As previously noted on this blog (here), genre is an excuse for poor film theory, and Race with the Devil exemplifies the mindset of producers and writers who approach films with a ‘shopping list ‘of elements – garnered from the comparison of unrelated materials, and perpetuated by mainstream film education and populist film criticism – resulting in a vacuous and throwaway end product. Here the film is a series of sketches built around the interaction of white, middle-class consumers with negative stereotypes designed to raise institutionalised anxieties in the viewer. As a result, it forgoes any attempt at employing the forces of control and desire that underpin the cinematic spectacle, instead betraying the conservatism that lies beneath much horror cinema: producers attempting to address relevant themes within their films resort not to intellectual discourse and objective documentation, but rather employ a mixed bag of visceral threats to right-wing values, belief systems and politics that are simply grotesque and unrepresented forms of valid minority groups. In this case, rural ‘satanists’ pursue modern Americans who have a right to worship God and not be burnt to death in their camper-vans.

This is an unfortunate method of film production that we see more often than not in today’s commercial cinema – compare The Dark Knight (2008; dir. Christopher Nolan), Thank You for Smoking (2005; dir. Jason Reitman) and 2012 (2009; dir. Roland Emmerich) – and exposes a fundamental lack of cinematic knowledge at the most basic level. The majority of filmmakers working today have no comprehension of the psychology behind the voyeuristic act of watching a film, and approach their productions like aesthetically-overloaded plays. If films like Race with the Devil were examined during the first steps of film education, revealing the fallibility of the methods they use in filmmaking, courses and instruction could then move onto debate and openly experiment with the cinematic spectacle, leaving behind their foolish over-reliance on narrative and genre study.

Race with the Devil at the IMDb