1972’s Who Fears the Devil follows a hillbilly troubadour on a journey on which he has several strange encounters.  It was also released under the title The Legend of Hillbilly John, which makes more sense.  Really, it is like some weird sort of Appalachian spin on The Illiad, so I think the best possible title would be The Hillbilliad.  I was reminded a bit of the Coen Brothers’ Oh Brother, Where Are Thou?, except that was a riff on The Odyssey.

Hedgers Capers is the star and the only constant through stories which would otherwise be unrelated.  He always has his guitar on him for when inspiration strikes.  We first see him having just finished making time with Sharon Henesy when the muse strikes.  She asks if this new number is a love song and, when it turns out to instead to be about King Nebuchadnezzar, I was hoping his muse would strike him.

In the first story, and the one that provides the reason for his journey, his grandfather (Denver Pyle) unwisely summons the devil.  He did this with the intention of trapping him and using his dark powers to strike down the interstate construction effort running through their land.  His instrument in this plan is a guitar strung with silver strings.  That he made these himself by melting down a quantity of Kennedy half-dollars shows one should not bet their soul on the quantity of valuable metals in U.S. currency, given those were 90% silver at best, and that was only in the first year they were made.  I wonder how far of a drive it was to the nearest metallurgist, because seeking the opinion of one would have valuable.  Also, I wonder if guitar strings made of pure silver would be playable and whether they would sound like shit.

Looking to not make the same mistake, Capers looks to make his own set of silver strings and finish the job.  But he’ll have better source material, courtesy of the mysterious local dowser (Severn Darden) who helps Pyle find Spanish pieces-of-eight that just happened to be in his own yard this entire time.  In fact, he claims these are 419 years old, give or take a year.  The whole thing feels like the scene where gold is found in a barn in All That Money Can Buy (aka The Devil and Daniel Webster).

One would think it would be a relatively straight line from getting those coins, to melting them down, to summoning the devil, but this picture opts for a more circuitous route, and that includes the actual rambling journey Capers takes.  There’s taking the evil and wealthy Sidney Clute to find gold Capers claims is on the man’s land, as part of a ruse to fulfill an odd contract with a woman who is over 100 years old.  There’s the owner of a strip mine who is cruel to those from whom he collects rents, and he is somehow also a stop-motion skeletal bird.

That bird is an interesting visual, more unnerving for its appearance than it is believably animated.  It is the kind of touch which low-budget movies of the period such as this could risk, and one of the reasons I watch this brand of cinema.  But the biggest risk it takes is what it does when Pyle dies, and that is the film appears to break in the projector.  It is a powerful moment, but I understand how it might take some viewers out of the experience.  As for myself, I applaud what it did because it seems to imply something so powerful has happened that it has actually escaped the confinement of the physical film.

There is much here that scans as folk horror, and it is interesting to see an Appalachian spin on that genre.  Some of that is in the language, such as referring to the devil as The Good Man, and Pyle saying he will call him by “his true name” at the time of the challenge.  There’s talk about books that cannot be sold or given away and which can only be buried like a corpse.  And Darden’s observation to Capers that they’ve “shared salt” recalls vampire lore.

There’s also a character who is Uncle Anansi (Charles Jones), bringing to my mind old African legends and how these were incorporated into Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.  Alas, this final sequence of the film is an odd misstep.  I can respect it wanting to tell a story about the legacy of slavery in the South, but this left an awkward taste in my mouth as, in a way, “a White man sets them free”.  And through song, no less.

The music is better than I would have expected, and I was surprised at least one was written by Hoyt Axton.  Capers, who was part of a popular signing duo with his wife at the time, does these songs justice.  He also is a decent-enough actor, so it seems odd he has so few screen credits to his name.

One particular number in Who Fears the Devil will stick in my mind because of its quirky lyrics.  It is the typical ditty about all the nice, simple things in their quaint, little town.  Then the list gets to one of those being the drive-in’s X-rated double feature.  Of all the things I didn’t anticipate in this movie, that was definitely the least expected.

Dir: John Newland

Starring Severn Darden, Hedges Capers, Sharon Henesy, Honor Hound

Watched as part of Severin’s blu-ray boxed set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Vol. 2