A holiday that turns into a nightmare
Race with the Devil begins like a cheerful road movie and ends like a warning. Peter Fonda plays Roger Marsh, a motorcycle dealer who sets off with his wife Kelly and their friends Frank and Alice in a recreational vehicle, bound for a skiing holiday in Colorado. The couples are successful, relaxed and looking forward to a break. Then, on a remote stretch of Texas road, they stop for the night and witness something they were never meant to see: a ritual sacrifice in a clearing, carried out by a group of robed figures. They drive away, hoping to forget it, but the cult has seen them too, and the rest of the film is a pursuit across Texas and New Mexico as the cult tries to silence the only witnesses to its crime.
Director Jack Starrett, working from a screenplay by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop, understood that horror works best when it invades ordinary life. The couples in Race with the Devil are not teenagers in a haunted house. They are middle-class adults in a comfortable RV, with a dog, a television and a well-stocked kitchen. The horror comes from the slow realisation that comfort offers no protection. The cult members are not monsters. They are neighbours, garage attendants, police officers and ordinary people who smile and offer help while planning murder. That ordinariness makes the film genuinely unsettling, and it gives Fonda’s performance a different kind of tension from his earlier road films. Roger is not a rebel or an outlaw. He is a man trying to protect his wife and friends, and discovering that the rules he has lived by do not apply on this road.
Fonda plays Roger with a growing, controlled panic. At first he is confident, even a little arrogant, sure that a fast vehicle and a sensible plan will get them out of trouble. As the pursuit continues, as their RV is sabotaged, as they are chased by cars and trucks and ambushed at gas stations, that confidence erodes. Fonda lets the audience see the calculation in Roger’s eyes: how much fuel, how far to the next town, who can be trusted, who cannot. He is not a superhero, and he does not become one. He makes mistakes, he argues with Frank, and he is frightened, and that fright is what makes the film work. The audience is not watching an invincible hero. It is watching a man learning, in real time, how quickly a holiday can become a fight for survival.
Paranoia on the open road
Race with the Devil belongs to a particular moment in 1970s American cinema, when paranoia was a popular theme. Films such as The Parallax View, The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor suggested that institutions could not be trusted and that ordinary people could be watched, followed and silenced. Race with the Devil translates that paranoia into a horror-thriller, but with a rural, cult twist. The cult is everywhere and nowhere. Its members appear as helpful strangers, as a sheriff who seems sympathetic, as a family at a roadside stop. The couples cannot tell who is part of the conspiracy and who is simply passing through, and that uncertainty is more frightening than any single chase.
The film’s action sequences are staged with a rough, physical energy that was characteristic of Starrett’s work. The RV, a vehicle designed for comfort, becomes both a shelter and a target. It is too big to hide, too slow to outrun a car, and too dependent on fuel and roads to escape into the desert. Starrett uses that vulnerability well, filming the RV from low angles, from above, and from inside, so that the audience feels its bulk and its fragility at the same time. The chases are not elegant. They are dusty, noisy and frightening, with vehicles swerving across empty highways and through small towns that offer no help.
The climax, set at an isolated house where the couples seek refuge, is a tense, claustrophobic sequence that reverses the film’s earlier openness. The wide Texas landscape gives way to dark rooms, locked doors and a final confrontation that leaves the audience uncertain about who has survived and what the cult will do next. Starrett does not offer a neat resolution, and that refusal is part of the film’s cult appeal. Race with the Devil does not explain its cult, it does not give its villains a grand speech, and it does not reassure the audience that the danger is over. It ends with a sense of dread that lingers after the credits.
Why it still works
Race with the Devil is not a great film in the conventional sense, but it is a highly effective one, and it has earned a loyal following among fans of 1970s horror and exploitation cinema. Part of its appeal is its premise, which is simple enough to summarise in a sentence and frightening enough to stay with you. Part of it is its cast. Fonda and Warren Oates, who plays Frank, are both actors who bring a lived-in, working-class authenticity to their roles. Oates, in particular, is superb as the more cynical, more volatile friend, and his scenes with Fonda give the film a believable male friendship at its centre. Loretta Swit and Lara Parker, as Kelly and Alice, are not mere passengers. They argue, they make decisions, and they fight back, and their presence prevents the film from becoming a simple story of men protecting women.
For Fonda, Race with the Devil was another example of his willingness to work in genre films that were outside the mainstream but close to the audience. He was not chasing prestige. He was chasing interesting premises, good collaborators and the chance to play ordinary men in extraordinary situations. Roger Marsh is not a biker or a cowboy. He is a businessman on holiday, and Fonda’s performance shows how quickly that identity can be stripped away. Watch the film for its road sequences, for its atmosphere of rural paranoia, and for Fonda’s gradual transformation from confident traveller to frightened survivor. It is a reminder that the open road, which had symbolised freedom in Easy Rider, could also, in the darker mood of the mid-1970s, symbolise exposure, isolation and danger.