“They Don’t Want Me”: The Rural Cosmic Horror of ‘Scarecrows’
Scarecrows, even though it was released in 1988, was a film I first discovered through the pages of Fangoria, when it hit DVD in 2007. I couldn’t believe this movie had ever existed without me knowing about it, because I loved the idea of killer scarecrows. I had ever since I was a kid. There’s such an inherent dread to the uncanny valley of a thing sculpted in the shape of a man, but which isn’t and likely had never been one. A figure iconic to rural America, one that looms, ever-watchful, over a field to scare away the birds and to unnerve everyone else. A hillbilly golem. I could trace my fascination at least back to the classic Goosebumps tale, “The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight,” but it probably goes back further than that, to the first time I spotted one, badly made as it was, in my grandfather’s very modest crop of corn. I tracked down a copy of Scarecrows on DVD almost immediately after first reading about it. Since then, I’ve seen all the other notable entries in the tragically small sub-genre of “scarecrow horror” and this remains my favorite.
The movie follows a group of robbers in the immediate aftermath of a heist, with the film opening just as one of them leaps out of a plane with all of the money and lands in a field near an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, and that is a terrific starting point. We know nothing and, from there, we’re off and running. Other than the pilot and his daughter who are held hostage, none of these people are good, and they never get better, and they never learn any kind of lesson, and they don’t need to, either. They’re a perfect match for this runtime, to watch them try and squirm their way out of an impossible situation.
This is one thing that has always impressed me about this film from the moment I first saw it: we are truly dropped into the action right in the middle of things. We’re forced to catch up, and impressively, we’re not really caught up through exposition. We’re caught up through everyone’s reaction to the situation. The basics of who these characters are and what they’ve done are made clear right off the bat, and that’s all we need to know. We don’t need to know why they did it. We don’t need to know how long they’d been planning it, only for it to blow up in their faces like this. We don’t even need to know if they knew each other before this job. None of that is important to the situation.
In that respect, it is so similar to the film’s treatment of the scarecrows themselves. What they are, why they are, the film hints only vaguely and gives no real answers, and the ambiguity makes it so much scarier. Scarecrows is a film that in terms of both character and plot, tells us exactly what we need to know and no further, which only helps to aid both the paranoia between these people and the rural, cosmic horror they’ve found themselves trapped in.
Still, Scarecrows is a weird recommend, in some respects, because it does some stuff that you objectively shouldn’t do in movies, like sudden narration, hearing someone’s inner monologue for just a scene, to hear their thoughts as they discover a truck doesn’t have any keys or gas — things that are absolutely expressed visually without the need for that. And yet it creates such an impressive, otherworldly atmosphere that other, better movies often don’t come close to replicating.
It’s got a genuinely unsettling feel to it, and that atmosphere makes it a terrific watch for the season. Scarecrows is a perfect marriage of a reprehensible cast of characters and a short runtime. It would be tough to live with this group of characters for too long. These people are so bad that when one of them conceives the explanation that what’s happening to them may simply be that they are dead and in Hell, the others clearly consider it as a legitimate possibility.
One of my favorite things about this movie is that there’s barely any information given as to how these scarecrows are alive or where they came from. The characters don’t know that and neither does the audience. We are literally dropped into this situation alongside them. And I love that the farm seems to wake up when they get there and go to sleep again when they live, as if the place itself is a thing that is hungry and waiting.
That’s the one thing that’s explicitly shown to the audience, in terms of things moving by themselves, a generator or faucet turning on, a pinwheel spinning in the absence of wind, whatever the case may be. The land, whatever this place is, is preparing itself for their arrival. And when they leave, once the last survivors have escaped — or so it seems — the farm shuts down, it rests, well-fed. Without any explicit explanation that tells me that the scarecrows are simply tools of the place itself, as much implements of death as the pitchforks and scythes that they carry. I think that is the scariest of all possible explanations, because sometimes an answer as simple as “It is a bad place” is the most chilling explanation of all.
This place wants to be fed, and it feeds on their greed. I love that about the movie as well. When criminals are the protagonists in horror, their vices are often exploited, falling victims to their perceived weaknesses. Scarecrows is no different. These are bad guys to the point that, again, one of them just assumes he’s in Hell the moment things get weird. But the only sin these people all share is greed, it’s the one that drives them and it’s the one that the farm frequently uses against them, whether it be finding one of their own turned into a scarecrow stuffed with money instead of straw, or finding the missing cash all over the ground in an attempt to lure them outside. No matter what happens, their own survival never becomes more important than the money. They’re consumed by their greed and the scarecrows, the farm itself, consumes them in turn. Not by actually eating them, of course, but by making them a part of it. That’s the cycle of this place, to eat and be eaten.
To me, Scarecrows feels very much like an episode of an anthology series of the ’80s or ’90s like Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Darkside, or Monsters. I know I wasn’t the only one who would watch some of those episodes and think, “Man, I would watch a whole movie about that.” Scarecrows is that movie. I’m a sucker for the simple, rustic aesthetic of killer scarecrows, and this is my go-to scarecrow flick, even more than the very good and more widely celebrated Dark Night of the Scarecrow.
This is a movie that might be best paired to a certain kind of viewing experience. If you saw it in a theater, you might be underwhelmed, but if you caught it on midnight on cable, it’s that kind of jolt of an unexpected surprise that could keep you talking about it for weeks. A top-notch midnight monster movie.
