Who Fears the Devil (The Legend of Hillbilly John). John Newland, 1973.
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Edition screened: Included in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Volume 2, released 2024. English language. Runtime approximately 98 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Who Fears the Devil is a distillation of three stories by American author Manly Wade Wellman. Folk singer Hedge Capers portrays the unifying character, Hillbilly John, who uses a guitar with pure silver strings to battle various incarnations of evil in the Appalachian mountains.
The Severin release includes several commentaries to the film and an especially good discussion with occult historian Mitch Horowitz who contextualizes Wellman’s stories within the hoodoo belief system and introduces the abundance of books and novelty items available in the 19th and early 20th centuries for practitioners of hoodoo.