Lifeless, human-shaped figures made of straw are already creepy sights, whether as decorations for autumn-themed events or when hung up on posts in the middle of a cornfield. That is before movies, shows, and books turn themed into monsters. No longer are they a singing friend of Dorothy Gale. They belong to the “killer scarecrow” subgenre that goes on to include one of the best monsters in Supernatural and the unsettling design of Harold in the 2019 film adaptation of the short story collection, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. But what is scarier than one deadly, creepy straw-filled monstrosity? Try a swarm of scarecrows that are lurking in a haunted cornfield in 2011’s Husk, where a group of unlucky friends fall prey to supernatural horror once the sun goes down.
What Is ‘Husk’ About?
On a long, dusty road somewhere in the rural Midwest, a road trip takes a turn for the worse. As an endless cornfield drifts by on both sides, a group of friends suddenly get into a car accident after crows slam into the windshield. They get knocked out, and when they awaken, one of them has gone missing, and they are stranded with no help in sight. Without any good options, the group makes one of the worst decisions you can make in a horror movie: They split up. One half goes to find out if anyone lives in the farmhouse in the distance, surrounded by cornstalks, unknowingly walking straight into the danger zone.
As the friend group gets smaller, the fears and anxieties only get bigger: Chris (C. J. Thomason) is the most vocal in expressing the need to leave the cornfield, while Scott (Devon Graye) begins to experience visions of the land’s dark past and Brian (Wes Chatham) won’t stop looking for his missing girlfriend. The first act creeps up on you. Everything feels wrong, but neither the characters nor the viewers know exactly why that is. As they split up and then try to regroup, the camera never wastes a moment to capture the sun sinking closer into the horizon. The daylight horror is atmospheric, with the friends walking into a small clearing where an abandoned farmhouse sits. Very soon, the endless rows of corn will be plunged into darkness, and that is on top of glimpses that something is moving inside. Husk doesn’t rush into revealing its scarecrows, and when they do finally appear, death is not the only thing the remaining friends need to worry about.
‘Husk’ Reveals Supernatural Horror That Turns Scarecrows Into Serial Killers
The movie is based on a short film by Brett Simmons, who returns as director for this feature-length version, where he takes the additional runtime to tease the straw-filled monsters audiences want to see. It’s worth the wait. Before she goes missing, Brian’s girlfriend, Natalie (Tammin Sursok), spots a body lying near the start of the cornfield. She mistakes it for a person and approaches it, discovering it’s a dirty, old scarecrow — but sees teeth in the mouth hole of the burlap sack around the head. When Husk finally lets the scarecrows come out to play, they become part of a larger haunting that has taken over the land, going back to a rivalry between brothers who used to live there. The movie stops short of being taken over by exposition-dumping flashbacks. The answers (and lack thereof) to the supernatural horror in Husk make it stand apart from others in the “killer scarecrow” crop.
Along with books and TV shows, the movies in this subgenre have given scarecrows a bad name in the best way possible There are older classics, like 1981’s Dark Night of the Scarecrow, and modern entries, like the aforementioned Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in 2019, where the scares come in twofold. The appearance of the scarecrow is frightening by itself when they are lifeless, surely doing their jobs well in spooking birds away. But it’s bone-chilling when the uncanny humanoid becomes animated. Husk continues this double whammy. The handcrafted design of the scarecrows that the friends spot is frightening without needing to animate them. But, when they get vicious, director Brett Simmons has another trick to make them the stuff of nightmares.
‘Husk’ Adds More Fear to Scarecrows
In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Simmons talked about Husk and how he wanted to handle the straw-filled monsters. “To me, scarecrows in a cornfield should be like predators in their natural habitat, and you’re their prey, out of your element,” he said, “They’re Jaws, and you’re in the water.” Cornfields may have killer clowns in them, but they aren’t the only ones to rush through the stalks to catch a victim. Putting that on screen, Simmons has “predators” that can pop out anywhere once the friends are in the rows of corn; the editing and camera go for quick cuts of them rushing through the cornfield as they hunt.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is another haunting, but its scarecrow is mostly kept hooked onto a post as an eerie omen of death. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark lets Harold off his post for him to lumber forward in a slow, inevitable march to his victim. The friends in Husk have to be much quicker if they want to escape an attack in Husk. The rapid speed and their deadliness make it perfectly clear to the audience that not all the characters will be outrunning them. So, next time you find yourself in a cornfield at night, don’t do a Pearl on it and keep your distance from those scarecrows!
