The Scarecrow, Part 3

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:13Speaker 2:Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

0:16Speaker 3:And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with the third and final part in our Halloween season exploration of The Scarecrow. So here on the show every October, we spend the whole month in Halloween mode, talking about all things haunted, monstrous, bewitched. On Weird House Cinema episodes for this month, we're all going to be doing horror movies. So in the spirit of the season, we started off this month looking at uncanny aspects of the agricultural bird-scaring mannequin, the scarecrow.

0:49Speaker 2:You put it like that, it doesn't sound as scary, does it?

0:52Speaker 3:I was trying to think like what it would be called on the Acme box. Uh, but anyway, in the, in the last two episodes, we covered a bunch of stuff. Uh, in part one, we kicked things off by retelling a classic short story of scarecrows and witchcraft in new England called feather top. This was a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, uh, gets into a lot of scarecrow themes that will recur throughout the years. We went through a brief and non-exhaustive taxonomy of horror scarecrows. We talked about the different types, like the illusion or the false man, the straw zombie, the pagan god, and so forth. We talked about the scarecrow principle in biology, addressing the question of whether there are any non-human animals that build an inanimate copy of themselves to frighten or otherwise manipulate other animals. And we talked about references to scarecrows and human effigies in the Hebrew Bible. Then in part two, we talked about the empirical question, do scarecrows actually work? Like, do they keep the birds away? The answer really is it depends. They can work for a time, but effectiveness varies by situation,

2:10Speaker 3:by scarecrow characteristics, target bird, protected object, and other things also. So and so the general principle is unless the scarecrow is moved or somehow remains unpredictable, birds will over time acclimate to it and become unafraid. So you have to add new tactics or change things up somehow to keep the scarecrow scary. We also talked about, you know, it's funny. That's how it is for birds. That's not really how it is for humans. We like our scarecrows to stay the same. That's that's how they're scary to us. But we also talked about scarecrows in the ancient Greco-Roman context, where there are lots of literary references to statues of the eternally tumescent god Priapus as a scarecrow and garden protector, you know, painted red and armed with a billhook. And we got into Japanese traditions about scarecrows, including the Shinto scarecrow god Kuwabiko. who, in contrast to the idea of a scarecrow as like an empty-headed being or a thing without substance, is actually an embodiment of wisdom and knowledge.

3:20Speaker 3:And there's some interesting logic underlying that and some historical factors as well.

3:26Speaker 2:We didn't really touch on this, as I recall, but Turnip Head in Howl's Moving Castle reminds me a lot of some of these Japanese traditions that we discussed. I couldn't find much that really connected the two. You know, I think everything that Miyazaki creates, it does have a lot of like rich connections to especially, you know, rural Japanese contemplations. But I will at least highlight Turnip Head as being one of my favorite cinematic Scarecrow.

3:56Speaker 3:Well, in that spirit, do you want to start things off today with your segment about Scarecrows in cinema history?

4:02Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. This is an area that I was really excited to dig into. because scarecrows have been there pretty much all along throughout the life of motion pictures. And much of the early scarecrow action is going to revolve around L. Frank Baum's Oz book series, which ends up playing a major role here. And to set us up for this, I want to just go ahead and read a little bit, an example. This is from when we first encountered the scarecrow in the 1900 book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dorothy leaned her chin upon her hand and gazed thoughtfully at the scarecrow. Its head was a small sack stuffed with straw with eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it to represent a face. An old pointed blue hat that had belonged to some munchkin was perched on his head, and the rest of the figure was a blue suit of clothes, worn and faded, which had also been stuffed with straw. On the feet were some old boots with blue tops such as every man wore in this country. and the figure was raised above the stalks of corn by means of the pole stuck up its back. While Dorothy was looking earnestly into the queer painted face of the scarecrow, she was surprised to see

5:15Speaker 2:one of the eyes slowly wink at her. She thought she must have been mistaken at first for none of the scarecrows in Kansas ever wink, but presently the figure nodded its head to her in a friendly way. Then she climbed down from the fence and walked up to it, and Toto ran around the pole and barked.

5:31Speaker 1:Now, while.

5:32Speaker 3:There are some scary things in The Wizard of Oz. I think this is not meant to be scary at all, even though in a different context, you could interpret a scarecrow suddenly winking as quite freaky.

5:45Speaker 2:Yeah. And one of the really interesting things I was reading about is that apparently Baum got the inspiration for the scarecrow from a recurring childhood nightmare that he had about a scarecrow chasing after him and kind of like falling apart. So if that is indeed accurate, then perhaps the origins of this idea had some place in Nightmare, even if the Scarecrow as it's broadly presented in Oz media and certainly in the original books is not like horror themed at all. Right.

6:19Speaker 3:I mean, the Scarecrow in Oz, most people probably already know this, but is a very friendly, positive, helpful figure and comical in some ways. Right.

6:28Speaker 1:Yeah.

6:28Speaker 2:He doesn't have a brain. That's if he only had one. but he doesn't have one. So this book, again, came out in 1900. So it comes out in the midst of silent cinema's worldwide bloom, like, you know, just perfect timing. And so the first attempt to adapt it occurred in 1908 with the Fairy Logue and Radio Plays. This is now lost. There's, I think, just some stills of this. And then there was a second adaptation in 1910 called And it's only 13 minutes long. You know, a lot of these old silent pictures were very short. It had two sequels, both of which were lost. But this 1910 film does survive and you can look it up on the Internet. And in both of these, like the scarecrow is presented like you imagine and very much like described in the original book. You know, you just kind of stuff someone out like a scarecrow, pat them out with some straw. You have the painted face on sort of on canvas appearance. And, you know, you could you could certainly decide that it looks creepy. Certainly, that's a fair read on some of these stills, especially from these old silent movies. But, you know, it's the scarecrow.

7:37Speaker 3:He's a friend. There is a photographer who comes up in an essay that I'm going to mention later in this episode, a photographer named Colin Garrett, who mostly focuses on taking pictures of trains, but put out a book in the 1990s about scarecrows, which is photography of scarecrows. I shared earlier, Rob, a linked to a gallery hosted on the Guardians website. It just has a lot of these pictures of scarecrows, and there's some really freaky ones.

8:05Speaker 2:These are British scarecrows, right?

8:06Speaker 3:British, yeah. Scarecrows around Britain, and Garrett talks about the experience of going around looking at and photographing scarecrows, of approaching a scarecrow not knowing when you're far away whether it's going to have a face or not, and I really like that idea. So you get close wondering, will it have a face? What will the face be like? Is it Is it a scary face? Is it a happy face? You know, can the birds tell a difference?

8:32Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. The ones with faces can be a bit more unsettling. That's just how we operate. But anyway, so many different Oz pictures come out during this time period. Again, it's just the perfect timing, right? We get the patchwork girl of Oz in 1914. That one doesn't have a scarecrow. The same year we get His Majesty the Scarecrow of Oz, which comes before the book The Scarecrow of Oz. So this is this is crazy. We think of this as being like a modern thing, right, where there's an adaptation of something before the author actually finishes or writes the book.

9:05Speaker 2:But it's happening at this point in the history of cinema and literature as well.

9:09Speaker 3:Now, I think I remember a story detail from when we did our Weird House Cinema episode on Return to Oz. And it's that in the book, does it say that when Dorothy leaves Oz, she they like make the scarecrow king or leave the scarecrow in charge?

9:26Speaker 2:I believe that is the case. Yeah, I think that is what is explored to some extent in this movie and in the book that came right after the movie. Yeah, but I'll certainly put the call out to our Oz fans out there because I don't think I've ever read one of these books in its entirety. And I know that, you know, they are much beloved and there are folks out there who have. So, you know, write in with details if you've got them.

9:48Speaker 3:By the way, if you've never seen Return to Oz, the movie, it's super weird. Pretty awesome. Worth checking out. Yeah.

9:55Speaker 2:Amazing.

9:55Speaker 1:Yeah.

9:55Speaker 2:And we have an older Weird House Cinema episode you can look up about that. Now, moving on through the years here. In 1920, we get a rare non-Oz scarecrow in the form of the 20-minute silent comedy The Scarecrow starring Buster Keaton. This is a comedic role. We have the comedic actor of legend here playing a man forced to disguise himself as a scarecrow. move like a scarecrow, you know, suddenly go still, that sort of thing. A lot of physical comedy, as you might imagine. This one, I think, is worth looking up, either in its entirety or just for stills. On one hand, because it's a reminder of Buster Keaton's handsome androgyny from the day, and I couldn't help but notice his resemblance to an actor who would play another scarecrow 88 years later. More on that in a bit. All right, so more Oz films come after this, though. 1925, we get another straight-up Wizard of Oz adaptation, and I include some images here for you, Joe, in our outline, but even the ones that are lost, there tend to be some stills that you can find on IMDb for these different titles.

11:04Speaker 3:In this image you shared, the scarecrow has these concentric circles for eyes that, at least in this image, almost suggest spirals. I don't know, it makes me think of a one of these villain types in science fiction that's like a hypnotist type villain, you know, you look into his eyes and they're swirling.

11:24Speaker 2:Yeah, it reminds one of a little jigsaw puppet from the Saw movies or something. And I think maybe it's supposed to be stitches too. Like there's this patchwork aspect to the scarecrow here. And then meanwhile, Dorothy, just fully a grown woman. And then the Tin Man looks like a cheese grater. Look up that still if you have the ability to do so.

11:44Speaker 3:Hide your knuckles from this tent man. Yeah.

11:48Speaker 2:In 1933, we get our first animated Oz with Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. This is the same animation studio, Ted Eshbaugh Studios, that had done Goofy Goat in 1931. So folks who are into the history of animation may know this name. Goofy Goat, you know, kind of looks like what if Mickey Mouse was a goat? And it invites us to imagine an alternate reality. in which Goofy Goat has the place that Mickey Mouse does in today's, you know, entertainment and entertainment business world stature, you know.

12:23Speaker 3:The Goofy Goat Club. Yeah. The Goat Cateers. The Goat Cateers.

12:28Speaker 2:I like it. I mean, it would change everything. The ripple effects of this alteration would just, who knows what the world would be like. Yeah. And then, of course, in 1939, we finally get the most iconic adaptation of The Wizard of Oz in Victor Fleming's masterpiece for MGM with Ray Bolger playing the Scarecrow. This, as we discussed in our episode on Return to Oz, not a runaway hit at the time and really only achieved its long lasting status. When it came to TV later on, it became like a regular staple of special event television. And now, of course, we hold it up as the Wizard of Oz film. And certainly its success made possible things like Wicked today. So all of these incarnations involve the Scarecrow as not a nightmare, not a villain. But we do have a very notable... Scarecrow villain that pops up in 1941.

13:30Speaker 2:That is when we get the debut of the DC Comics Batman villain, the Scarecrow.

13:35Speaker 3:Oh, I would not have expected the Scarecrow appeared in the Batman rogues gallery this early. I would have thought this is like a later thing from the 70s or something.

13:45Speaker 2:Yeah, same here. Apparently, you know, he wasn't used a lot. He officially debuted in 41, I think was only used a handful of times if I'm understanding things correctly. And then it's in 67 that he's brought back and he's given some of the attributes that we associate with the character, like his fear toxin. But this Ichabod Crane-like villain, you know, was initially rolled out in 41. But since he didn't get revived again until 67, he ends up missing the Adam West Batman era and doesn't come to TV or film until 1968 on the animated Adventures of Batman.

14:24Speaker 3:Hmm.

14:25Speaker 2:Of course, he went on to become a very popular Batman villain, of course, serving as a major antagonist in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, especially the first film. But I believe he appears in some form or another in all three. And of course, in this, he's played by Cillian Murphy, whose casting does not seem to have anything to do with his resemblance to Buster Keaton. But I was like putting the two next to each other here. And I'm like, oh, man, he does remind me a lot of Buster Keaton, especially Buster Keaton as we see him in The Scarecrow. I guess part of that is like you just have like a thin actor with piercing eyes and you call them the Scarecrow. It's kind of like these ideas are just going to latch on.

15:03Speaker 3:Do I remember right that Murphy was originally reading to play Bruce Wayne or Batman?

15:09Speaker 2:I've read that as well, yeah.

15:11Speaker 3:Didn't get the part, but then was like, hey, what about me as Scarecrow?

15:16Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's perfect casting. He made a great Scarecrow. Let's see, I was looking around a little bit for precursors in literature. And I found there is a story from 42 that's sometimes singled out as perhaps the first non-comic book, evil scarecrow, or the first horror scarecrow, depending on how you want to judge it. It's called Crew, C-R-E-W-E, from 1942 by Walter de la Mare, or de la Mare, that's M-A-R-E. And I read it. You can find the full thing online on Gutenberg. It's It's kind of an old-fashioned ghost story concerning a train and a scarecrow resembling a dead man that creeps closer and closer. I would say for hardcore fans only, or if you really like ghost stories from this time period, it's a little bit more of a slow burn, I guess. Let's see. Now, film-wise, this is one that we've mentioned on the show before.

16:10Speaker 2:In 1963, we get a movie. This was like a Disney film, actually. It's come up on Weird Al Cinema before. It's called Dr. Sin, alias The Scarecrow, in which Patrick McGowan plays a scarecrow-disguised smuggler hero who's, I believe, actually a vicar. It's not horror. It's a Disney adventure based on Russell Thorndyke's novels, the first of which published in 1915. He's just a vicar who dresses up as a scarecrow to engage in these kind of rebellious, good-guy-smuggler-type activities.

16:44Speaker 3:Is he smuggling rum or something?

16:46Speaker 2:I think that's the case. I've not read these books and I've not seen the film. It just, when it comes up in connections on weird house, I'm always like, just, whoa, that looks really weird. It looks, you see stills from it. He looks creepy. It's this creepy scarecrow mask. And especially I think to modern, the thing is you look back at these old scarecrows and we have things like Batman scarecrow on the brain and scarecrow related horror films. And so, that is often the reading we go to when we see an image like this.

17:16Speaker 3:It was counterintuitive to me and I think probably to a lot of modern people who explore the history of this. You just assume scarecrows have always been scary to people and have always featured in, you know, scary stories going back as far as you could think, but not really. I mean, like you can argue that there are, going back into the 19th century as we talked about, you can argue there are creepy things about the story Feathertop, like it has witchcraft in it, but it's not really a horror story. It's more of like a moral tale. Um, and so, yeah, you, you just assume this is a really old tradition, but it's kind of surprising how late the scarecrow becomes frightening to us or becomes a monster in the popular consciousness.

18:01Speaker 1:Yeah.

18:01Speaker 2:Like modern, I think the modern individual going into Feathertop, you expect Feathertop to start, to start lopping off heads or something.

18:07Speaker 3:It doesn't happen.

18:08Speaker 1:Yeah.

18:09Speaker 2:Yeah, as far as I can tell, proper horror scarecrows, as we kind of think about them today, don't emerge on screen until 1981's Dark Night of the Scarecrow. This is a TV movie, and it's possible I've missed something that occurs earlier. If so, write in, and we'll talk this out on a listener mail episode in the future. But yeah, this is a made-for-TV film about the spirit of a murdered innocent who ends up possessing the body of the scarecrow and uses it for slasher-style vengeance. It stars Charles Durning and it features Larry Drake playing the neurodivergent individual who is like viciously killed by by by bullies.

18:48Speaker 2:And then like his spirit takes over the body of the scarecrow and does murders.

18:54Speaker 3:A lot of people really like this movie. I remember trying to watch it years ago and finding like the early parts just hit me in a really mean way. Like they left a nasty taste. I don't know. Maybe I'll give it another try, but.

19:05Speaker 2:I've had the same experience. I caught part of this on TV at some point as a kid, and it just really made me feel bad. I didn't want to finish watching it. And again, it's just kind of crazy. Like this is made for TV and it's, uh, I don't know. Maybe I should give it a second look. I do love Larry Drake. I just didn't want to watch the bad things happen to this character. By the way, this is where we get into a really interesting area here. 81 is also the same year that Alvin Schwartz's Herald the Scarecrow debuts in the pages of the very first scary stories to tell in the dark.

19:49Speaker 3:There were multiple.

19:50Speaker 2:Editions, like different volumes of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Joe, I never had these books. Did you have any of these growing up?

19:57Speaker 3:I didn't own them, but they were somewhat inexplicably in my otherwise fairly conservative school library. And they were some of the most popular books in the school library. We were like, I got to get that, you know, looking at it constantly. Yeah. Yeah.

20:14Speaker 2:I don't know how I missed out on these. Cause I was, you know, I was always a horror kid. My, my, my bet is that perhaps these were popular at the same time I'd started reading like nothing but Stephen King and reading it, I think way too early. I should have been, I should have been reading scary stories to tell in the dark in part because it would have been arguably more age appropriate, but also, And I say that as a parent now. But I also think Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark seems like they have a lot of great tales that are retold and repackaged for younger readers, but also still delivers a lot of really creepy content, as we're about to discuss.

20:50Speaker 1:Yeah.

20:51Speaker 3:And some funny stuff, like the viper, you know, can't go wrong. That's a good joke.

20:55Speaker 1:Yeah.

20:56Speaker 2:So basically what happened here is Schwartz compiled and retold various spooky tales and bits of folklore, which is pretty awesome because that's what a lot of these thinking back to things like Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio and just so many different folklore volumes. This is like what people have done for ages. They've asked around, they've collected scary stories, and maybe they've tweaked them a bit and they've given them a slightly different form and then reintroduced them to a new audience. So let's talk about Harold, because I think Harold is, again, Harold the Scarecrow is a character that really creeped out a lot of younger folks, really resonated with them, stuck around in their head. Again, originally in this 1981 debut collection, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And then in 2019, the Guillermo del Toro produced and written film adaptation actually used this character as well. I haven't seen this one yet, but I pulled up a still of it here for you, Joe.

21:55Speaker 2:And then, folks, if you just even look at the poster, I think Harold is on the poster. Very creepy-looking scarecrow entity here.

22:02Speaker 3:Looks like a combination of a human, a pig, and a catcher's mitt.

22:06Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And the original illustrations were also really weird and disturbing in the original book. So I'm going to briefly tell the story here of Harold the Scarecrow. Not as well as in the pages of the book. Obviously pick that up if you're so interested. But it concerns two bumpkin cowherds, one named Alfred and one named Thomas. And they decide, hey, let's make a straw man and let's name it after a farmer that we both hate. Some guy named Harold. So they do. They stuff it with straw. And since they've essentially made a scarecrow at this point, they start using it as one. They bring it out to the field. And then each night they bring it right back into their home. They apparently don't want it rained on or ruined. And then also they have plans for it when they bring it back into the house. If they're in a good mood, we're told they have a playful relationship with Harold. But when they're not in a good mood, and it seems like they're frequently not in a good mood, they mistreat Harold. They smear food on his face and they say nasty things to him.

23:07Speaker 3:Well, as we will learn later in today's episode, not the worst a scarecrow has ever been treated.

23:11Speaker 2:But still, they're not nice to this guy. And then one night, they're smearing food on Harold's face and being general cusses to him. And Harold seems to grunt. And they're really not sure what to make of this. They're spooked. They also try to explain, like, maybe there's a mouse inside him or something. I don't know. But they're like, we shouldn't be grunting. And they discuss, well, should we just go ahead and burn him and just, you know, remove any possibility that this is going to backfire on us?

23:37Speaker 2:But they decide, no, you know, we got a good thing going with Harold. Let's keep him. Let's keep mistreating him. And let's keep putting him up in the fields to protect our crops.

23:47Speaker 3:Yeah.

23:48Speaker 2:And, you know, I guess if they do take him inside, maybe that actually improves the effectiveness of Harold as a scarecrow. Hmm. Okay. So as you imagine, this is going nowhere pleasant. I'm going to read from the book here for the last little bit here because I think this delivers it nicely. Quote, the next morning while they were eating, Harold stood up and walked out of the hut. He climbed up on the roof and trotted back and forth like a horse on its hind legs all day and all night. He trotted like that. In the morning, Harold climbed down and stood at a far corner of the pasture. The men had no idea what he would do next. They were afraid.

24:24Speaker 2:They decided to take the cows down into the valley the same day. When they left, Harold was nowhere in sight. They felt as if they had escaped a great danger and began joking and singing. But when they had gone only a mile or two, they realized they had forgotten to bring the milking stools. Uh-oh. Yeah, neither one wanted to go back for them, but the stools would cost a lot to replace. There's really nothing to be afraid of, they told one another. After all, what could a doll do?

24:51Speaker 2:Referring to Harold the Scarecrow.

24:53Speaker 1:Mm-hmm.

24:53Speaker 2:They drew straws to see which one would go back. It was Thomas. I'll catch up with you, he said, and Alfred walked toward the valley. When Alfred came to a rise in the path, he looked back for Thomas. He did not see him anywhere, but he did see Harold. The doll was on the roof of the hut again. As Alfred watched, Harold kneeled and stretched out a bloody skin to dry in the sun.

25:16Speaker 3:Whoa, that escalated.

25:19Speaker 2:Yeah, so Harold the Scarecrow has flayed a man, perhaps alive, and then tacked his bloody hide to the roof of the building here. Nice.

25:33Speaker 3:I think I remember reading this from when I was a kid.

25:38Speaker 2:Yeah, really rough finish on this one. Very creepy. I can see why this one resonated.

25:45Speaker 3:This is the awesomest thing you're going to find in the school library.

25:51Speaker 2:So I was looking around about this. I ran across a website called scarystudies.com with some writing on there by one Cody Myrick. And I understand this particular guy has done some documentary work about these books and has done some real research into how they were written, how they came together. That Schwartz's work here is a retelling of an older Austrian Swiss tale that had been collected in Max Luthi's Once Upon a Time on the Nature of Fairy Tales in 1976. And the original title of the story is The Tunch Baptized by the Cowherds of Goshenin.

26:36Speaker 2:So it doesn't roll off the tongue as well as just Harold. So Myrick here hunted down not only the tale that Schwartz used, but the very book that he would have read it in at the Firestone Library at Princeton. And on his website, he has a photograph of those pages. And the original story is interesting because some of the major beats are the same, but the details are a bit different. So the original story takes place in an alpine setting. It ends in exactly the same way, with the character flayed in his hide, tacked on the roof by a creepy human decoy somehow brought to life. And in the version that Luthi shares in this 76 collection, The sacrilegious baptism of the doll seems to have done the trick. I think there was some other mistreatment, but when you pretend to baptize a doll, it may come to life and flay you. And then there are other tellings, I think, that focus more on just general mistreatment and cruelty.

27:36Speaker 2:You know, like you create something or you have something in the likeness of a human, you mistreat it enough, and it will come to life. There's like the karmic magic of the thing will make it your own punisher. Hmm.

27:49Speaker 3:Interesting.

27:51Speaker 2:However, it is not in these tellings a scarecrow. It is a tunch or a tungle or a dittentunch or a tushung. There are all these different words that are shared. And some of these I could not find really any discussion of outside of, at least not in English, outside of this particular discussion. But apparently it's some sort of like traditional Alpine doll. So it's not about bird scare. It's just about, it's more about its human likeness. and it's more like they just make a straw man. They make some sort of an artificial representative of a person, and they mistreat it, and then it comes to life.

28:31Speaker 3:Okay.

28:33Speaker 2:But it's deeply interesting because this idea that we create something in the likeness of a human, and if we mistreat it, we are inviting some sort of doom on ourselves. This, of course, is key to so many different stories. The golem, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and it exposes our compulsion for anthropomorphism And certainly resonates, too, in our age of, say, like chatbots and voice-controlled devices. It's certainly not in the forefront of discussion of chatbots and AI right now. But over the past few years, that has been something that's come up. Like, should you be nice? Should you be mean? What sort of voice should you use in talking to them?

29:10Speaker 3:We've talked about this before. I mean, as I've said, I'm very much of the opinion that you should not be cruel to or mistreat inanimate objects that resemble humans, not because their feelings matter, but because it harms you to do that. Yeah.

29:26Speaker 2:I think I also read some stuff where people were like, actually don't go out of your way to be nice though, because then you're just adding to the, energy usage of these different systems. Okay, I get that too. But I'm thinking to myself, it's like, okay, but there's still no need to be mean. You can maybe keep it brief if you have to use these things, but there's no need to be mean about it.

29:47Speaker 3:We're creatures of habit, and I don't think it is good to create habits of practicing cruelty even towards inanimate objects because that can manifest in other ways.

29:58Speaker 2:Yeah, this seems like there would be even more stories we could tell with this. Like I'm thinking of like, what are some, what are some heralds out there that we have in the world that we create just for misuse? And I think of that pink plastic punching guy that you see in like boxers and martial artists, you know, practicing on where it's the same like square jawed dude with the like 60s haircut.

30:19Speaker 3:I don't know what you're talking about.

30:21Speaker 2:Oh, you would recognize him. You know, he's like some sort of like a punching mannequin. I wonder if anyone's made or thought to make a work of horror where that dude comes to life and starts, I don't know, slashing people with karate moves.

30:34Speaker 3:I'm sick of this.

30:36Speaker 2:Maybe enters a tournament. I don't know. I think he writes itself. Somebody do it. I give you, I release it to the world. All right. But getting back to horror. So in 1995, we get another, I think, pivotal example of scarecrow horror, Night of the Scarecrow, in which a scarecrow is possessed by a dead warlock. And I think the Scarecrow, by this point, is pretty firmly established as a creepy motif of rural Americana. This particular film has Steven Root in it, as well as Gary Lockwood and John Lazar. And I haven't seen this one either, but it certainly seems to stand out. And then after this, you get a lot of less notable Scarecrow films. Certainly when you get into even more like direct-to-video and digital filmmaking.

31:23Speaker 2:But nothing that I'm aware of really stands out here as an important step in the clear subgenre of scarecrow horror, with the possible exception of Harold, of course, and that more recent cinematic adaptation that featured him.

31:38Speaker 3:There's one I was looking at before we started recording, though I haven't seen. It's from, I think, the late 80s. It's like a low budget horror film. called Scarecrows were a team of mercenaries who were, you know, wearing body armor and with machine guns. I think they're, I don't know if they're doing a drug run or something, but they like, they crash land a plane in a field in the middle of the night and then there are haunted Scarecrows in the field. I think they're just stuck in the field the whole movie.

32:06Speaker 2:So it's like Predator except Scarecrows?

32:08Speaker 3:It seems like that's what it is. Again, I haven't seen the whole thing. Except Scarecrows. Yeah.

32:13Speaker 1:Yeah.

32:14Speaker 2:All right. Well, Yeah, so if there are others like that that we should know about, you know, notable entries, certainly let us know. Because there are, of course, other things that are not quite scarecrows, but are at least scarecrow adjacent, like the monster, the Creeper, in the Jeepers Creepers films. I think of these, I've only seen the first one, which, you know, problematic aspects aside, I remember enjoying back in the day. But in the second film, which I have not seen, there is apparently a part right near the beginning where the Creeper disguises itself as a scarecrow in order to hide in plain sight. And I included a still from you here, Joe. It does look pretty, pretty perfect. It's like there he is up on the poles looking like a scarecrow and even has a crow on his arm.

32:59Speaker 3:Yeah. Invoking that idea that the crows are not afraid.

33:02Speaker 2:Yeah.

33:04Speaker 3:And in the crucifixion pose also.

33:06Speaker 1:Yes.

33:07Speaker 2:Yeah. Which brings me to another example that is at least Scarecrow adjacent, and that's the expansive Children of the Corn film series. At the very least, these will invoke some ideas of the Scarecrow. I haven't seen most of these movies, but I'm a big fan of the original 1977 Stephen King short story. It also doesn't explicitly involve Scarecrows, but it has sacrificial victims that are hoisted up or crucified amid the rows of corn. This one was originally published, by the way, 1977 in the March issue of Penthouse.

33:45Speaker 2:And I pulled up an image from inside it here for you, Joe. Folks can look this up. If you just go to the Wikipedia entry for the Stephen King short story, you'll see it. But there's this illustration of like a human hand that has been like sliced off. There's blood on the concrete. And the hand is also made to look like a cob of corn.

34:06Speaker 3:Yeah, the forearm is corn and there are kernels all over it. It has the leaves or the husk peeling off.

34:14Speaker 2:And this is an illustration by Don Ivan Punschatz, a sci-fi and fantasy illustrator who, among many other things, did the original cover art for the 1993 Doom video game.

34:26Speaker 3:Oh, weirdly enough, that image also is very... forearm centric. You know, it's got the Doom Slayer like standing on this mountain with all these demons clawing at him. They're grabbing his forearm. My eye is always drawn to the forearm there.

34:39Speaker 2:Yeah, if you can draw forearms and hands more power to you, I can't do it. But anyway, Children of the Corn, I'm to understand that by Children of the Corn 3 colon Urban Harvest in 95, we do get a scene where he who walks behind the rose, the sort of nameless entity that the children worship, he turns somebody into a scarecrow. Um, and as the title implied, this, this, this movie, uh, makes the, the classic horror franchise decision to move the action to the big city because the idea here is a, a, a Chicago couple adopt a couple of the corn cult kids, uh, and I imagine it plays out in exactly the expected form.

35:20Speaker 3:Sounds really tasteful. Yeah. But, uh, but it's, yeah, going to the big city. So it's like, um, it's like beast master through the portal of time. Yeah. Yeah.

35:31Speaker 2:So, I don't know, that's my overview of the Scarecrow film. Certainly write in if you have other examples you want to bring to mind or other examples from comic books and other written media. But I think it's interesting that, you know, certainly there's the long shadow cast by the Wizard of Oz. And then outside of that, the recurring theme with the Scarecrow seems to be one of oops, Frankenstein or oops, Gollum. You know, where we have inadvertently brought something to life or created a form that something could occupy.

36:00Speaker 3:Right. So in Feathertop, which again is not explicitly horror, the witch brings the scarecrow to life on purpose. But a lot of these other stories are an inanimate object resembling a human that is accidentally brought to life in some catastrophic way. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So next, I just wanted to get into a somewhat randomly ordered collection of ideas that came up because of an article I read on the subject of scarecrows. This article is called Scaring Crows, published in the journal Geographical Review in the year, I believe, 2013 by an author named Hayden Lorimer. Hayden Lorimer is a scholar affiliated with the University of Edinburgh now.

36:58Speaker 3:This is not a traditional academic article, but sort of a mix of researched portions and personal essay where the author talks about traveling around the countryside looking for scarecrows and other alternative bird scaring methods. Just to illustrate the personal essay qualities of this, it starts off with a scene of the author on a train. traveling through the countryside after wheat planting season. And he notices that he doesn't see any scarecrows in the crop fields. He believes they used to be more common. And he's like, well, where'd they go? You know, can I find them somewhere if I walk around in the country and look at these farms that are farther afield, maybe to say. And it's funny because this reminds me, you know, there's some observations in this essay similar to things we talked about Was it last year when we did our spooky trains episodes where we talked about the creepiness of being on a train and looking out into these, you know, quick glimpses into other parts of the world, other settlements and kind of wondering what goes on there and why that often leads to think thoughts about horrors and, you know,

38:05Speaker 3:hidden things.

38:07Speaker 2:Yeah, always makes me think of that line from one of the Sherlock Holmes stories where Sherlock is having the exact same thought. Watson and Sherlock are discussing like, You know, is it comforting to look out at the countryside from the train.

38:18Speaker 3:Or is it disturbing?

38:19Speaker 2:Because who knows what they're getting away with out here?

38:21Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. But in this case, it's not so much thinking about the people, but thinking about the scarecrows. Like who knows what kind of effigies are hidden out there? So the author, Lorimer, has some interesting observations and ideas about how the physical form and implementation of the scarecrow can contribute to the associations we attach to it. like he talks about how the scarecrow's common posture with the arms raised in an act of, quote, forever shooing things away, gives the scarecrow the appearance of protectiveness and ownership, as if to say, this field is mine and I will defend it. I never really thought about the crucified posture that way, but I think that's right. It does suggest something of like, this expanse of the arms is like, this is my domain and also has the arms raised as if to strike. Yeah, yeah.

39:18Speaker 2:I think that's a good point because you're raising this effigy in the same way that one might rise up some, raise up some sort of a, you know, divine icon, you know, and certainly in the same way you might raise up a condemned criminal's body. But also, yeah, it's like, this is the God of this field. I mean, we, we can't help but read.

39:37Speaker 3:It that way. Yeah. It's, it's a claim of ownership. And there's some interesting implications that flow from that. Like, Because the scarecrow is not in reality the owner of the field, but a false being that is built by the owner or built on the owner's behalf. And yet it has this appearance of like jealously protecting its own domain. And so Lorimer notes that it is a common understanding going back in tradition that the clothes of the scarecrow are taken from, quote, a dead man's wardrobe. This is actually present in that Hawthorne story. In Feathertop, it says that the witch dresses the scarecrow in clothes that used to belong to her dead husband. This does make some practical sense, though when you really think about it, I would guess that a lot of times the clothes people put on a scarecrow end up there because the clothes have reached their end, not because the person who used to wear them has reached their end.

40:36Speaker 2:Yeah, you think of busted old overalls, things that don't fit anymore, hand-me-downs.

40:43Speaker 3:But anyway, the idea that the scarecrow is dressed in the garments of the dead is a pretty obvious reason that you would associate a scarecrow with ghostly or frightening forces. But then finally, Lorimer observes, quote, It is also his sentinel position, stationed apart from and yet so clearly apart of the rhythm of country life, that gives shape to uncanny stories of possession and concealment, shifty movements and slow transformations. When spotted, he is always alone, keeping no company, set up to stand out over yonder, right in the heart of the field or on the brow of a long ridge.

41:22Speaker 3:Gaunt and solitary, he is a watcher and a keeper. So, yeah, interesting idea. Like human in shape, but always alone, made for the service of human life, but standing apart from it. We make a thing that's shaped like us. But then we leave it out there. And that's kind of it. There's something creepy about that, too. Yeah. Like it doesn't get to come inside. I guess Harold gets to come inside.

41:48Speaker 2:Harold. Yeah. For some reason. Yeah. They want to they want to protect them and or they just want to mistreat him more than just simply leaving him outside.

41:58Speaker 3:So the author talks about his personal experiences, like riding the trains, looking out for scarecrows, not really seeing any, and then going out wandering and looking in fields, trying to find them. He really doesn't find many at all. He finds in one field, a red Ford Fiesta parked in the middle of the field and wonders if this is supposed to be some kind of scarecrow functional object. He also mentions a plastic chemical jug on top of a pole. And he's like, is that a scarecrow or, you know, unclear. But another thing this essay gets into is how the scarecrow is just so heavily loaded with symbolic potential. Like it signifies lots of things that are very almost mythically salient to us. Like it is a labor saving device and thus it signifies craftiness and ingenuity.

42:46Speaker 3:It is a sort of a work of art in the labor of human hands. It means something about work and design and, It has this suite of agricultural symbols like the harvest, of course, food and the lack thereof, feast and famine, the return of the seasons, which is heavily bound up in religious practices and beliefs, claims of property ownership, the concept of the human form, of course, and thus like an effigy for religious purposes or a surrogate for human sacrifice, as it often is in these later folk horror themed Scarecrow stories. But it's also made of trash or items that have outlived their usefulness and thus ideas about obsolescence and death. And Lorimer talks about something that we touched on before, but the idea of how before the 20th century, it was common in Britain to use human bird scarers who would patrol the edges of fields with like a rattle or a clapperboard. and would chase the birds away, and that this was a common job for children or for the elderly, people who couldn't necessarily do other types of work.

43:56Speaker 2:Yeah, and I understand this was also a role in different indigenous cultures as well. And really, if you have the manpower or the child power to do it, this is better than a stationary scarecrow, as long as the children are staying busy with it.

44:12Speaker 3:He also... talks a good bit about this photographer, Colin Garrett, that I mentioned earlier, who put out this book of photographs of scarecrows. One thing Garrett claims is that scarecrows are often the victims of violence and abuse. Talking about passersby, Garrett says, quote, it is not uncommon for passersby to attack a scarecrow, stabbing and mutilations being the most common. And he also mentions people stealing scarecrows. something I haven't really read about much in other sources, but that, I don't know, I guess I can imagine that's true. Like if there are a lot of people coming by, there's just a temptation to attack or abuse a human shaped thing.

44:56Speaker 3:That's not really human and can't fight back. Yeah.

44:59Speaker 2:I mean, there are things like scarecrows that are up all over our communities, especially this month. Uh, like so many things that are not definitely scarecrows, they're still like Halloween decorations that are in the form of a body. And those things get carried off. They get stolen. They get vandalized. And certainly you imagine a rural setting as well. I mean, you get out into rural America and sometimes it seems like you can barely find a road sign that hasn't been shot with a shotgun or a rifle.

45:27Speaker 2:So it's not surprising that scarecrows would have an even worse time if just a stop sign is getting this kind of treatment.

45:36Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, this will come up again in just a minute when I want to get into one of the namesakes of a scarecrow in British terminology that was also an inanimate subject of abuse. Anyway, in this essay, Lorimer briefly just mentions a collection of different words in dialects of the British Isles that have been used to refer to scarecrows. And I independently went down a few rabbit holes looking at the etymology of these words, like where they come from. And in almost every case, there was something pretty interesting about them. So, for example, in some historical dialects of Great Britain, a scarecrow was called a mawkin. Interestingly, a word that was also a derogatory or contemptuous term that would be used for an unkempt lower-class woman, often a servant, or used for a woman perceived as sexually promiscuous. The word Malkin traces back to a name, Malkin, which was probably a diminutive form of the personal name Maud. So I think the way this works is a person in the Middle Ages might have thought of Malkin the scullery maid Like we think of Joe Sixpack or in the British context, Tommy the soldier.

46:59Speaker 3:So cases where like a personal name just comes to be associated generically with a social class or with a type of work. Okay. Anyway, it was weird to me that the same term would be used for this derogatory way of speaking about a woman of the lower social classes or a servant woman. and also used for a scarecrow. And I was trying to figure out more like what's the link there. There's one possibility that really intrigued me. I want to be clear that this is speculative. But in looking at these word histories, I started to wonder if the connection between the working class servant woman and a scarecrow might lie in the object of a mop, which at the time in question in the Middle Ages was would be a bunch of rags on a stick, I think usually used to clean difficult spaces like the inside of a baker's oven. So according to the online etymology dictionary, this crude type of mop was also called a mawkin in sources from around the year 1400. So it could be that a mawkin is this contemptuous term for an unkempt servant woman. And it's also a servant woman's tool, though it's not clear to me whether the

48:20Speaker 3:mop gets this name because the servant woman uses it or because it was thought to look like her. Like a mop, I guess you could think of as looking like a rough or untidy woman.

48:30Speaker 2:Yeah, you can easily anthropomorphize a mop by standing it on end and then imagining the moppy bits being the hair.

48:39Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly.

48:40Speaker 2:Put some eyes on it and you're there.

48:42Speaker 3:So that's a possible association. It could be that or it could be that the servant woman is using it. And then finally, it could refer to a possible final fate of the servant woman's tool as this false human put out in the fields to guard the harvest from the starlings and the wood pigeons. But there also could be simpler routes of association. It could be that the link between the scarecrow and the untidy woman is that they both look like a mess.

49:12Speaker 2:Okay.

49:14Speaker 3:A theme that seems to recur in some of these terms for scarecrows is a kind of meanness. Like they're often linked to a word that has some, uh, derogatory or mean implications in other usage. And I think that's kind of interesting. Maybe it's just that a scarecrow is a thing that is treated contemptuously, as we said it earlier. It's like a human, but it doesn't get to come inside. You leave it out there, and it just gets abused by the weather.

49:41Speaker 2:Yeah, made of old things, left to just decay out in the field.

49:48Speaker 3:And that theme will continue. So in some English dialects, scarecrows were also apparently called jackalents. Now, I looked this up in the Oxford reference entry on the term, and I want to be clear that jack-o'-lent is not a variation on jack-o'-lantern, a different thing. So apparently from the late 15th to the 17th century, the jack-o'-lent was, quote, the name for gaunt puppets made of straw, rags, and herring skins personifying the Lenten Yeah, so that's from the Oxford reference entry. So the context here is that, you know, on Ash Wednesday, you begin your fast for the 40 days of Lent in the, you know, the Christian liturgical calendar.

50:48Speaker 3:I think more often in the Western churches, this fast would mean abstaining from meat, though I think there could be other ways it manifested. Most often, I think it means you don't eat meat. And Lent is a time for penitence and sacrifice corresponding to the 40 days that Christ spent fasting in the desert in the gospel stories. And then it finishes with Holy Week, which leads up to Easter Sunday. So in this English tradition, at the beginning of Lent, It's saying boys would make these weird skinny puppets out of rags and straw and trash to symbolize the fasting season. And then they would physically abuse the puppets. So you might put them up in a public place and mistreat them. And then finally, at the end of Lent, they would burn these puppets. Wow.

51:36Speaker 2:So instead of just like silently suffering through Lent, you're taking all that anger you're feeling at not getting to eat meat. And you're taking it out on this effigy that you've created. Like, way to go, Lynn. I wanted to have bacon this morning. And you're just like pummeling it with rocks and sticks.

51:53Speaker 3:I was wondering, like, yeah, why the violence directed toward the puppets? Like, is it that they're hangry? Is that literally it? I'm hangry and I need to take it out on somebody, so I'm going to mistreat this puppet.

52:05Speaker 2:Yeah. I also love the detail about them being made with herring skins as well, which makes me think these things must have stank as well, reminding me of the The role odor plays in the Japanese tradition of bird scaring slash ghost scaring decoys.

52:23Speaker 3:Oh, I forgot about that. That is interesting. Interesting confluence. Yeah. And there are other things that happen. I was looking at other sources. Some sources mentioned that these puppets would be shot at. I found a blog post that said sometimes they get dumped down a chimney. People really just being mean, parading it around like a Roman prisoner of war. Uh, but whatever the reason, it might not have just been hanger. Uh, it did make more sense to me when I read that there are some sources that equate the Jacqueline with the biblical figure of Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrays Christ. Um, but Jack does not always, uh, definitively seem to be Judas.

53:06Speaker 3:That seems, you know, some, some people are making this connection. Some of the time, ultimately. I think it is just not known where this tradition comes from or exactly what it means. One of the questions is, is it possible the Jacqueline tradition preserves cultural memory of pagan traditions where an effigy of some kind is sacrificed or abused? Unclear. It's a tempting idea, and it seems like a lot of people want to go there, but I don't think there's any direct evidence of this at all in Celtic traditions of springtime, despite what we see in the Wicker Man.

53:43Speaker 3:This is more like a connection that modern people are very tempted to make, but there's really no evidence for it in the historical record. So the Oxford reference mentions that the Jacqueline was sometimes a character played by living humans. That sounds like no fun. It's in their references to this in Shakespeare, actually, of people being like, well, you know, I'm so hated, I might as well play the Jacqueline. But it cites an Easter pageant or a Lenten pageant or an Easter pageant, some religious play put on in London in 1553, where Jacqueline was portrayed on his deathbed giving confession to a priest. So, you know, like the week leading up to Easter is the end of Lent.

54:31Speaker 3:So I guess it is literally like the death of the Lenten season when you get toward Easter. The entry also mentions a 17th century Oxfordshire tradition around Easter of children singing the following rhyme. So they'd run around singing,' Herrings, herrings, white and red, ten a penny, lint's dead. Rise, dame, and give an egg, or else a piece of bacon. One for Peter, two for Paul, three for jack-a-lint's all, away, lint, away. So it's like trick-or-treating for meat and eggs. Give me meat.

55:06Speaker 3:Give me something good to eat. But it's trick-or-treating around Easter for meat. And the entry mentions a text which says that if the people in their houses didn't come out and answer the trick-or-treaters, didn't give the kids some bacon or whatever they wanted, the kids might cut the latch of the house's door or stuff the keyhole with dirt, quote, or leave some more nasty token of displeasure. What would that be?

55:32Speaker 2:I think my fellow vegetarians and also vegans would probably observe, like, man, you even suggest that meat eaters not eat meat and they just lose their mind.

55:44Speaker 3:So anyway, it is not hard to see how the same word would come to be used for a scarecrow. You know, two different kinds of rough or ragged human effigies.

55:54Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.

55:56Speaker 3:Uh, I didn't find any evidence that like the jackalent was literally a scarecrow. So I think it's probably just this, you know, the fact that, you know, two different kinds of straw effigies, uh, we'll just start calling a scarecrow a jackalent.

56:09Speaker 1:Yeah.

56:11Speaker 3:A few other dialectical terms. One is hodmodod. So that's a scarecrow, but also in some usage, it means a snail or sometimes a hedgehog.

56:22Speaker 2:Well, you know, you have those bits of straw poking out. It kind of reminds one of a hedgehog.

56:26Speaker 3:I guess.

56:27Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.

56:28Speaker 3:I don't know if that's the connection. I didn't look as deeply into this one or didn't find good sources on it. Now, this one is really weird. In some English dialects, a scarecrow was a moment, a generic word for a lifeless human replica that can also be used to describe a doll or a puppet. So thing shaped like a human, but not a real human. could be doll, could be puppet, could be scarecrow. And the really bizarre thing about this one is the etymology. As documented in the Merriam-Webster entry, it is derived from a Middle English version of the name Muhammad, referring to the prophet Muhammad, based on the very incorrect belief that was apparently widely held among European Christians, medieval European Christians, that Muslims worshipped idols of the prophet Muhammad. This seems like a, if you have modern knowledge of religions, this seems like a particularly weird thing to get wrong since the Quran is like very strongly worded and it's condemnation of idol worship.

57:36Speaker 3:But medieval Christians had a lot of misunderstandings about other religions and And another one is just there's literature at the time reflecting the common European belief that Islam was polytheistic, which, again, it is very decidedly not.

57:51Speaker 2:Couldn't be more incorrect on both of these counts. It does remind me a little bit. We've discussed this. I don't know if we discussed this in core stuff to blow your mind. We may have discussed this primarily in our Weird House Cinema episode about one of the blind dead films about undead Templars. But. there was one of the charges against the, the poor Knights of the temple of Solomon was that they worshiped like a head. And there was, you know, some, there were often all these like at times kind of, you know, convoluted ideas about the, the Knights in question, like having like taken up some imagined form of Islam as their own personal faith. But again, a highly incorrect and, and misinformed idea of what Islam actually was and is.

58:36Speaker 3:Well, Interestingly, this brings us back to our conversation from the first scarecrow episode about that passage in Jeremiah where, you know, in some translations of the Bible, the prophet compares the idols of other religions to scarecrows because he's talking about them as like his view is they're manufactured things that have no real power. They only work as a deception, much like a scarecrow. But yeah, I think that connection maybe explains it because for medieval European Christians who don't really know anything about other religions, if you're faced with the concept of another religion... Maybe your only real reference points are the other religions talked about in the Bible, which are described as polytheistic idolatry.

59:26Speaker 2:They're like, what are we doing? We're trashing other religions? Good, I know all the jokes. And they're like, no, those jokes don't actually apply. Those are written for different circumstances. And we're also ill-conceived to begin with.

59:36Speaker 3:Yeah. So anyway, there is another cluster of terms. I think these are particularly in Scotland. You've got like the tatty bogle, also related idea of the tatty dooley. The way I understand this is it's sort of like saying potato goblin. So Taddy meant potato, and Dooley and Bogle were different words that could refer to types of beings like hobgoblins or ghosts or specters. So the monster that you put up in the potato field to scare birds away would be the Taddy Bogle. And another variation on this is the Craw Bogle, the crow goblin. So that's what I've got on etymology. But there's another question that comes up briefly in Lorimer's essay that I kind of really started thinking about is the question of, are scarecrows an art form? I think this is interesting because it draws attention to the outer boundaries of the category. For example, I think it's totally obvious and uncontroversial that a scarecrow could be considered a work of art. Like if it were made with some kind of deliberate care and treated like a sculpture shown to people, like the person who made it thought of it as art and meant for

1:01:05Speaker 3:other people to see it, then we would think, yeah, that's art. Yeah.

1:01:08Speaker 2:It's a prime area for outsider art to emerge where someone, if someone approaches the construction of a scarecrow with any level of artistic event, They're like trying to make something aesthetically pleasing or entail some sort of idea that they have. Right.

1:01:25Speaker 3:But then you think about, like, take some of the characteristics of that scenario away. What a scarecrow that was made with some care, but not intended to be displayed in front of people, but only meant for the function of scaring birds, still potentially be a work of art, like a work of art perhaps seen only by the artist and by the bird. You know, you can think about these examples. You know, we looked at some pictures of them in that Guardian article of scarecrows that don't seem to have been made for people to look at, and yet there is something somewhat evocative about them. Yeah.

1:02:04Speaker 2:Of course, once something is photographed, it can and does become art. So there is that aspect to it as well. It becomes a little complicated when you get into the medium. But yeah, and then sort of a larger discussion is the thing that is not art, if perceived, as art is, is it now art?

1:02:19Speaker 3:Um, I say, sure.

1:02:21Speaker 2:I'm not, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna die on the hill of telling people not to call things art as long as nobody's, you know, hurt or deeply offended in the process, you know?

1:02:31Speaker 3:Well, yeah. I mean, so I think you and I have liberal sensibilities about art where we tend to want to say, you know, basically anything that you want to think about as art could be art, you know, we have pretty expansive boundaries there. So the other side of it, I think is, um, Most people would probably not say that like a device that emits lasers or sonic booms over a field to scatter birds is art, right? That just seems more like a functional machine. And a scarecrow is often meant to do the same thing that is.

1:03:05Speaker 3:It's supposed to be a functional machine. And so like, what is it about the scarecrow? Is it the fact that it's made by a single person with lower tech? means that it's not mass produced is maybe is that what makes that art versus the bird scaring machine? Yeah, it's bespoke.

1:03:22Speaker 2:And then I guess that with the bird scaring machine, it's also worth noting that we're assuming that there is no element of design that that would lend itself to being considered art, because there are things that were mass produced that were designed by by artists. And, you know, I'm thinking of recently went to the Noguchi exhibit while it was still running here at Atlanta's High Museum. And like there is an early version of the baby monitor that he designed. And, you know, it's beautiful and it's on display. Like it was an exhibit about design and art and the interface between these two ideas. But I think there's a strong case to be said that's art.

1:04:00Speaker 2:So it's possible that there could be some sort of a soulless crop boom device that had some level of design in its carapace that we could say is artistic in nature.

1:04:12Speaker 3:I don't know if they're still as widely used or as controversial today as they were when this essay came out, but Lorimer talks extensively. There's a whole section in it about how much a lot of people hate these sonic bird scaring devices, like the propane-powered gas guns that emit bangs and booms over the field to scare birds away. And there are groups organized to be like, outlaw, ban these things. I hate them. They're ruining my life.

1:04:39Speaker 2:But if you put one in the Tate Modern... instantly it's art i guess the context is so important here yeah.

1:04:46Speaker 3:Uh yeah and there is a weird offbeat beauty to non-human shaped bird scaring devices like one thing that you'll see in some uh gardens or crop fields is people will hang up compact discs from string and apparently the way those kind of turn as they blow in the breeze they catch the light in interesting ways and These chaotic patterns of glint and glare are thought to scare birds away. There is something kind of beautiful about that. Even though this old CD is trash, it's being repurposed.

1:05:18Speaker 3:It's not shaped like a human. There seems to be obviously a lot less design in that than like putting together a body shaped thing with a face. But still, it's kind of beautiful in a way.

1:05:29Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. As long as I don't see that it's just all like Friends DVD discs from the box set or something. I don't know. It's like if I could tell what they were, they might lose some of the appeal.

1:05:41Speaker 3:That's what happened to all the DVDs of The Amazing Colossal Man.

1:05:44Speaker 2:Yeah, there they are. They're being used to scare birds. And that one maybe should scare birds. Maybe I'm okay with that one, except I would like to have the DVD.

1:05:52Speaker 3:One last idea I just wanted to mention from this essay is, so the author, Lorimer, can't really find any classical scarecrows out in the farm fields that he explores. Uh, but he ends up seeing one not far at all from his own house in a garden in his neighborhood. And because of this, he ends up comparing the scarecrow to. Types of wild animals that now thrive in disrupted urban landscapes, like the Fox in Britain and the American context, I think of raccoons and coyotes, things that once lived out there in the country standing apart. And now they have found a niche in the city. And the scarecrow is kind of like that, isn't it? The traditional static scarecrow is not going to be as common in the farm fields.

1:06:42Speaker 3:And there are other methods that have replaced it, higher tech methods often. But as a domestic and cultural artifact, we've brought it in. We've brought it into the metropole. And now it serves to remind us of things. Maybe it has seasonal implications or it's fun to be a little bit scary or to be nostalgic.

1:07:01Speaker 2:Yeah, because it's like what we've been saying, when you create the scarecrow, you're kind of creating something that's now out of your control. Like the way we think about it and the different associations that it kind of like pulls into its gravitational field, you know. So, yeah, it makes sense that then, you know, we have no reason to make them anymore or even maybe just partial reasons. And we're just going to keep doing it in one form or another.

1:07:23Speaker 3:One last thing I wanted to mention quickly is an essay I came across by a professor named Dr. Juliet Wood called The Great Scarecrow in Days Long Ago, Gothic Myths and Family Festivals. This essay, I'm not sure if this was ever published in a journal or presented at a conference. I found it just hosted on the author's website. But the author, Juliet Wood, is a professor at Cardiff University in Wales. She specializes in Celtic folklore. And it gets into a bunch of ideas about the history of the scarecrow, how it has become less functional and more symbolic over time. She also gets into the idea that there really is no clear link between the scarecrow and pre-Christian pagan practices like people sometimes suggest. But she does argue, I thought this was interesting, that a better academic framework for understanding the powerful, modern, symbolic meaning of the scarecrow is not this link to paganism, but is the concept of liminality. We've sort of gotten at this already, but to make it explicit, liminality, as used in academic theory, has to do with the properties of being in-between, whether

1:08:37Speaker 3:in a physical, temporal, or conceptual sense. It can refer to things that don't cleanly belong in one place or another or somehow sit in-between or or things that borrow characteristics from opposed categories. And Wood writes, quote, this is a disposable figure made of castoffs set up on cultivated land to prevent the incursion of wild nature. And in this way, she compares it to other liminal figures, like as you brought up earlier, Rob.

1:09:05Speaker 2:The golem.

1:09:08Speaker 3:But more on the positive end of associations, Wood mentions in one brief passage here that the scarecrow today is often used to invoke nostalgia, you know, the way you see it at craft festivals or Halloween celebrations, you know, fall harvest time things as a symbol of an earlier agricultural way of life where things were made by hand and not mass produced. And so there's something that feels very down home about the scarecrow in opposition to its creepiness factor. And I wonder, is this just a sort of different unconnected aspect of the scarecrow's cultural meaning or Or is the nostalgic down-hominess somehow linked to what makes it a ripe subject for horror? Because a scarecrow is not only liminal, like a thing that looks human but is not, they're also a tool from a time gone by, a tool to do a job that still needs doing, but where this form of tool has sort of become obsolete or has been recognized as not very effective. And because they're shaped like us, does this somehow form unconscious thoughts about human obsolescence?

1:10:22Speaker 2:I think that's a good point. I think that's a strong point.

1:10:25Speaker 3:Yeah.

1:10:26Speaker 2:Like that we, we see ourselves in the scarecrow and it raises all these additional questions and we can't help but imagine ourselves as the scarecrow. Yeah.

1:10:34Speaker 3:Like is the, is the human farmer going the way of the scarecrow? Is there, is there a total mechanization ahead of us?

1:10:41Speaker 2:Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's it for our look at the scarecrow here. But this one's been a lot of fun. We've covered a lot of ground. And again, if there's stuff you want to bring up related to all of this or just field reports, sometimes literal, literal field reports, outstanding in a field, get a picture of the scarecrow that you've seen and send it in to us. We would love to look at it. We'd just love to hear from you in general.

1:11:07Speaker 3:Absolutely. Contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Send us your best weird scarecrow pictures, please.

1:11:13Speaker 1:All right.

1:11:13Speaker 2:We're going to go and close it out here. As always, write in. As always, wherever you follow us, wherever you get your episodes, just rate, review, and subscribe. If you're on Netflix, give us a couple of thumbs up and ask to be reminded about new episodes.

1:11:26Speaker 3:Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, To suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

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