QAA Podcast - 70s Christian Exploitation Double Feature Movie Night (Premium E337) Sample

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

In this Movie Night episode, Travis, Jake, and Jack descend into the sweaty church-basement panic of 1970s Christian exploitation cinema with a double feature: If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971) and A Thief in the Night (1973). These were not slick Hollywood productions, but they reached millions through church screenings, youth groups, libraries, and religious distribution networks. If The Footmen Tire You used anti-communist nightmare imagery to warn Christians that godless radicals were coming for their children, their churches, and their wives. A Thief in the Night turned rapture theology into an indie horror movie, terrifying generations of evangelical children with the fear of waking up to find their loved ones vanished and the Antichrist running the United Nations. We talk about Ron Ormond’s journey from swamp monsters and stripper movies to Christian gore, Estus Pirkle’s apocalyptic anti-communist sermons, the birth of rapture horror, and the power of low-budget religious filmmaking. https://archive.org/details/if-footmen-tire-you-what-will-horses-do-1971-dir.-ron-ormond-final-reconstruction-hd-267159565 Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 337, 70s Christian Exploitation Double Feature Movie Night. As always, we're your host, Jake Rakitansky, Jack LaRoche, and Travis View. The rank and file of the religious right are kept in a constant state of high anxiety. I think we're all made worse off for it. Everyday social disagreements are reframed of spiritual battles against, demonic supernatural forces. Through movies and books depicting the end times, they are taught that politics is closely linked to the apocalypse. They are vigilant about the threats of bureaucrats

corrupting their children and dismantling their churches. They act like a persecuted minority, even when about two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, despite recent increases in the non-religious population. Using religious fears to activate Americans politically is, of course, standard practice. And on this movie night episode, we are going to illustrate this fact by, reaching back more than 50 years into the past to examine two Christian exploitation films. The first is, if the footmen tire you, what will horses do from 1971? And the second is, a thief in the night from 1973. These films presented viewers with a choice.

They could either turn their life to Christ and attend church every week, or they could accept being murdered by one world government thugs while their loved ones are brainwashed and sexually violated. Now, these are far from Hollywood movies that people saw in the multiplex, but there are no less influential. Millions saw these films via projectors and church basements during the Nixon administration. And their combination of horror and eschatological fearmongering set the tone for paranoid evangelical media in the decades since.

So, start off, what do you, what do you think? Yeah, fun time. A couple short movies, I appreciated. Yeah, hour long each. I wonder if that was so they could keep them on a single reel or something. Most likely. That's a good guess. They don't have to be too complicated.

They were really fun. They were just early horror films. There was some truly disgusting stuff in there that I didn't expect to be seeing at, you know, 8 a.m. in the morning. No, you think you're seeing a Christian film. It's like you have the idea of like they're trying to. Maybe they allude to horrors and a sort of a roundabout way. But I don't know. It was especially, yeah, gruesome.

Yeah, both of these movies, to me at least, is somebody who grew up, you know, Jewish, they kind of started out like sermons. And I was like, are they just kind of saving production by bringing the kids? Cameron to church. Here, like, are these even actors or, you know, but then as the stories kind of like spiral out of control, you actually realize how much money went into some of these. Yeah, there were some effects. For at the time, you know, I mean, one of them has a helicopter chase. Like, that's a church movie, you know, made in the early 70s. Like, that's pretty crazy. Yeah, there was a definite, like, budget there. They were definitely thinking along the special effects lines. You know, I mean, the quote unquote blood budget had to be.

fairly high considering how much there was. Like, Ed Wood couldn't have made these. No, no, no. You know what, there was a, there's really a sense that there's a pervert behind the lens in some of these movies, you know? Yeah, and probably the pervert behind the lens is the same person staring into the camera, giving a sermon throughout 70% of it. Yeah, these felt very like, start as a church movie and then they kind of like, you know, sort of get out of the church a little bit.

But very terrifying. I mean, some truly brutal scenes, especially in your movie, Travis, so truly violent, you know, as I was saying before we started recording, kind of like reminded me of like a Christian faces of death, basically. Yeah, I thought that was a very good description of it. And I, yeah, I loved watching these because I have no baggage here. I couldn't, you know, there's nothing that triggers anything for me. I have, you know, only good memories of my Christian cousins and, you know,

going to their communion and like getting to do kind of like, a double Hanukkah Christmas sort of family celebration, which was great. It was good food. You got double gifts. Like I had only good experiences. My wife, on the other hand, has lots of, you know, Christian trauma. So I'm learning, you know, as I grow up. It reminded me a lot of the trauma horror films. And right. Yeah, totally. I think that there is a distinct pipeline between people who grew up exposed to this type of propaganda and the later kind of D-tier movie. really sicko-slash-er stuff that comes out of there. Because if you look into some of the hellhouses and the like that Christians did,

a lot of those special effects come into being there. So let's start with the movie I'm covering, which I originally thought I was going to do your movie, A Thief in the Night. And I was like, oh, this one is like too coherent. I'd feel bad taking this one. I feel like you enjoy this more. The other one is like, it's like, God, it's just,

there's like there's really no plot it's just a string of like horror of horrors yes it's it's a sermon intercut with like horrific like reenactments basically of like what the communists are going to do to you communist bad guys in both movies by the way yes if you do try to string together a plot you're realizing that well i'll mention it when we get to that part of the film because i realize the plot is just really fucking fucked up well and i mean look if footmen tire you what will horses do sounds kind of like a Drake line, you know. If we'll entire you, what will horses do? Ha, ha, got him, 40.

Like I said, this film was released back in 71, and it was directed by Ron Ormond. It was built around the preachings of the Mississippi Baptist minister Estes Perkle, which is, of course, a fantastic name. It sounds like the name of, like, a child trafficker in like a Victorian novel, you know. I was going to say this is, it's getting. giving like evil entity in like a ladder, a latter poltergeist sequel. I mean, like just the name Estes sounds like a really horrifying, like, um, autorific like Darth or something.

Well, in all Souls players will know Estes Flask, which is, you know, how you replenish your health. You're limited amount of potions to replenish your health. Given the topic of, you know, these movies and everything, I want to make the, like, I've been melting the past couple of days in the heat here. I was a little bit delirious. So instead of reading Ron Ormond, I was reading Ron Osmond and kept wondering how the Osmond's were involved with this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yes, I hadn't, I was not familiar with this guy's work until I started researching for this episode. But yeah, so the involvement of director Ron Ormond is

notable because before he directed Christian horror films, he had already made a living for decades, producing movies that shocked and titillated audiences. From the 40s through the 60s, he produced and directed several B-movie westerns, low-budget musicals, and exploitation films. He, his wife, June Ormond, and later their son, Tim Ormond, were essentially a family film factory.

They made and distributed shoestring pictures independently often handling production themselves and casting people from their own circles. This was not Hollywood. This was a southern-based movie production operation. But they are like the Osmans, then it's a family matter. Yeah, yeah.

Sort of like interesting got me really interested about, I don't know, the extent of, I guess, the southern film industry over the decades. Now, the most famous Orman picture, at least among fans of bad movies, is probably 1952's sci-fi horror, Mesa of Lost Women, starring Jackie Coogan, who's probably the most famous leading man of any of the Orman pictures. You know, it features a mad scientist named Dr. Arranya, who uses arachnid venom to create giant spiders and mind-controlled spider women who tempt men. and kill them with a kiss. That's fucking awesome. I would watch the hell out of that. Like, I'm so in for this. All right.

I see you have a YouTube clip for us. Yeah, at the last second, I realized, I wanted to show a small clip of the trailer here. Oh, we got to see. We got to see. The spider women. Yeah, I'm here for this, man. Spider women are going to get you.

Yeah. I fought a spider woman last night and never went her. Did you win? Yes. Okay, good. It's like a dad, MMO. It's like very easy. Very easy.

I don't think I've died yet. Well, that might be too easy. see if you haven't died at all in an MMO. It's a perfect difficulty level. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode as well as all past

premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low

price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie. 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv. 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickledown with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you.

And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying.

Not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.