Last Updated on November 15, 2024

From Rosemary’s Baby to The Exorcist and The Omen, the devil was big business at the box office in the 1960s and ‘70s. Also popular at that time were motorcycle movies, most notably the pop culture sensation Easy Rider. That’s how we get the 1975 film Race with the Devil (watch it HERE), which very smartly mixes two popular concepts together and puts Easy Rider’s Peter Fonda in a lead role that allows him to both rip around on motorcycles and battle rampaging devil worshipers. Add in some connections to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you get a drive-in era movie that’s a total blast to watch. Race with the Devil is definitely the best horror movie you never saw.

CREATORS / CAST: Directed by Jack Starrett from a screenplay by Lee Frost and producer Wes Bishop, Race with the Devil stars Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as Roger and Frank, friends who run a successful motorcycle dealership in San Antonio, Texas. When Frank and his wife Alice get a new RV, they decide to break it in by taking Roger and his wife Kelly on a vacation road trip to Aspen, Colorado… but they don’t make it very far through rural Texas before their vacation turns into a hellish nightmare.

The motorhome has all the amenities you could possibly need, which Frank says will allow them to be “self-contained” – a line Quentin Tarantino lifted for From Dusk Till Dawn. When Harvey Keitel’s family says they don’t stay in motels because they’re self-contained in their RV, that’s a nod to Race with the Devil and Frank’s reasoning for not stopping at a park for the night. Instead, he decides they should set up camp at a random spot in the countryside. Which turns out to be a terrible mistake. After a pleasant evening of off-road motorcycling and having too much to drink, Roger and Frank see a bonfire light up nearby. Gathered around this fire are a bunch of figures in robes, some people scampering around naked, and a masked man who is obviously the leader of the pack. At first, Roger and Frank think they’re about to see a bunch of hippies having a fireside orgy… but then it becomes clear that they’re witnessing a Satanic human sacrifice. Unfortunately, the devil worshipers become aware of their presence as soon as the sacrifice is carried out, and they don’t want witnesses.

Our heroes are able to escape from the cultists that night, but this story is just getting started. As the road trip continues, Roger, Frank, Alice, and Kelly keep crossing paths with shady characters they suspect may be involved with the cult. They just can’t be sure. It is certain that members of the cult are following them, as they make their presence known through escalating acts of violence, building up to some great high speed action sequences.

Race with the Devil was the third of three movies Fonda and Oates made together, their previous collaborations being the Western The Hired Hand, which Fonda also directed, and the drama 92 in the Shade, which ended up being released after Race with the Devil. Frank’s wife Alice is played by Loretta Swit, who at the time was just a couple seasons into the eleven years she would spend playing “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the M*A*S*H TV series, while Roger’s wife Kelly is played by Lara Parker, who had recently wrapped up a two hundred and sixty-nine episode run on the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows.

Jack Starrett and Wes Bishop have acting roles as a couple of the suspicious characters that are encountered, with iconic character actor R.G. Armstrong making a memorable appearance as a sheriff who isn’t particularly helpful. Fans of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre should keep an eye out for a cameo from Paul A. Partain, the legendary Franklin himself, early on in the movie. Arkey Blue, a country band that had some songs on the Chainsaw soundtrack, also shows up on screen in this film, playing their tunes at a bar the characters stop by. “Misty Hours of Daylight”, one of the songs from Chainsaw, is next on their set list when a barroom brawl breaks out. There’s a connection to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in here as well: when Roger and Frank buy a shotgun for self defense, the gun store owner is James N. Harrell, the same guy who sells chainsaws to Dennis Hopper.

Starrett would claim that he cast real Satanists as the cult members in the film for the sake of authenticity, but that was probably not the case.

BACKGROUND: Screenwriter Lee Frost directed a lot of movies during the drive-in era, most famously the ridiculous 1972 film The Thing with Two Heads, in which the head of a racist white man played by Ray Milland gets grafted onto the body of a black man played by “Rosey” Grier. Frost was originally intended to direct Race with the Devil, and was actually at the helm for the first few days of production. But the film was set up at 20th Century Fox, and when the executives there saw the footage Frost was getting, they were so underwhelmed that they fired him. They were hoping to repeat the success they had with the Peter Fonda movie Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry the previous year… and they no longer had faith that Frost could deliver a movie capable of doing that. So director Jack Starrett was hired to take over at the helm, and executive producer Paul Maslansky was brought in to oversee the filming.

Starrett is best remembered for playing the role of Galt, a cop who gives Rambo a hard time in First Blood and then becomes that film’s one confirmed casualty. But that was just one of more than thirty acting roles he took on over the years, and he had an almost equal amount of directing credits. His work directing the biker movies Run, Angel, Run! and The Losers, as well as the Blaxploitation action movies Slaughter and Cleopatra Jones, had convinced Fox that he was the director to deliver a satisfactory version of Race with the Devil.

Maslansky didn’t think Frost’s footage was as bad as Fox did, but he started mostly from scratch with Starrett – and calmed the studio’s worries about the project by making sure Starrett’s first days were dedicated to gripping action and character moments. Production went smoothly from that point on and Fox let Starrett and Maslansky do their thing without any interference.

Fonda had signed on to do Race with the Devil because he knew that he and Warren Oates would have fun working together on something like this. Aside from the bump in the road that came when the director had to be replaced, that’s exactly how it turned out. Fonda described every day on the set as being a “labor of love”. He said in an interview, “It was an exciting, scary, spooky script and I’d not done that type of film before. I knew that me and Warren would have a good time doing this. We made good paychecks up front and had big percentages in the film. It was a fun shoot. It was like going to camp. We’re gonna go camping with some friends of ours, we’re gonna have a grand time, we get paid, and we’re making a motion picture.”

It’s easy to understand why Fonda would have so much fun working on this. He got to hang out with a good friend of his and drive motorcycles, he brought his own shotgun to set to blast away at Satanic cultists with, and he did some of his own stunts in the action sequences. That sounds like it should rank highly as one of the best experiences he ever had on a movie, and it got even better when Race with the Devil was released and became a solid hit for Fox – which means those percentages that Fonda and Oates had in the film paid off, too.

Despite being a box office success in 1975, the film hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves over the decades since. It seems to have burned bright at the time of its release and then faded away for the most part. There was a special edition DVD release for the thirtieth anniversary, and a few years later it was brought to Blu-ray in a double feature with that other Fox and Fonda car chase money maker, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. Those releases did earn the film some new fans, but it still should have a lot more. In 2005, it was announced that Project Greenlight producer Chris Moore would be directing a remake of Race with the Devil, and it might have given the film’s popularity a boost if that new take on the material had gone into production. Instead, it fell apart before filming could begin. While we didn’t get another telling of this exact story, Race with the Devil did serve as a source of inspiration for a couple different films that were released in 2011: Kevin Smith would refer back to it while making his movie Red State, and screenwriter Todd Farmer named it as one of the films that influenced the “Nicolas Cage escapes Hell to destroy a cult” action movie Drive Angry. Smith was quoted as saying, “Race with the Devil is such a favorite movie of mine. When I was a kid it was just such a terrifying notion. It’s where you’re on vacation and you just happen to see some (people) sacrificing a virgin, they kill your dog, and then chase you in your Winnebago. There’s nothing more horrifying than that!”

WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Race with the Devil is so effective because it hooks you in with its relatability. The four characters at the core of the film are regular people who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, and from the moment they cross paths with the cult it feels like they’re stuck in an impossible situation. You can imagine yourself in the characters’ place, you can feel how scary it would be if you couldn’t trust anyone around you, if it felt like it wasn’t safe anywhere you go. The film also benefits from being a product of its time, before people had cell phones or access to the internet. When the characters need to find out information on cults and human sacrifice in this movie, they have to go to a library… where the librarian may or may not be part of the cult. When they need to call for help, they have to find a public phone that might have been tampered with. Even though they’re traveling the wide open road, there’s a claustrophobic feeling because it seems like the cult has managed to cut them off from the outside world. There’s nothing but danger outside the RV. And occasionally it gets dangerous inside the vehicle, too.

Roger, Frank, Alice, and Kelly aren’t the deepest or best written characters, but you come to care for them because the cult is making things so bad for them, and because of the actors’ performances. The fact that Fonda and Oates actually were good friends comes through in the film, it’s clear that Roger and Frank have been buddies for a long time. Swit does well in her role, and Parker managed to enhance the horror of the movie with her performance. Coming from Dark Shadows, she had the most genre experience going into this project, and she put that familiarity with horror concepts to use. It was already in the script that her character Kelly was the most intuitive of the bunch, that she would be able to tell before any of the others that something was wrong. Parker played that up even more, so that it seems like Kelly has a bit of extrasensory perception at times. She gets an uneasy feeling as soon as she sees the tree the cultists will be gathered around, even though she notices it during the day, long before the cult will get there. She gets that same uneasy feeling at other points in the movie, and Parker has great eyes for all the troubled looks her character has to give. Maslansky admits on the audio commentary that he was concerned Parker was pushing Kelly’s ESP too far during filming, but in the end felt that she found the correct balance – she plays it just right to show that she feels something bad is going to happen, but it’s also obvious that she doesn’t know exactly what the bad things are going to be.

Once the characters witness the human sacrifice and escape the initial confrontation with the cultists, there’s still an hour of the film’s eighty-eight minute running time left, and that hour is a masterpiece of paranoia and building tension. Is the sheriff a cult member? Is the mechanic in on it? What’s up with those weird people at the RV park, or that staring steel guitar player? From time to time, that building tension is released through bursts of terror – like when Kelly’s adorable little dog is found dead, or when the characters realize a couple rattlesnakes have been left inside the RV.

BEST SCENE(S): The rattlesnake sequence is one of the most frightening parts of the movie, especially since it was filmed with real snakes interacting with the cast. The snakes are coiling and striking, and Fonda, Parker, and Oates are shown actually handling them and throwing them around inside the confines of the RV. Swit was no fan of snakes, so she refused to be on set for most of the filming of this sequence, but there are a couple shots where you can see that she did have to participate in some of the live snake moments.

Although we see one of the snakes sinking its fangs into Frank’s pant legs, the actors made it through the filming of the sequence unscathed – and of course the snakes had been milked of their venom anyway. Some viewers may be bothered by the shots that show someone poking at a live snake with a ski pole, and in fact those shots were cut out of the film for the UK DVD release. The snakes couldn’t accomplish anything by biting people, but one did get its revenge by urinating on Fonda’s shirt.

Soon after the rattlesnake attack, we reach the film’s biggest selling point: the extended climactic action sequence, featuring almost 17 minutes straight of vehicular mayhem. The cultists have clearly gotten tired of playing games with the couples and have decided they’re just going to try to take them out while they’re driving down the road. Trucks and cars are smashed and flipped, you get the obligatory explosions, and cult members try to infiltrate the RV while it’s still moving. Which doesn’t work out too well for them. It’s a classic, old school chase and stunt sequence, and it’s a whole lot of fun to watch.

PARTING SHOT: Just like the RV has all the amenities you could want, Race with the Devil has pretty much everything you could want from a movie. It’s a perfect blend of horror and action. If you like movies from the grindhouse days but haven’t seen this one yet, it’s highly recommended you seek it out immediately, whether on Blu-ray, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu… However you can get your eyes on it, it’s worth a look.

In the film, there are cult members everywhere, the characters are surrounded by them at all times. The movie deserves to have a cult following that’s equally as large. We need to pull Race with the Devil out of obscurity and start celebrating it as the all-time classic that it is.

Some previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!