If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

For those not in the know, If Footmen Tire you, What Will Horses Do? (1971) is a miraculous historical survival. Directed by an exploitation filmmaker turned evangelical Christian, Ron Ormond, the movie nearly disappeared forever. Only in 2018 did experts clean up an old copy. Ormond worked with aptly named fundamentalist Baptist preacher Estes W. Pirkle to produce one of the minister’s sermons. Their collaboration produced a singular work of art. Dead children, communists telling kids to pray to Fidel Castro, girls killing their moms by smoking cigarettes—all in the name of the coming morning in America.

Ormond and Pirkle intended the movie for church viewing. Apparently, evangelicals in Latin America still put it on at camps and in halls. It warns of what Communism will bring, which is mostly death, sexual assault, and being forced to kill your parents. Ormond’s background in exploitation cinema shines as the camera pans over gory child-corpses and despoiled homes. Keep in mind, Footmen came out a year before Last House on the Left (1972). It competes with this more famous relative so far as gore is concerned.

Fun as it is to watch, the movie’s greatest value consists in allowing us to historicize what we so often call “Christianity” in the United States. At almost no point does Pirkle mention who Jesus was, what he commands, what the basic tenets of Christianity are. Nothing at all from what the Nicene Creed. His entire sermon—aside from occasional moralizing about modesty and sex—trades in conspiracies about faceless communists, adorned with white, Nazi-like armbands, annihilating people for no reason at all. They don’t preach equality or proffer hope. They just murder.

Now these days, that variant of Christianity has metastasized. Our ambassador to Israel upholds it, our secretary of defense embodies it, and our vice president flirts with it. It has come to replace any other version of Christianity (and there used to be many others!) in the American consciousness. Here, we get to see it in its nascent stages, ready to be picked up by figures like Richard Viguerie for dissemination into the broader conservative movement.

For that reason alone, I strongly recommend If Footmen Tire you, What Will Horses Do. It’s so blatant, so upfront, I can’t help but feel it offers special insight, even if its full meaning requires some puzzling over. Besides, it’s bloody good fun in the meantime.