31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024 - Day 1: DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981)

 

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

In an agricultural community in the deep rural South, mentally challenged 36-year-old Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake) enjoys spending time with Marylee (Tonya Crowe), which arouses the ire of bullying redneck mailman Otis Hazelrigg (Charles Durning). The mailman harbors unsavory interest in the young girl (she's around nine years old), so he stirs up three of his friends by convincing them that sweet and harmless Bubba is likely to do something unspeakable to Marylee. It's made clear that the quartet make sport of regularly tormenting Bubba, but things reach critical mass when Bubba and Marylee investigate the new fountain that a neighbor has installed in their backyard. Marylee tries to convince Bubba to sneak into the yard with her, but, fearing that he would get into trouble, Bubba demurs. Once in the backyard, Marylee is attacked by the owner's big dog, and though mauled, Otis saves her and brings her to her mother's door. When the child is brought to the doctor, it's a small town, so news travels fast, regardless of the information's accuracy, and it is assumed that Bubba did something unspeakable to Marylee, so while the sheriff calls for volunteers to find Bubba, Otis gathers his loutish friends and the four embark on a mission of vigilante "justice," equipped with bloodhounds and armed to the teeth. A terrified Bubba flees to his home, where he lives with his aged mother, who reminds him of "the hiding game." Bubba knows the hiding game and he's good at it, so when the posse arrives, Mama Ritter tells the vigilantes that he's not there (which is technically true). The dogs, however, pick up Bubba's scent, which leads them to a scarecrow in the middle of a field. Baffled at first, the posse soon realizes that Bubba has hidden inside the scarecrow and, led by Otis, they blast the shit out of poor bubba, shooting him twenty-one times.

Bubba, failing at "how not to be seen."

Moments after ventilating the innocent man-child, one of the rednecks receives a CB call telling him that the search for Bubba has been called off and that Marylee is alright, thanks to Bubba saving her life. The four are tried for the murder, but the prosecution's evidence is nil, so the four walk. Bubba's distraught mother loses it in the courtroom, and as she's being hauled out by the bailiffs, she more or less curses the murderers by ominously stating "You may think that you're getting off free, but there's other justice in this world!!!" The shameless murderers celebrate getting off scot free, and they celebrate with beers at the local bar before resume their lives as normal. 

A few weeks go by and Marylee is home from the hospital, but she is depressed and wonders where Bubba is. No one informed her of the murder, and her parents, who only just realized the deep and genuine connection she had with her cruelly executed friend, opt not to tell her about it. The girl learns of Bubba's death from his mother, but she refuses to believe he's gone, noting that he must be playing the hiding game. But things get weird when the scarecrow that Bubba hid inside begins appearing in broad daylight in the fields of two of the murderers, so ringleader Otis is convinced that someone knows what they did and that that person is trying to rattle them. Suspicion initially falls upon the prosecutor, who vowed to nail them if he could find so much as a shred of evidence, but Otis's sights soon fall on Bubba's mum. 

As two of the rednecks meet gruesome "accidental" deaths (wood chipper and burial under tons of grain in a silo), Marylee also falls under Otis's suspicious scrutiny, and when he confronts her to find out of Bubba's mother told him anything, she states she knows that he killed Bubba, because Bubba told her. This spooks the hell out of Otis, so he returns to Bubba's mother to intimdate her but accidentally kills her in the process, so he blows up her corpse and her house by igniting a staged gas leak.  Otis and the remaining redneck dig up Bubba's grave to make sure he's dead, and from there things escalate to a final reckoning for Otis, who chases Marylee through a pumpkin patch in the middle of the night, with a reveal of exactly who is exacting revenge at the climax.

After hearing about it for over forty years, I finally saw DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981). I was really into made-for-TV exploitation and horror offering during my growing up years, but I missed this one because it aired during one of my Saturday night shifts at the local movie theater. When we returned to school the following Monday, my peers who saw it raved about it, so, unlike with several other touchstone made-for-TV efforts whose daring and/or scary attributes that we all bonded over in mutual kindertrauma, I felt left out. But now I have seen it and I'm glad to say it's a solid little entry-level shocker. As it was made for television, it features no gore, nudity, or profanity, and only the most minimal of blood, so this would get a mild PG if submitted to the MPAA, but its tale of supernatural retribution is quite tense,and I could easily see it scaring the shit out of any under-10's who watched it. And the killer remains intriguingly ambiguous until the last moments, with a final reveal thankfully does not cop out. Available on Youtube.

 TV GUIDE ad for the movie.