Cult horror film 'Dark Night of the Scarecrow' finally comes to DVD

Posted Friday, June 11, 2010 at 2:59 PM Central
Last updated Friday, June 11, 2010 at 3:04 PM Central

by Tim Briscoe

You'd be surprised to learn how many really good movies have yet to be released on DVD, let alone Blu-ray. That's one of the reasons why we offer people the opportunity to receive email notification when old and rare movies are made available.

A perfect case in point is the cult classic Dark Night of the Scarecrow. This was a made-for-TV horror movie from 1981. It stars Larry Drake as a mentally-impaired man named Bubba who is wrongly hunted down for injuring a little girl. The great Charles Durning stars as postal worker Otis P. Hazelrigg, the leader of the lynch mob. The movie played on CBS for a couple of consecutive Halloweens in the early '80s and then was relegated to occasional appearances on TBS. The film was obviously made in a post Halloween and Friday the 13th world but lacks the slasher mentality of those films. Instead it's classic suspense on a Hitchcock level. Heck, there's even a moral to the story.

Oddly, the film was never released on DVD -- until now. VCI Entertainment is giving it its digital debut on Sept. 28. Dark Night of the Scarecrow has been remastered in high definition from the 35mm negative with a new 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound mix. There's also a deleted scene that never aired on TV.

Here's a powerful scene from early in the film: