Last night, as I was driving down Highway 281 across the Texas Hill Country from Marble Falls to suburban San Antonio, my way home was illuminated by a September harvest moon. It was an unusually cool late summer evening, indicating the chill of an early fall and evoking an ambience of ominous serenity. During my drive south, my mind wandered to an obscure yet thrilling film from 1975: Race with the Devil.

Set in south-central Texas and filmed on location in San Antonio and various Hill Country burgs like Bandera, Castroville, Leakey, and Tarpley, the film stars Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, and Lara Parker. Fonda and Oates portray the owners of a motorcycle shop in San Antonio who, in mid-January, decide to drive their new $36,000 motorhome up to Aspen, Colorado with their wives for a much-needed vacation. The film unfolds innocently enough, with the two couples motoring through downtown San Antonio past such landmarks as the Alamo and the Cenotaph and then out into the countryside. As evening approaches, instead of heading to an RV park, the main characters drive off of the road and park next to a remote river, hoping to enjoy some pastoral peacefulness and solitude. They find just the opposite.

Later that night, while Fonda and Oates are outside of their motorhome taking in the chilly Texas winter evening as their wives prepare for bed, they notice a bonfire off in the distance. Drawing closer, they observe what they think are a bunch of hippies celebrating some kind of nature festival. Odd, but apparently harmless. That is, until a young, nubile woman is stabbed through the heart in an act of human sacrifice. At just that moment, one of their wives opens the door to the motorhome, illuminating the outdoors by the light within. The satanist hippies notice and start coming after them. The “race” is on.