Who Fears the Devil by Manly Wade Wellman

John swears to go defying for as long as he walks the earth. Guess who appears? Don’t worry– Grandpappy John’s got silver banjo strings melted down from official US currency, silver dollars! But… money is the root of all evil, and Silver John sees his Grandpappy die. The title song, The Devil, by Hoyt Axton is stirring, and sets the mood instantly, preparing us for some hillbilly folk tales and run-ins with the Devil up in the Appalachians… about as far from city folk as you kin git.ĭenver Pyle really gets things heated up singing about defyin’ Old Scratch in the beginning. The only thing that can stop the duo is the pure silver that John the Balladeer has cast into his guitar strings.ĭirected by John Newland, the movie adapts two stories from Manly Wade Wellman’s Who Fears the Devil: “The Desrick on Yandro” and “O Ugly Bird”. Yandro is not a shape-changer, then there’s a man and a hideous, giant bird so deeply intertwined that physical harm to one is reflected in the other through some unspeakable magic. Once you are fully ensconced in a suspension of disbelief, it becomes less about the effects it’s the darkness that grows inside you as the uncanny implications of the story sink in. (That’s the way I remember Vincent Price’s Once Upon a Midnight Scary, with its short renditions of John Bellairs’ The House with a Clock in its Walls and Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.) This is the special soulful, wistful magic you will find in this movie. You know how you remember those movies and after-school holiday specials you saw just once as a kid, and the memory is of a mist-enshrouded tale of thrilling fantasy… but when you see it again as an adult you suddenly see it through new eyes? The special effects look they were done in a garage, the acting is terrible beyond description, and the story lacks the key points that make sense of it all.

Who Fears the Devil by Manly Wade Wellman