If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is a 1971 American Christian exploitation horror film directed by Ron Ormond, featuring Southern Baptist minister Estus Pirkle.

Background

The film is based on and shares its name with a sermon by Estus W. Pirkle held on January 31, 1968 at Camp Zion in Myrtle, Mississippi. The film was widely distributed among evangelical churches and church camps in the United States in the 1970s, and remains in use at some, especially in Latin America.

While Ormond and Pirkle made two more films together (The Burning Hell in 1974 and The Believer's Heaven in 1977), If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? remains their most infamous work. The title paraphrases :

<blockquote>If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, Then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace, How will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?</blockquote>

Reception and legacy

Though critically panned upon initial release, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? has since attracted a cult following among secular fans due to its explicit depictions of brutal torture and the heavy-handed and hypocritical nature of its message. In one of the scenes set in Pirkle's imagined Communist future, loudspeakers in internment camps issue proclamations such as "Christianity is stupid, Communism is good, give up!" to detainees for seventeen hours a day, "from five o'clock in the morning 'till ten o'clock at night." Negativland lifted these phrases and played them repeatedly, backed by industrial music and various other sound effects, on the song "Christianity Is Stupid" from their 1987 album Escape from Noise. A more complete version of Pirkle's sermon can be heard on the following Negativland album, 1989's Helter Stupid, which was based on a hoax propagated by the band purporting that "Christianity Is Stupid" had inspired the murders committed by David Brom in 1988.

Video essayist Stephen Broomer argued Ormond's close-ups of Pirkle were used "much the same end" as the cinema of Slavko Vorkapich distancing itself from theater and as an effective use of brainwashing.

Availability

The film was restored in 2018 and made available to stream for free on filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn's proprietary service byNWR.

All three of the films made by Pirkle and Ormond were released as part of the Blu-ray box set From Hollywood to Heaven: The Lost and Saved Films of the Ormond Family in June 2023.

See also

  • Counterculture of the 1960s
  • Cult film
  • Plunderphonics

References

Sources

  • The Burning Hell and The Believer's Heaven also on Archive.org
  • Prophets and Propaganda, or, If Faces Tire You, What Will Movies Do?, a video essay by Stephen Broomer