#Frank De Felitta

[astralbondpro]

The Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981) // Dir. Frank De Felitta

[horrorcrypt12]

31 Day Horror Challenge:

Day 2: In a Cornfield

Now Watching: Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

"In a small Southern town, four vigilantes wrongfully execute a mentally-challenged man, but after the court sets them free mysterious "accidents" begin to kill them off one by one"

Happy Halloween!

@nightmareonfilmstreet

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Dark Night of the Scarecrow (De Felitta, 1981)

This is the story of a bunch of good ol’ boys who kill a developmentally disabled man and spend the rest of the movie being killed in revenge and falling apart in fear. The dramatic sturdiness I associate with TV movies is especially an asset here, as it brings the characters’ breakdowns into focus, their sweaty discomfort squirming against the confines of the form. The head of this good ol’ boy posse is played by Charles Durning, and if you’re the type to confuse him with Brian Dennehy, you’ll note similarities between Durning’s character here and Dennehy’s in First Blood. The comforting quality I associate with TV movies is also nicely subverted here. Whatever affable demeanour the good ol’ boys may project has already curdled into ugliness once the story begins. It also helps that this posse seems to consist of the schlubbiest guys south of the Mason-Dixon Line. 

On a stylistic level, this has a low contrast colour palette that I found effective. The daytime scenes have a brown autumnal look whose comforting qualities are also nicely subverted, and the nighttime scenes are characterized by impenetrable shadows. As a TV movie, this has to be skittish about the slasher violence, but the way it works around it is through some elegant direction, like a scene where a character stumbles around like Inspector Clouseau and falls into a hay processor, and the movie punctuates it by cutting away, first within the barn, and then to a shot of preserves being heaped onto Durning’s plate during breakfast. The elegance does mean that you don’t get nonstop Scarecrow Man running around and killing people, so just go in with that in mind and you’re more likely to appreciate this. 

[sesiondemadrugada]

Z.P.G. (Michael Campus, 1972).

[haverwood]

Dark Night of the Scarecrow Frank De Felitta USA, 1981 ★★★ #TeamBubba

[movie-titlecards]

Z.P.G. (1972)

My rating: 4/10

Too silly to work as a dystopia, with its ridiculous realdoll children, giant video phones, and air-dropped execution domes, but too dreary to really be enjoyable for its camp.

[veryslowreader]

Audrey Rose by Frank De Felitta

Scissors  

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

The Entity

Sidney J. Furie’s directorial style — all tilted cameras and tight closeups — is a perfect fit for THE ENTITY (1982, Criterion Channel through month’s end). His skewed view of reality helps reinforce the film’s deeply subversive approach to the ghost story. At the same time, unlike less expert directors, he maintains his strong visual stylization without getting in the way of a very strong cast headed by Barbara Hershey in one of her best performances, so real she almost seems to be appearing in a documentary.

Single mother Carla (Barbara Hershey) becomes the victim of a series of vicious sexual assaults by someone who isn’t there. When she seeks help at the local university’s mental clinic, she’s treated as the source of the attacks, as if female hysteria had produced wounds she could not have inflected on herself physically. Her therapist (Ron Silver) suggests she’s responding to an unvoiced attraction to her teenaged son (David Labiosa), while his boss (George Coe) thinks she’s feeling guilt over masturbation. Her only hope is the school’s paranormal researchers, headed by Dr. Cooley (the wonderful character actress Jacqueline Brooks) though it’s just as likely some of the researchers are more thrilled at having found a genuine manifestation than by the prospect of helping her.

The film sets up a dichotomy between faith and science as representative of female and male viewpoints. Even when Hershey has witnesses to her abuse, the “experts,” most of them male, refuse to believe it. When the being attacks her at best friend Maggie Blye’s apartment, the woman’s husband witnesses the windows being blown in with no sign of a storm outside and still insists Hershey wrecked the place. What emerges is a vision of horror as a physical expression of what the patriarchy oppresses within itself, hatred of women. Frank De Felitta’s script — based on his novel, which was inspired by a real-life case — creates a parallel between Hershey’s Carla and Brooks’ Dr. Cooley. Just as Hershey can’t get the medical establishment to believe what’s really happening to her, so Dr. Cooley can’t get Coe to accept what’s happened even after he’s seen it.

Because De Felittta follows the real-life case’s lead and stays true to his themes, the film’s conclusion offers no real resolution, which may be honest but is also dramatically unsatisfying. Yet even today, it doesn’t seem likely society will ever get past the depredations of patriarchal authority. The film suggests some scintilla of progress. When Silver attempts to explain away Carla’s haunting, Furie has him consistently moving into dominant positions in relation to her. Later, when Coe refuses to acknowledge what he’s seen, he’s in the foreground, looking toward the camera, with Brooks behind him in a more dominant position. There’s also a bit of visual wit in the scene in which Hershey presents her story to the psychiatry department. The room is filled with smokers (this is still the 1980s, when people were just starting to fight for non-smoking areas in restaurants), and as they spout their theories of what they can accept as happening, the room becomes increasingly filled with smoke.

[moviesandmania]

DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW TV movie horror classic - free online

Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a 1981 American made-for-TV horror film in which four vigilantes wrongfully execute a mentally-challenged man, but after the court sets them free mysterious “accidents” begin to kill them off one by one. The movie was directed by veteran novelist Frank De Felitta (author of Audrey Rose) from a script by J.D. Feigelson. The latter’s intent had been to make an…

[cultfaction]

Cult Faction Podcast Ep. 112: Dark Night of Scarecrow (1981)

In this weeks episode Frank De Felitta’s 1981 made-for-television horror film Dark Night of the Scarecrow goes under the spotlight. It stars Larry Drake, Charles Durning, Robert F. Lyons, Claude Earl Jones, Lane Smith, Tonya Crowe, and Jocelyn Brando. It takes place in a small Southern town where four vigilantes wrongfully execute a man with Special Educational Needs – after the court sets them…

[michaelcoffeysthoughts]

Watched Today: Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

[brokehorrorfan]

Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Dark Night of the Scarecrow 2 will be released together on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray on September 10 via VCI Entertainment.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a 1981 made-for-TV horror movie directed by Frank De Felitta and written by J.D. Feigelson. Larry Drake, Charles Durning, Tonya Crowe, Jocelyn Brando, and Lane Smith.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow 2 is a 2022 sequel written and directed by J.D. Feigelson. Amber Wedding, Aiden Shurr, Carol Dines, Adam Snyder, and Tim Gooch star.

Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Dark Night of the Scarecrow audio commentary by writer J.D. Feigelson (new)

Dark Night of the Scarecrow audio commentary by film historians Heath Holland, Robert Kell, and Amanda Reyes (new)

Dark Night of the Scarecrow audio commentary by director Frank DeFelitta and writer J.D. Feigelson

Bubba Didn't Do It: 30 Years of the Scarecrow featurette

Dark Night of the Scarecrow cast reunion Q&A at Frightfest 2011

1981 CBS world premier promo

1985 CBS re-broadcast promo

Photo gallery

Dark Night of the Scarecrow tells of the murder of a young girl, Marylee Williams (Tonya Crowe), and the vicious mob justice wrongly enacted on Marylee’s innocent, mentally challenged friend Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake). A cover-up by the murderous mob, led by Otis P. Hazelrigg (Charles Durning), results in a strange turn of events. Soon, one by one, the guilty are stalked and served a specific kind of justice by an unknown figure.

40 years in the making, Dark Night of the Scarecrow 2 picks up with Chris (Amber Wedding) and her young son Jeremy (Aiden Shurr), moving to the small town where the events of the first film took place. Chris finds a tattered scarecrow amongst the cornfields of her new home and tells the effigy her secret; the real reason she has come to this small town. Soon after, a mysterious figure begins to roam the fields of their new home… stalking them or protecting them from unknown threats?

Pre-order Dark Night of the Scarecrows 1 & 2.

[art--harridan]

[Image description: A digital painting of Bubba Ritter from the film Dark Night of the Scarecrow. It depicts him with a burlap sack over his head, like a scarecrow would wear. The piece is a close-up, so the sack takes up the whole canvas. There's three ragged holes in the sack, two for his eyes, and one for his mouth. While surrounded by deep blue shadow, the eyes are very prominent and bright, gazing intently forward. They seem open wide in fear. Nothing is visible in the mouth hole, which seems just like a gaping void. The piece uses a lot of colours, but primarily yellows, blues, and greens. The painting is soft with some grainy texture and a lot of hatching, which replicates the burlap texture.]

Inktober - Day 25 (Scarecrow)

Film - Dark Night of the Scarecrow (Frank De Felitta, 1981)

[depalmafan]

Sharon Stone in Scissors (1991), dir. Frank De Felitta.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

The Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981) dir. Frank De Felitta

[sporadiceagleheart]

My favorite actress and actors television stars Joan Geraldine Bennett, Joan Benedict Steiger, Douglas "Doug" Stuart Sheehan, Claude Earl Jones, Frank Paul De Felitta, Judy Garland, Margaret Hamilton, Jocelyn Brando, Baby Peggy Montgomery, Baby LeRoy, Shirley Temple, Darla Jean Hood, Jean Darling, Mary Ann Jackson, Dorothy DeBorba, Mary Kornman, Mildred Kornman, Peaches Jackson, Peggy Cartwright, Shirley Jean Rickert, Billy Miller, Tyler Christopher, Jacklyn Zeman, Sonya Eddy, Judith Barsi, Heather Michele O'Rourke, Zelda Rubinstein, Richard Belzer, Michael Gambon, Richard Harris, Richard Griffiths, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, Robbie Coltrane, Helen McCrory, Sir John Vincent Hurt, John Heard Jr., John Franklin Candy, Edith Marie Blossom MacDonald, Roberts Blossom, John Ingle, Anna Lee, David Lewis, David Jacobs, Julie Harris, June Marlowe, Betty White, Carl Weathers, Virginia Weidler, Jane Withers, Jane Adams, Jane Wyman, Jane Waddington Wyatt, Cammack"Cammie"King, Lisa Loring, Raul Julia, Susan Lynn Gordon, Juanita Quigley, Julie Vega, Samantha Reed Smith, Dominique Ellen Dunne, Marie Eline, Ann E. Todd, Marlene Lyden, Frank Sutton, Jim Nabors, Phyllis Brooks, Jacquie Lyn, Janet Elizabeth Burston, Anissa Jones, Bridgette Andersen, Raymond Burr, Brittany Murphy, Denise Marie Nickerson, Clara Blandick, Jack Haley, Terry, Buddy Ebsen, Charley Grapewin, Billie Burke, Frank Morgan, Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Betty Ann Bruno, Carol Tevis, Betty Tanner,