31 Days of Horror Movies: Dark Night of the Scarecrow

Our month of horror film blogging continues today with a stone-cold classic from thirty years ago. Dark Night of the Scarecrow is the real deal. Don't be put off by the fact that it was a TV movie. This little gem knows how to affect creeping terror quite deftly. I just watched the restored blu-ray release last year, and the movie has aged well.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow

This is a fairly straightforward story: a nice, mentally-handicapped man named "Bubba" befriends a young girl. The prejudiced townsfolk don't like it, and so when the girl is attacked one day by a dog, they blame it on Bubba, saying that he raped her (yes, this is a TV movie from the early eighties). Four vigilantes, led by Otis (the town's postman) go on a search for Bubba, who has been hidden as a scarecrow in the cornfield behind his mother's house.

The vigilantes find Bubba, and shoot him dead. Not long afterwards, the men are hunted down, one-by-one, by some sinister force that, at best, they're only able to catch a glimpse of. The terror in Dark Night comes not only from the murder scenes, and the scenes inbetween when the vigilantes are being stalked, but from the notion that one's neighbors could hate you so much, just because you are different, that they would shoot you down in cold blood.

Aside from being a horror movie about death and revenge, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is also a film about love: love of a mother for her son, of a sweet man for a child that he relates to on a mental level, and of a child who never forgets her kind and protective "Bubba." It's one reasons this movie is still thought of fondly after all these years.

Comments

Yesterday's Restaurants

The local newspaper has a feature from one of Champaign-Urbana's most legendary restaurateur's, John Katsinas, on what his favorite area restaurants were that have now since closed (or will soon be closing). It's a nice little read, and has made me stop and think about the restaurants that have come and gone that have left an indelible (and edible) impression on me throughout the years. Here we go....

31 Days of Horror Movies: Thir13en Ghosts

While not a scholar or even a purist, I am somewhat of a film snob. Not a big fan of remakes, specifically when the originals don't need updating. It is therefore an unusual position I find myself in, preferring a remake to an original, and by leaps and bounds. Let's take a look at today's feature...

31 Days of Horror Movies: The Woman In Black

Yesterday, we had a lady in white, and today we have.... The Woman In Black Just as Nosferatu was our oldest horror film to be reviewed this month, The Woman In Black is our most recent. Released earlier this year, the film stars Daniel Radcliffe in a more adult role than previously seen in his Harry Potter career. He plays a young lawyer whose wife died in childbirth, so he has been raising their son (mostly) on his own. With money tight, and his job on the line, the young attorney takes an assignment in a remote village, much to his dismay. The small, closed community Radcliffe's character finds himself in is apparently haunted by a woman dressed in all black. When she is seen, a child dies. She is seen quite a lot during the course of the film. The locals get edgy with the attorney, making him feel most unwelcome. And when he is doing his work, sorting through the papers of a deceased elderly woman, he discovers the secret of the woman in black. It doesn't

Left to my own devices

Search This Blog