Dark Night of the Scarecrow Double Feature

It’s easy to forget with all the attention lavished on the big screen that often our most impressionable experiences as children come from watching television.  Whether it’s learning opera from Looney Tunes or picking up our musical taste from Miami Vice, the small screen can sometimes be more powerful – and more personal – simply because it’s piped directly into those suburban homes.  Horror has been a mainstay since the early episodes of Twilight Zone but things really took off in the ‘70s with classics like  Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Salem’s Lot.  And coming in right under the wire, before home video changed the media landscape, was 1981’s Dark Night of the Scarecrow, pure pre-teen nightmare fuel that seems to age better every year.

 

Bubba (Larry Drake) and Marylee have a special relationship built on the sort of innocence only children can share.  The trouble is, Bubba is a mentally-handicapped 36-year-old man…a fact that doesn’t sit well with some of the locals, particularly the local postmaster, Otis (Charles Durning), who’s just looking for an excuse to get rid of Bubba permanently.  So, when Bubba is accused of attacking Marylee, Otis and his gang to murder him in cold blood with their victim disguised as a scarecrow.  After the killers walk away scot-free, they begin to suffer fatal “accidents,” driving Otis into a paranoid frenzy of murder and madness.

 

The best thing about Dark Night of the Scarecrow is it doesn’t pull its punches.  Even though it was a CBS Movie of the Week and keeps most of the blood offscreen, director Frank De Felitta (an author responsible for his own fair share of ghostly vengeance in Audrey Rose and The Entity) crafts a deceptively dark film, not just in terms of subject matter but in the lead character we’re forced to follow.  As the disturbingly vicious Otis, Charles Durning becomes the protagonist and antagonist of the story, an uncomfortable narrative trick that makes the slasher-like revenge sequences almost a relief for the audience.  It’s an unsettling performance that Durning pulls off almost too well, his half-lidded eyes worse than any Halloween mask.

 

Speaking of the holiday, the film leans hard into an almost Bradbury like celebration of season.  So it’s not so surprising to discover that the author himself had a hand in shaping J.D. Feigelson’s script.  Things get even more autumnally evil in the final act which takes place in a deserted pumpkin patch which, thankfully, doesn’t pull any supernatural punches either. Unlike some of the TV product from the era which still requires a good bit of nostalgia-addled suspension of disbelief to enjoy, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is one outlier that still delivers the goods…on the screen of your choice.

 

Spruced up in a new 4K Ultra HD edition from VCI and MVD, there’s only so much improvement you can get out of the original material.  The rather muted colors inherent to film stock used at the time is still there, but there’s some definite improvement in the black levels compared to the Blu-ray version (which is also included).  To sweeten the pot, Dark Night of the Scarecrow 2: Straweyes (2022) is included as a bonus.  Writer J.D. Feigleson returns in the director’s chair this time and, while I’m sure his heart was in the right place, this shot of video cash in is barely worth a watch.  Luckily, the extras on a second disc include a terrific 30-minute Making Of, cast reunion Q & A, three commentary tracks and some cool retro CBS promos.

 

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