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Dark Night of the Scarecrow: Another for the Spooky Season

Dark Night of the Scarecrow: Another for the Spooky Season

Last updated on: October 24, 2026 at 2:29 pm by Chase Padusniak

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Dark Night of the Scarecrow: Another for the Spooky Season 2026-10-24T14:29:16-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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I don’t usually like using the word kino. Partly because I knew it from German long before it became English-language internet slang. Parly because its saturation means AI fruit videos almost certainly get called kino a million times a day. But the word has its place: it fits when a movie strikes us in the way nothing else can, when the visual, aural, and theatrical elements of a film break through our fleshy carapace and touch the soul.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981), as is probably clear from its name, is not exactly kino. It’s what Gregg Turkington would call a “popcorn classic.” Made for TV, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is the most fun I’ve had with an at-home movie in a long time. It’s eerie, gorgeous, and goofy all at once. It brought me back to watching Goosebumps VHS tapes as a kid, soaking in the absurd stories of fantastic creatures in realistic-feeling environments. My soul, perhaps, did not feel the piercing ray of the sublime. But I had a damn good time.

What makes this little TV film so fun is its sense of place and willingness to play on common and obvious human feelings. We open with a shot of a large mentally handicapped man and a child playing together. At first, he destroys a flower. Anyone who has seen Frankenstein (1931) will fear destruction. We, the viewers, don’t know these people, and it’s natural enough to hope for the protection of the child. In other words, tension is immediate.

But she’s fine and so is he. In fact, the film will mostly concern the man’s fate at the hands of local yokels who resent him for his kindness and innocence. The movie has touches of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Deliverance (1972); it doesn’t shy away from playing into stereotypes common to Hicksploitation. That said, it includes myriad little details that lend it a sense of reality and place. The primary yokel lives at a boarding house where he drinks alone in his room, for example. Constant match cuts successfully build and release tension.

The thing is just well made. A Halloween classic.

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