Satanic Panic

Film: Race with the Devil
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I believe that I have mentioned my lack of religious belief on this blog before. I also believe that I have mentioned that I grew up in a town that is absolutely religion-soaked. One of claims to fame of the town I grew up in is that it had (and may still have—it was true when I lived there), the second-highest number of churches per capita in the United States. If you were a kid in the early 1980s in a town like that, you lived through the Satanic Panic in a very odd location. That’s going to affect the way that you see a movie like Race with the Devil.

If you don’t remember the Satanic Panic or aren’t old enough to have lived through it, a short primer is worth having. Essentially evangelical Christians decided that Satanic influences and rituals were becoming more and more common and were finding their way into culture and the lives of people around the country. There were alleged to be Satanic influences in movies and TV, in music, and, of course, games like Dungeons & Dragons were purely Satanic. Virtually all of it was nonsense, and the parts that weren’t were entirely fabricated. That’s especially true of the stories of Satanic rituals and ritual murder. It’s worth noting that there’s still a decent amount of Satanic Panic around in parts of the U.S. today.

Roger Marsh (Peter Fonda) and Frank Stewart (Warren Oates) run a motorcycle dealership in San Antonio and spend their free time racing cycles. They decide to take a ski trip to Aspen in an RV with their wives Alice Stewart (Loretta Swit) and Kelly Marsh (Lara Parker). The whole point of the RV is that they can take their time getting to where they want to go, and essentially stop for the night wherever they find the space. On their first night, the stop in the middle of nowhere in central Texas and the men race their bikes. It’s all fun and games until that night when Roger and Frank see something happening nearby that looks a great deal like the ritual Satanic sacrifice of a human.

While that’s bad enough, the group is spotted by the Satanists, who give chase and damage their RV. They escape to a nearby small town and report what they witnessed to the local sheriff (R.G. Armstrong), who is convinced that what they saw was a group of hippies sacrificing an animal. Roger manages to steal some dirt with the victim’s blood, hoping to deliver it to someone who can investigate it. This becomes more imperative when he realizes that the sheriff drove them to the site of the murder without them telling him where it happened.

Meanwhile, the RV itself is attracting some attention—Alice and Kelly find a rune pinned to the broken rear window of the RV. They try to research it at the nearby library and don’t realize that they are being observed. That night in an RV part, Kelly starts to feel paranoid about people looking at her. That night at a club, she has the same feeling, that she is being stared at by the other patrons. When the group returns to the RV, they find that Kelly’s dog has been killed and hung from the broken door of the RV. Inside, there are two rattlesnakes in the cupboards. It seems that no matter where they go, the Satanic cult is right behind them.

There are a lot of parallels between Race with the Devil and other movies. There are parts of this that feel like something of an homage to Duel. There are also a lot of movies that feel like they have cribbed from this. Roadgames certainly has a lot of the same feel in places, and it’s hard not to see that The Road Warrior took a lot of lessons from this as well.

The satanic aspects of this are naturally a product of the time. This was a popular movie theme around this time and there are plenty of horror movies that involve Satanic cults and ideas. The reality of the movie, though, is that these aspects are not important until the massive chase sequence near the end of the film. These are people being chased and observed. The fact that it’s a Satanic cult doing this is only relevant in terms of how things started. In a lot of ways, this has real similarities to a film like The Hills Have Eyes. It’s also worth noting that the stunt work at the end is really good.

Race with the Devil plays on the idea of paranoia and of being an outsider in an uncomfortable situation. The Kellys and the Stewarts are normal, everyday people who have been thrust into a terrible and dangerous situation. Who around them can be trusted? Is everyone out to get them? This sense of foreboding and growing danger pervades the entire film and makes it an effective little thriller with a side of folk horror.

This is a film I’ve been looking for for some time, and I’m happy to have finally seen it. It was worth the wait.

Why to watch Race with the Devil: Paranoia works.
Why not to watch: It really does feel like it’s creating the problem it wants to warn us about.