The comedy of horror
It was a movie about necrophilia in small-town New Zealand, but the censors were more worried about the F word, writes James Croot.
Sam Pillsbury has news for the generation of Kiwis traumatised by viewing The Scarecrow when they were young – it’s not a horror movie. Sure, his 1981 adaptation of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s 1963 novel might boast the famous tagline ‘‘the same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut’’, but the American-born film-maker assures me that it’s not as horrific as those born in the 1970s remember.
Indeed, all the violence actually takes place offscreen.
‘‘Look, it’s a comedy, not a horror film,’’ he says, sounding slightly exasperated.
‘‘I didn’t really think it was scary, it was more kind of tongue-in-cheek.’’
It’s true they didn’t actually have a disagreement with the Kiwi censors over anything visual, instead it headed for cinemas initially attached with a warning to viewers about coarse language.
‘‘Of course, we fought that because it’s untrue and we thought it would alienate some of the New Zealand audiences from seeing it,’’ Pillsbury told Art New Zealand’s William Dart at the time of the film’s release.
‘‘Eventually the appeal board threw the rider out: but, in the meantime, we were prevented from using the poster and trailer campaign we had set up at some expense.’’
Looking back, Pillsbury feels the censors’ concerns were really ‘‘hypocritical and stupid’’.
‘‘I reminded them it was in the book and that was in all the schools – and so it went away.
‘‘Besides, everybody says the F word at home and it’s also the easiest thing in the world to make an audience laugh with, even if they might be slightly aghast. I think it’s a really good way to get a crowd to relax if you pop it in at the right place.
‘‘I’ve actually become notorious in America – people come to hear me speak, just waiting until I pop one.’’
Now a winemaker in ‘‘deepest, darkest Arizona’’, Pillsbury has fond memories of his television and movie-making career in
New Zealand, which included documentaries on the 1974 Commonwealth Games, Ralph Hotere and childbirth, and other features such as Goodbye Pork Pie, The Quiet Earth and – his personal favourite – Starlight Hotel.
So what drew him to Morrieson’s tale of a 1950s-set, small-town teenage boy and a murderer disguised as a magician? He says it reminded him of one of his favourite books from his American childhood (he emigrated to New Zealand when he was 13) – Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
‘‘Reading Scarecrow, I remember feeling all the same things I had when I first read Finn and, to me, it also summed up a kind of essence of
New Zealand. Here was this alcoholic, reprobate writer who wrote a novel about an incredibly degenerate, corrupt town, where the only person who could see the truth was a kid. I loved that concept – an innocent person who could see things clearly, but was kind of impotent. I guess, as a kid, I always felt in that same position, but also, to me, it seemed so quintessentially New Zealand – so eccentric, but truthful at the same time.’’
But while Pillsbury always thought he could make a film out of it, he was surprised that he managed to get some of the money out of the New Zealand Education Department and NZ Film Unit (Pillsbury worked for both) to make a movie that’s ‘‘essentially about necrophilia’’.
‘‘When I screened them the movie, the look of absolute relief on their faces when it finished was palpable. They were clearly terrified their jobs would be on the line for helping support a movie that had a dirty old man f...ing dead girls.’’
To play that ‘‘dirty old man’’, Pillsbury and company managed to secure the services of Hollywood legend John Carradine (The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach). While he describes the thenseptuagenarian as a ‘‘total sweetheart’’, Pillsbury admits he wasn’t his first choice.
‘‘In fact, I had a big a disagreement with one of the producers [Rob Whitehouse, whose most recent project was 2018’s Nicolas Cage horror Mandy].
‘‘I’d actually found this old New Zealand actor who was really eccentric and I thought perfect. Rob thought we needed to get a name. John turned out to be fine, except that he couldn’t walk and barely remembered things. His agent literally fell over himself trying to get him out to New Zealand.’’
For his younger cast members, Pillsbury, a firm believer that ‘‘kids can either act or they can’t’’, simply put the word out and spoke to school principals about who the best actors in their schools were.
‘‘They immediately know who they are.’’ Pillsbury is proud of unearthing talents such as Jonathan Smith (who played the film’s young hero Ned Poindexter and is now an acclaimed cinematographer in the United Kingdom), and a young actress called Greer Robson.
‘‘I booked Greer [who was about 10 at the time] about a week before my friend Roger Donaldson did for Smash Palace. I remember Roger coming and saying to me, ‘what are we going to do’ and I said, ‘let’s schedule our way around it’. Some years later, I used her for the lead in Starlight Hotel and
she’s now a lawyer with three kids in Sydney. We’re still friends.’’
With a budget of only around $700,000, any dreams of filming the whole shebang in Morrieson’s beloved Taranaki were unlikely to be realised because ‘‘the costs of taking a crew there and putting them up for four weeks were insane’’. But Pillsbury discovered another problem, too.
‘‘Unlike America, New Zealanders haven’t been very good about preserving the authenticity of their towns.
‘‘One of my sons lives in a little town in Hawke’s Bay that would have been perfect until they put up a massive gas station in the middle of it. They’re all so proud of it, but the essence of the town has been completely destroyed.’’
As a result, most of The Scarecrow was shot in Auckland, with a carefully photographed main street of Thames standing in for the centre of Morrieson’s Klynham.
Given such restrictions, and because Pillsbury found directing his first feature ‘‘a steep-learning curve’’, he’s delighted by many aspects of the end result, especially those he had championed despite some opposition.
‘‘I wanted to use a voice-over and I remember all these people who said, ‘you can’t do that, it will ruin everything’.
‘‘I thought it was a great way of telling this story of a young boy seeing the corrupt truth of a small town by having it from the point-of-view of an older man looking back on his childhood.
‘‘I found Martin Sanderson and we recorded him in a way that I thought worked just perfectly. We used a highly sensitive directional mike and I got him to basically whisper inside a pile of blankets with the microphone almost inside his mouth – so it really sounded like he was thinking out loud.’’
Striking a chord with – and fear into – Kiwi audiences in the summer of 1981-82, The Scarecrow also became the first New Zealand feature to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival, in the out-ofcompetition directors’ fortnight.
More a fan of the south of France’s wines than its celebrity-filled celebrations of cinema, Pillsbury admits he ‘‘hated every minute of it’’.
‘‘It’s the most awful place on Earth. Forty years ago, a glass of Coke cost $20. My wife and I went out to dinner with these guys who bought Scarecrow for a particular territory, and it cost $1000 – we nearly died.
‘‘And you kept meeting people on the street who’d say, ‘hi, we must do lunch’ – which never eventuated.’’
Sporting a second-hand, woollen dinner jacket that he bought in an op-shop on Ponsonby Rd (‘‘in a heated room you died in within about five minutes and it must have weighed about 25 pounds’’), Pillsbury says one of his biggest regrets occurred during the festival.
‘‘I totally screwed up my introductory speech to
The Scarecrow at the Palais.
‘‘I didn’t tell the truthful reason of why I did it – I was nervous. I just said some dumb thing that was written in the handout, instead of the muchbetter story about the evil corrupt town that was only seen by this youth.’’