We here at Screengrab consider ourselves to be omnivorous in our moviegoing tastes. So, in an attempt to counter the rash of pieces about end-of-year lists and other prestige pictures, I'd like to tell you about a singularly strange film I caught up with recently, entitled If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? Released in 1971, Footmen was meant to be screened in churches throughout the South, but the film is no clean-scrubbed bit of Christian piety. It’s perhaps the most notorious example of a regional genre called the "soul winner," designed to (literally) scare the hell out of stray believers and send them running back into the bosom of the Lord.
Footmen was directed by down-home auteur Ron Ormond, who was spotlighted in the indispensable hixploitation book Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, written by Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak. But the real dominant force behind the film was Mississippi preacher Rev. Estus Pirkle. Footmen was based on Pirkle’s book of the same title, and is a mindbending mix of fire-and-brimstone Christianity and anti-Communist propaganda. A sermon by Rev. Pirkle serves as narration for dramatized scenes of what would happen when the Communists took over America- based, according to Pirkle, on events that have already occurred in other Communist nations.
Footmen feels like a kind of Southern-fried Red-panic version of Scared Straight, containing one bizarre scene after another. The video above is from one of the film’s most infamous scenes, in which a state-sanctioned schoolteacher brainwashes children to turn away from Jesus. Believe it or not, the movie only gets weirder from here. Footmen is one of the damnedest films ever committed to celluloid, and one that ensured that Southland Tales was only the second most jaw-dropping movie I saw this past weekend.