Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a low budget horror film from 1981 that is surprizingly good because of quality acting. The main actors in alphebetical order include, Jocelyn Brando as Mrs. Ritter, Tonya Crowe as Marylee Williams, Larry Drake as Bubba Ritter, Charles Durning as Otis P. Hazelrigg and Lane Smith as Harliss Hocker.
The premise of stereotypical redneck mentalities and lynching gives us the deep south setting in a small farming community. Our antagonists are a group of 4 overgrown bullies led by the rural town’s postman, Otiz Hazelrigg. The group comprised of the local postman, Skeeter the mechanic, Harliss a crop farmer and a hog farmer named Philby. has been tormenting a mentally deficient Bubba. As the film progresses it is suggested that Otiz’s obsession with getting even with Bubba may have been fueled by his own pedophile tendencies and subsequent jealousy of Bubba, who was naturally accepted by children as a playmate.
When Marylee, the best friend and neighbor to Bubba is attacked by a dog, he carries her limp body home, tearfully explaining that he didn’t do it. Her screaming mother sends him scurrying for home, petrified that he has been blamed. When Otiz hears of the accident he calls up his buddy’s saying “Bubba killed Marylee” and they bring bloodhounds to help lynch poor Bubba. Bubba gets home and manages to explain to his momma that they want to hurt him. She tells him to play the hiding game and helps him to disguise himself, like he has in the past, as a scarecrow.
The men think that Mrs.Ritter is hiding Bubba in their home, until the dogs pick up his trail. Following the hounds into the middle of a field, the men find only a scarecrow. But Otis walks up close to it and sees the whites of the terrified eyes of Bubba. He steps back and points his pistol directly at the ragged figure, waiting for his friends to hoist their own firearms. Together the 4 men unload 21 rounds into the docile man. Just then, the cb radio squacks and the group is informed that Marylee is going to be alright. How she was attacked by a dog and Bubba had saved her life. Desperate to save their own skin, Otiz places a pitchfork in Bubba’s hand.
The scene jumps to a murder trial, where the reputation of the postman as a teetotaler, pillar of the community, juxtaposed by the savagery of their vigilante crime is too difficult for the judge, who knows Otis personally, to accept and the gang is let go. The prosecuting DA is committed to finding a shred of evidence that the men did not act in self-defense as claimed, while Mrs. Ritter cries out that they are all murderers but justice has many forms, and it will come for them.
Marylee now fully recovered from the accident keeps asking for Bubba, but her parents can’t bring themselves to tell her what happened. She sneaks out to his place in the middle of the night and his mother explains that he has gone someplace that they can’t hurt him anymore. She runs outside to look for him and his mother eventually finds her signing beneath the very pole that he had hung on as a scarecrow. She tells his mother that he isn’t really gone, he is just playing the hiding game.
The next day. Harliss is startled to see in his field a Scarecrow. Knowing he did not put it there, he storms off to see his accomplices and yell at them for the sick joke. When they tell him they had nothing to do with it, it is assumed that the District Attorney must being trying to rattle them. Rattled nonetheless, he spends the day drinking, returning home late to hear something in his barn. While he is investigating in the loft, his wood-chipper suddenly turns on, startling him and he falls in. The incident is written off as accidental, but the guilt ridden mind of Otis is suspicious. He investigates further discovering that the machine had been turned off after Harliss’s demise, because the fuel tank was practically full.
But who is serving this justice? Who will be next to die?
