Paxton and imag­i­na­tive pho­tog­ra­phy from Vincent Martinelli to cre­ate an atmos­phere that gets under the viewer’s skin within the first few moments.  Better yet, he crafts all the key set­pieces with nerve-wracking skill and often adds a macabre flour­ish to cap each one off (the best: a cut-on-action from a man falling into a piece of farm machin­ery to red pre­serves splat­ter­ing onto a din­ner plate).

DeFelitta also gets strong per­for­mances from a cast packed with famil­iar faces.  Drake wins the audience’s sym­pa­thy instantly with his con­vinc­ing turn as Bubba (it’s inter­est­ing to note he would later play a sim­i­larly hand­i­capped char­ac­ter to great acclaim on the show L.A. Law).  Brando adds the right note of mater­nal warmth as his mother and Crowe dis­plays a nice amount of poise as the lit­tle girl.  The posse is a ver­i­ta­ble who’s who of char­ac­ter actors: Lane Smith from Red Dawn, Claude Earl Jones from Evilspeak and Robert Lyons from The Todd Killings.  Each turns in a nice per­for­mance but Lyons deliv­ers beyond the call of duty: he has a cou­ple of mem­o­rably intense scenes with Durning in the lat­ter half of the film and he really dis­plays his skills in those moments.

However, the film belongs to Durning, for he is ulti­mately revealed to be the film’s the­matic focal point.  The char­ac­ter of Otis begins the story as a manip­u­la­tor and a hyp­ocrite but is grad­u­ally revealed to be capa­ble of much worse.  The viewer gets a front-row seat as his veneer of respectabil­ity is slowly worn down to reveal the rage and psy­cho­pathic ten­den­cies under­neath.  This requires the nat­u­rally like­able Durning to play against type but he rises to the chal­lenge, pre­sent­ing Otis as a time-bomb of repressed desires who becomes truly ter­ri­fy­ing when he is cor­nered.  The end result is scarier than any movie mon­ster you can think of and one of Durning’s finest performances.

In short, Dark Night Of The Scarecrow deliv­ers all the chills you could hope for as well as an object les­son in the dark side of human­ity.  As such, it is one of the all-time clas­sics in the world of made-for-television horror.