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“I see strange people coming to churches across the land.”–Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, “If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?”
DIRECTED BY: Ron Ormond
FEATURING: Estus W. Pirkle, Judy Creech, Cecil Scaiffe
PLOT: The Reverend Estus W. Pirkle gives a sermon on the dangers of the imminent Communist takeover of America, dramatized by actors who demonstrate the coming persecution of Christians. Young Judy arrives at church late, telling her boyfriend she’s only going to keep up appearances. Initially, she’s bored by Pirkle’s sermon, but at the end she becomes moved enough to approach the altar and give her soul to Jesus.
BACKGROUND:
- “If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?” began as a sermon Estus Prikle preached, beginning in 1968, in evangelical revivals across the southern U.S. The preacher became so fond of it that he published the sermon as a pamphlet. When Pirkle met former exploitation filmmaker turned born-again-Christian Ron Ormond, he conceived the idea of turning “Footmen” into a movie to reach a wider audience. It would prove to be the first of three collaborations between Pirkle and Ormond.
- Samples from If Footmen Tire You… were used in Negativland’s provocative 1987 single “Christianity is Stupid“; it was the first exposure for many people outside of evangelical circles to Pirkle’s work.
- For many years Pirkle would not allow the film to be released on VHS or DVD, insisting it only to be screened in person on 16mm film in a church so that there would be a pastor there to lead people to Christ after the movie concluded. This led to the film being largely unseen for many years, especially after 16mm projectors became rare; it circulated in the underground through bootleg editions, keeping its legend alive.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Though many will fixate on the unexpected gore, the most significant recurring image is the leering face of pseudo-Cuban commissar Cecil Scaiffe, whose bushy sideburns remind you more of the rockabilly promoter he actually was than of a diehard Commie. Ormond loves to focus on a tight closeup of Scaiffe’s grinning, greasy face as he and his flunkies commit the most unspeakable atrocities against Christians.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Candy-throwing Commie; bamboo ear torture makes kid vomit
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Completely sincere, completely wrong, and completely bonkers: this attempt to use exploitation filmmaking techniques to preach the Gospel is pure hallucinatory propaganda.
Short clip from If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?
COMMENTS: Let’s not be cunning and subtle about this: the main reason If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? qualifies as weird is because its underlying philosophy is so demonstrably paranoid and wrongheaded. Today, this right wing Christian propaganda film is beloved and championed more by mockers than by believers. The good Rev. Estus W. Pirkle’s argument is that the ongoing moral decay of the late 1960s (as represented by the “footmen” of sex education, TV cartoons, drinking, and dancing) was so pernicious that it would weaken the moral fiber of the country, causing God to desert America in favor of Brazil or Indonesia. This in turn would lead to the godforsaken capitalist superpower being invaded, conquered, and enslaved by the tiny nation of Cuba (the “horses”; fittingly, the Communist soldiers ride into Mississippi on old-fashioned horseback). Once in command, the Cubans (with a total population of just over 7 million) would slaughter 67 million American Christians, forcing the survivors to work 15 hour days, 363 days a year (with two days off to praise Communism). All non-martyred children would be sent to re-education camps. And these events would inevitably come to pass within 24 months of the date of this sermon, if the country did not collectively come to Jesus!
You can doubtlessly poke your own holes in Pirkle’s scenario without further assistance from these quarters. But Pirkle, by all indications, was deadly serious in his beliefs. (He reportedly turned televisions towards the wall in motel rooms so he would not be tempted to watch them.) His earnestness and ideological fervor causes him to accept the most outlandish Cold War claims at face value, while willfully eschewing any sort of deeper reflection. Hysteria undercuts even Pirkle’s legitimate points, like the baleful influence of television on youth (though one again doubts the specific statistic he cites: crime rates have risen 1000% since the introduction of TV). Pirkle is also right about dancing: “the thing that started on the dance floor is expected to be concluded in a parked car or motel” is a pretty accurate assessment, I’d say. Footmen invites the viewer to indulge in a sense of smug self-satisfaction, because they are too sophisticated to fall for this line of baloney. And despite Greg Pirkle’s estimate that 6 million people came to Christ as a result of watching Footmen and its cousins (is it possible that six million unsaved people even saw the film on the Baptist church basement circuit?), I’d wager that these propaganda pieces led more even more souls to abandon (or at least moderate) their faith.
All of this would be not so much risible as depressing and alarming—considering how many of Pirkle’s contemporaries actually bought this line of malarkey, and how many of their descendants accept even wilder fantasies—if not for the entertainment impulses of fellow true believer Ron Ormond. To illustrate Pirkle’s dry. monotone sermon, Ormond brings the same questionable talents he brought to cinematic tragedies like Mesa of Lost Women and The Exotic Ones [AKA The Monster and the Stripper], along with gallons of red paint. That last point should not be underestimated: the film is shockingly gory and bloody for a Christian film, especially coming from a pastor who rails against violence on television. Ormond and Pirkle’s favorite scare tactic is to show dead bodies lying in the street (usually children, for extra shock value) covered in blobs of unnaturally-splattered red paint. At one point, Pirkle even allows his own altar and Bible to be desecrated by stage blood-covered kiddie corpses. There are a couple of big torture set-pieces that could have come out of a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie. Soldiers shove sharpened bamboo skewers into a boys ears (the tyke vomits—for real—for some reason). At gunpoint, laughing Communist overseers force a family to suspend their patriarch by a rope hanging over buried pitchforks, periodically instructing them drop him onto the bloody prongs. A young boy who refuses to stomp on a picture of Jesus Christ and has head sawed off for his insolence. Not that any of this carnage looks remotely realistic—the shock comes in the sadistic lengths to which Pirkle is willing to go to frighten his flock into repentance. Add to all of this acting performed mainly by volunteers from the congregation—most of whom would have been politely rejected from community theater auditions due to their inability to drop dead in a timely fashion when gunned down—threadbare sets (the same Church backroom is used as a TV station and a Communist re-education center), and truly bizarre set-pieces like the infamous “candy from Castro” bit, and the whole thing feels like a fever dream broadcast from an alternate reality.
Future Ormand/Pirkle collaborations would eschew earthly politics and focus on the afterlife: Heaven and Hell, with a heavy focus on the latter. A movie like The Burning Hell offers a greater dose of superficial surrealism, due to the low-budget infernal sets and demonic costumes, and to the addition of such actual torments as live maggots poured on the poor volunteers. Ormond’s later films, with and without Pirkle, typically featured recreations of actual Bible verses, enacted by parishioners with thick Tennessee accents, that were almost blasphemous in their amateurism. But Footmen remains in a class all its own. One reason why is because it is so demonstrably wrong. The existence of Heaven and/or Hell can’t be proven or disproven, but there’s no doubt that the bloody Communist takeover Pirkle foresaw if America didn’t immediately repent of its sinful ways was a blatant mirage. There’s just something about the clash of styles here between Pirkle’s fire-and-brimstone anti-Communism and Ormond’s sleazy drive-in aesthetics that captures people’s attention (and derision). It’s a marriage made in Heaven: bad movie Heaven.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
OFFICIAL SITE:
If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? by NWR – Link to rent the film, a note from the restorationist, and links to 5 essays about the Ormond/Pirkle movies
IMDB LINK: If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? (1971)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (Film) – TV Tropes’ Footmen page catalogues the usual set of motifs, but also takes time to refute some of Pirkle’s more dubious factual claims
If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? – The Cinema Snob – Typically sarcastic review of the film from the Cinema Snob
If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? – The University of Southern Mississippi’s description of its holding of the original sermon
RON ORMOND’S CHRISTIAN SCARE FILM: IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU, WHAT WILL HORSES DO? (1971) – Alfred Eaker‘s original review of the film for this site
CAPSULE: “FROM HOLLYWOOD TO HEAVEN: THE LOST AND SAVED FILMS OF THE ORMOND FAMILY” – Gregory J. Smalley‘s overview of the Ormond family box set
JAMES FELIX MCKENNEY’S TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES – Director James Felix McKenney (Satan Hates You) names Footmen one of his favorite weird movies
HOME VIDEO INFO: If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? was, to our knowledge, never released on physical media in a standalone edition. At one point, poor quality bootlegs abounded. But in 2023, Indicator, in conjunction with Nicolas Winding Refn‘s “byNWR” project, remastered and released it as the centerpiece of their 12-film “From Hollywood to Heaven: The Lost and Saved Films of the Ormond Family” box set (buy). Extensive details on the set and the included film are available in this post.
There are currently two options to view the film on-demand without springing for the entire box set. You can either rent it directly from byNWR or watch it with a subscription to Mubi (free trial available).