Film Comment: Race With the Devil

Race With the Devil is a low budget 1975 film produced during an era when numerous films were being made about Satanists and Satanism.  The idea (think of Rosemary’s Baby) is that you really don’t know if the nice couple next door are really a nice couple or if, in the dark, they kill and eat babies while worshipping the Dark Lord.

The plot of Race With the Devil: two couples (portrayed by veteran B-movie actors Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, and Lara Parker) are travelling from Texas to Colorado in their SUV (sport utility vehicle).  While parked overnight in the desert, the four witness a group of nude people ritually murdering a woman.  To complicate matters, the murderers quickly realize that they are being watched and the chase is on.

As the couples run, it becomes increasingly obvious that everyone in the area, including the police, are members of the cult.   Unable to trust anyone, the couples go into survival mode.  The film becomes intense at that point with car chases, gunfights, animal mutilation, and increasingly sinister events.  The couples come to see their SUV as the only safe place and their only means of escape.  From a Christian viewpoint, I think that the SUV can be seen as the people’s attempt to save themselves under their own power.  Many people cling to the belief that they are strong and can handle life on their own with no need for “some God.”  They put their faith in themselves, politics, money, education, their ethnicity, their weapons, tradition, non-Christian works-based religions, or some other vague “spirituality.”

Race With the Devil has over the years generated much internet discussion including this statement at Better Geek Than Never (profanity alert!): 

“I also like how even though they are running away from murderers, and that is absolutely the right thing to do, but our main characters seem to believe that as long as they are in their RV, then they don’t really have to believe anything else that’s going on. Their vehicle is supposed to protect them from all outside influences, including belief systems that don’t fit into their specific worldviews. This conceit is proven wrong time and time again, yet they still cling to it like a life preserver. Sound familiar to anyone? Perhaps in some ways, we all have our own big ass RV that we use to shield us from things we don’t like to look at or think can’t possibly happen.”

About the Satanists.  While there are people who do worship the traditional Devil of the Bible, most modern Satanists would tell you that to do so means to acknowledge the reality of the Christian God, whom they reject. The modern Church of Satan, founded by Anton Szandor LaVey, is really worship of the self as the ultimate deity.  I believe that the modern Satanists are wrong and that the biblical Satan is a very  real being.  Jesus said that he was real.

The good news for spirit-filled Christians is that we have the Mind of Christ.  If, in the name of Christ, we resist the Devil, he will turn and run (James 4:7).