Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

Made-for-TV movies didn’t always suck. In the 1970s and very early ’80s, they were downright awesome. Just look at Duel, Gargoyles, Killdozer, Dead of Night and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark — solid, well-oiled genre flicks one and all. But the best of these spookshows was Frank De Felitta’s Dark Night of the Scarecrow (sorry, folks, but Trilogy of Terror is only one-third good).

Charles Durning headlines as Otis, a sweaty, pumpkin-assed small-town postman who’s also a closet alcoholic, big-time bigot and all-around loser. When the mentally handicapped Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake) carries the torn-up, near-lifeless body of a little girl to her mother, Otis and pals assume the worst and grab their guns.

Bubba’s mom hides him in the scarecrow on their farm field, but the vigilante mob finds him and shoots him dead. And for nothing: Bubba saved the little girl’s life; ’twas a vicious dog to blame for her bloodiness. D’oh! Just desserts arrive as a scarecrow comes a-knockin’ for vengeance, one by one. You might say they get the short end of the straw. (Insert rimshot here.)

So much of this movie has haunted me since I saw its CBS Saturday prime-time premiere at the age of 10. Nearly three decades later, it still holds up — sadly, so does the small-mindedness of its characters — as a creepy, effective slasher film, minus the slashing. You won’t miss it; this is a well-told story that gets its thrills the old-fashioned way: It earns them. This is a true horror treasure. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

2 thoughts on “Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)”

  1. I would take the 1/3 good part of TRILOGY OF TERROR over all of DEAD OF NIGHT any day of the week. In fact the last story in DofN is pretty much the same as the last in TofT (woman stalked in house/apartment by something evil) with the crucial difference that a Zuni fetish doll is crazy creepy and a bratty tween isn’t.

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