CHAPTER 1: THE HILLBILLY HIGHWAY
THE COAL CAMPS
Though consistently accused of stagnation throughout reductive stereotypes, in actuality Appalachians have a long history of migratory movements, beginning with the transition of nomadic fur-traders to homesteaders in the late 18th century. From The Appalachian Coalfield: “Many of the region’s early settlers were agriculturalists who established what can be described as ‘backwoods farms.’ They were generally located in areas with access to water and cleared the dense timber on flatter lowland landscapes for crops. They also raised livestock, often including hogs, by treating the woodlands as ‘open range.’ The form of agriculture practiced by the earliest settlers has been described as “yeomanesque,” or a largely self-sustaining activity.”9 As the American railroad boom took hold in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so too did the demand for the timber and coal output. This increased need for resources to fuel urban development and expansion in larger, primarily northern cities, led to the formation of “coal camps,” or communities built around local mines. These communities, at their best, provided steady work to Appalachians who were increasingly unable to adapt their homesteads to the demands of a changing economic market. Coal companies would frequently build schools, convenience stores, churches, and housing that modeled a picturesque small-town to attract laborers from around the region. These Appalachian families were often forced to walk away
9 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4139547
from their “yeomanesque” lifestyles, trading “open-range” for closer quarters on the promise of steady support and educational access for their children and families.
At their worst, these coal camps were highly exploitative and created dependency on both the output of the specific mine they were built around, and the (often absentee) owner who controlled it. Some companies elected to pay their miners in “scrip,” a type of currency produced by and for the specific coal camp. Scrip could look like a ledger, in which purchases from the company-owned convenience store would be deducted from the miner’s pay. In other cases, scrip was paper or coins issued to the miner to be used only within the camp. Charles Edward Thomas writes
“[...]the scrip system was used extensively in the U.S. coal industry between the 1880s and 1950. This was true across large swaths of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, but scrip could also be found in 34 other states. By the time the Harlan County coalfields were opened in 1910, the system had already been developed and was widely implemented. [...] When laws were eventually passed outlawing direct payment in scrip, the coal companies came up with a workaround that accomplished the same thing: Scrip would be issued as an advance on wages.”10
Beyond the obvious issues with this practice, there was fear within the camps for what miners’ futures held when the mine stopped producing profitable coal. Saving money was ineffective, as whatever meager savings they could accumulate wouldn't be recognized as currency anywhere outside of the coal camp. While miners were sometimes offered positions at nearby mines after closures, this wasn’t a guarantee, especially if they were injured or had spoken out about working conditions. In short, micro-migration to coal camps was often an act of desperation for Appalachians, where profits operated off of laborers’ fear, exploitation, and economic exclusion.
https://www.dailyadvocate.com/2021/07/28/coal-mining-scrip-a-collector-shares/
THE GREAT MIGRATION
The Gilded Age railroad expansion, ironically the very industry that facilitated the coal boom, quickly became a contributor toward its decline. As urban progress continued, homes began to switch to natural gas, railroads were migrating to diesel fuel, and steel moved to
10 Charles Edward Thomas, Scrip, 2
electric power.11 From Philip Overmiller and Thomas E. Wagner “[...] coal mining employment reached its apogee in the early 1920s and although there were a few surges, the industry entered a steady decline. This ‘boom and bust’ pattern in mining employment loosely correlates with larger economic conditions (for example the Depression and World War II) as well as with flows of Appalachian in-, out-, and shuttle migration.”12 With the surrender of regional families’ homesteads, or in the case of Eastern European and other international migrants brought in to work in the coal mines, no homestead at all, Appalachian residents were frequently left little choice but to migrate elsewhere. As opposed to the micro-migrations they’d experienced in the decades prior, economic opportunity was now further than a day’s trip away. Northern cities like Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago needed labor to staff their growing factories and mills, therefore Appalachians began moving north, creating what is often referred to as the “Hillbilly Highway,” or a stream of out-migrants from the region seeking economic opportunity. Early sociological research was often at odds with anecdotal evidence about how Appalachians fared in these northern cities, yet more recent scholarship has begun to address such discrepancies. From “Major Turning Points: Rethinking Appalachian Migration:” “Only about a quarter of whites who left the South came from Appalachian areas. The rest came from across the vast 17-state census-defined South. Ample data suggest that white Appalachian out-migrants had extremely different experiences than did other Southern white out-migrants.”13 In 2007, scholar J. Trent Alexander expands on this shift in perception arguing:
“Anyone following developments in southern or African-American history will have noticed an interesting turn in recent years: The ‘Great Migration’ is no longer only about the half-million southern blacks who moved northward in search of industrial work during World War I. Newer studies of the Great Migration have expanded the scope to the middle and later decades of the twentieth century, to western destinations, and-most recently--to the even larger parallel out-migration of southern whites. [...] With poverty rates around 30 percent, Appalachian migrants in large cities were economically on par with southern blacks, as well as newcomers from Eastern Europe, Mexico, and Vietnam.” 14
It is clear that Appalachians were coming from unique cultural and economic circumstances that led to stark differences in both their experience and reception during migrations to northern city centers.
ED GEIN, BENNIE BEDWELL, AND APPALACHIANS AS ANIMALS
11 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40934502
12 Bailey, Frankie Y. Ph. D; Chermak, Steven (2016). Crimes of the Centuries: Notorious Crimes, Criminals, and Criminal Trials in American History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. pp. 325–326. ISBN 978-1610-69593-0.
13https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/ed-geins-childhood-the-butcher-of-plainfield-fixated-on-hisdomineering-mother
14 Guy, R. (2000). The Media, the Police, and Southern White Migrant Identity in Chicago, 1955-1970. Journal of Urban History, 26(3), 329-349. https://doi.org/10.1177/009614420002600303 (Original work published 2000)
The question now becomes: what does 19th and 20th century Appalachian migration have to do with 21st century horror representations of hillbillies? The answer lies in the reception to Appalachians from urban centers like Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago. We know from Alexander and others that Appalachians experienced difficulty in adjusting to Northern life, but many scholars have stopped short of paying significant attention to the all-too important question of why. Differences of background, culture, and socioeconomic standing all led to social isolation of Appalachians in northern cities. With isolation comes misunderstanding, cultural othering, and fear. A look toward publications throughout the early to middle part of the 20th century illustrates the marginalization and animalization that took hold in the public’s perception of the region.
“During the 1950s most of the writing about Appalachians appeared as sensational journalistic accounts in Northern and Midwestern newspapers or community studies issued by municipalities. Reporter Norma Lee Browning wrote a series of nine articles for the Chicago Tribune portraying Appalachian migrants in extremely negative terms. She solidly established the ‘hillbilly’ motif in Chicago by linking a migrant from Tennessee, Edward Lee "Bennie" Bedwell, with the grisly murder of two teenage sisters. Bedwell fit the reporter's general profile of the denizens of the ‘hillbilly jungles of Chicago’ (1957a, 9). Her articles contained exaggerated accounts of incest, illiteracy, alcoholism, and violence. Browning (1957b, 2) wrote, for instance, that migrants despised education to the point that they ‘burned down schoolhouses and horsewhipped the teachers.”15
The “mountain monster” Bennie Bedwell was a semi-illiterate drifter formally charged with murder on January 27, 1957 after confessing to the gruesome attack on Barbara and Patricia Grimes, but later recanted and was eventually released after several details of his statement did not align with the facts of the case; however the cloud of urban suspicion around these “violent” and “primitive” hill people still hung thickly in the air.16 No one was ever arrested for the murder of the two sisters and as of 2025, it remains a notorious cold case. Less than a year later on November 16th 1957, authorities discovered a site of true horror in Plainfield, Wisconsin: the family farm of serial killer Ed Gein.17 Authorities found at least eight murdered and mutilated bodies throughout the property, along with evidence of even deeper familial dysfunction and psychological compulsions. While Gein himself was not a southern migrant, the sensationalism surrounding this case opened up the imaginations of urban audiences to perversions and deviancies previously unheard of in most cases. Gein’s mother, devout in her religious vigor, and the family’s isolation on their farm also shared characteristics with the depictions of Appalachian migrants in the writing of reporters like Norma Lee Browning, further attaching them to the notion of homicidal and dysfunctional compulsions. Scholar Roger Guy points to this phenomenon, citing a Town Hall police report from Chicago: “The report added that inaccurate newspaper accounts contributed to the notorious reputation southern whites received
15 https://www.modeldmedia.com/features/hillbilly-highway-110716.aspx
16 Votaw, Albert N., THE HILLBILLIES INVADE CHICAGO , Harper's Magazine, 216:1293 (1958:Feb.) p.64
17 https://daily.jstor.org/when-uptown-chicago-was-hillbilly-heaven/
and that certain behavior was labeled ‘hillbilly’ regardless of the person’s place of birth. This may explain the tenuous claims of an early unpublished report in which police were quoted as saying that 75 percent of their arrests and disturbances were caused by ‘hillbillies.”18
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ed-gein-a-wisconsin-was-led-away-by-sheriffarthur-schley-news-photo/1154183768
Journalists were frequently warned about entering areas where there were known to be a significant number of Appalachian migrants, often referred to as “hillbilly ghettos.”19 One anecdote captures advice given to a reporter: “You better be careful going into those places. You may not come out alive to write your story.”20 Iterations of this sentiment will later be found in numerous films highlighting the same caution: a run-in with a mountain monster could be your
18 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009614420002600303
19 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009614420002600303
20 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-16 16:34:36.
last. Several excerpts from Browning’s nine article series neatly summarize public sentiment at the time:
"It's a dangerous situation, one that we have to wake up to and face. These migrants are United States citizens, free to roam anywhere they wish. But they have turned the streets of Chicago into a lawless free-for-all with their primitive jungle tactics" [said Walter Devereux, chief investigator for the Chicago Crime commission].”
“[...]the southern hillbilly migrants, who have descended on Chicago like a plague of locusts in the last few years, have the lowest standard of living and moral code[...]”
“Of 400 rape cases recently investigated by juvenile police, the majority involved migrants who didn't even know what the word meant.”21
Words like “jungles,” “roam,” and “primitive” all point to Appalachians as being less-than human and draw a clear parallel with the mountain monsters we will see emerge later in 21st century media. This marginalization was applied to many ethnic groups including Black Americans, indigenous populations, and immigrants; however there was a particular fear rooted in and around white mountain migrants. In 1934, Wayne State crafted a survey asking what respondents what population they consider most “undesirable” in Detroit. The results were telling: “poor Southern Whites (“hillbillies”) came in second, just behind “criminals.” For as much discrimination and hatred was projected onto African Americans during the turn of the 20th century, “negroes,” as the survey wrote, were ranked fourth, revealing something uniquely distressing about Appalachians for urban centers.22
In 1958 Harper’s Magazine published an article by future city commissioner Albert Votaw entitled “The Hillbillies Invade Chicago.” Votaw collected impressions of these Appalachian migrants from community stakeholders: "In my opinion they are worse than the colored,’ said a police captain. ‘They are vicious and knife-happy. They are involved in 75 percent of our arrests in this district.’ ‘I can't say this publicly, but you'll never improve the neighborhood until you get rid of them,’ commented a municipal court judge.”23 Votaw himself, a quaker by birth, writes: “Clannish, proud, disorderly, untamed to urban ways, these country cousins confound all notions of racial, religious, and cultural purity.”24 It is important to note that many have looked into these claims of lawless, violent, murderous “hillbillies,” and found very little to sustain the sensationalistic reports around them. “In Uptown, however, southern whites did account for a significant number of arrests. Although precise figures were not available, it was estimated that southern whites made up about 20 percent of the population in the Town Hall district and
21 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-16 16:51:03.
22 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-20 19:19:02.
23 https://classic.esquire.com/article/1940/6/1/through-hell-and-high-water-with-the-mountain-boys
24 https://classic.esquire.com/article/1940/6/1/through-hell-and-high-water-with-the-mountain-boys
accounted for 35 percent of all arrests in 1960. Twenty-three per-cent of those arrested were from four states: Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee,and West Virginia. However, the author of the report advised against generalizations, noting that most arrests were for disorderly conduct and intoxication.”25
It is clear from these reports that the template for the mountain monster was being fleshed out in detail during this time by journalists, and then reinforced by reporters, law enforcement, city commissioners, and investigators, among others. The image of Appalachians tainting the “purity” of urban progress through their animalistic nature, their misleading “whiteness,” and their violent, irrepressible compulsions will all come up again in the examination of Deliverance, and the hillbilly horror media that succeeded it. In other words, mountain monsters were not a concept created for film, but rather translated onto film in a way that brought to life their damning public perception throughout the Great Migration. One of the most paradoxical elements of this examination comes with the parallel popularity of hillbilly sitcoms, which dominated network TV outlets at the same time these horrifying accounts were circulating throughout regional publications. What explanation can account for the fact that the very people urban audiences claimed to revile and fear, were also the ones they crowded around their living rooms to watch? The answer can be found, again, through an examination of horror.
CHAPTER 2: URBANOIA AND HILLBILLY TV
One of the most foremost reasons why audiences enjoy the horror genre, is the ability to embody a narrative outside of one’s lived experience. The “final girl” construction, where one heroine is left standing victorious after defeating the resident “monster,” resonates with audiences who want to feel that same sense of redemption over threats of evil. In many ways, The Beverly Hillbillies, and media like it, accomplished this for urban audiences. At a time when fear of a foreign “threat” was rampant across sensationalistic news reports, viewers enjoyed a voyeuristic look at the “sanitized” hillbilly to overcome their urbanoia. The sanitized hillbilly reinforced urban superiority while also generating nostalgia for a simpler way of life. From scholar Anthony Harkins, “The Beverly Hillbillies, and to some degree all sitcom mountain folk, resonated with audiences precisely because these shows captured the dialectical relationship between the noble mountaineer and the farcical and base hillbilly at a time when real mountaineers were much in the news.”26 The mountain monster of 21st century media is an amalgamation of the inflammatory descriptions of Appalachians throughout the Great Migration, and many of the characteristics present in these sitcoms, which rendered hillbillies impotent figures as opposed to sincere threats. While examples are countless, there are several whose
25 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-21 17:27:16.
26 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-21 17:39:23.
ramifications for contemporary representations have had significant staying power, beginning with Paul Webb’s The Mountain Boys.
THE COMIC STRIPS
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1940/6/1/through-hell-and-high-water-with-the-mountain-boys
Webb’s Mountain Boys comic premiered in November 1934 in popular men’s magazine, Esquire. The debut featured a single frame with three men lazing about on a porch. The men have long hair and unkempt beards. They’re surrounded by moonshine jugs, posing before an overturned wagon wheel and a single boot in the foreground. The caption reads, “Wonder if Maw’s had her baby yet—I’m gettin’ mighty hongry,”27 While contemporary audiences familiar with the mountain monster may read this as a nod toward cannibalism– that particular trope wouldn’t emerge until later in the 1970s with The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Cannibalism aside (for now), the caption is intended to humorously emphasize the inherent laziness of the hillbilly men. Webb was careful to illustrate that they have the resources for productive, agrarian labor (boot, wagon wheel, gun), but are choosing to ignore them in lieu of reclining on the porch and waiting for the matriarch to prepare a meal for them, despite having just given birth. A parallel approach can be seen eight five years later in Swift’s video, where the “savage” Appalachians are choosing to eschew their responsibilities (abandoned tractor, farm equipment) in favor of wielding homophobic signs and menacing Taylor and her friends. Harkins writes:
“Through the words and (in)actions of his three nearly identical Tolliver brothers (Luke, Willy, and Jake), and their family and neighbors, Paul Webb presented endless variations on the standard tropes that defined hillbillies throughout popular culture: social isolation, physical torpor and laziness, unrefined sexuality, filth and animality, comical violence, and utter ignorance of modernity. Although all familiar ideas, Webb’s portrayal was novel in the sense that such negative qualities were not offset by a correspondingly mythic vision of these folk as rugged pioneers, the inheritors of a proud Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage.”28 [...] Webb’s cartoon was also a visual manifestation of a powerful new myth of southern society and culture that developed in the 1920s and 1930s, what historian George Tindall later labeled ‘the Benighted South,’ a society characterized by a degraded culture, oppressive economic and political institutions, staggering inequality, and widespread poverty. Challenging the long-standing view of an idyllic antebellum society of stately plantations and cultural sophistication, this reconceptualization was one result of a much broader struggle over the nature of modern America that was part of the shift from a country grounded in localized commerce and social relations to one characterized by mass production and consumption.”29
Another notable Webb comic shows two of the “boys” in the foreground with a moonshine jug between them. Behind them is the family matriarch carrying a door over her head with the characteristic outhouse crescent moon shape on it. Her husband, standing
27 Hollis, Tim. Aint That a Knee-Slapper : Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century, University Press of Mississippi, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=534340. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-21 17:56:33.
28 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-21 18:46:43.
29 Inge, M. Thomas. “Sut, Scarlet, and Their Comic Cousins: The South in the Comic Strip.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 19, no. 2, 1996, pp. 153–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41970276. Accessed 21 May 2025.
barefoot and holding a paper, is watching her carry this heavy door, with a caption that reads, “Gran’maw’s switchin’ doors–she wants Gran’pappy to spend more time in the cabin but she wants him to feel at home.”30 The inference here, that their grandfather spends the majority of his time in the outhouse, further reinforces the primitive nature of these caricatures. As Harkins alluded to–Mountain Boys dispenses with any invocation of the “noble frontiersmen” and instead leans fully into the notion of Appalachians as slovenly, uncivilized people. Another important feature: the idea of women as being dominant toward the men. At the time of these publications, men were still very much expected to be acting as the head of their households–so the continual reinforcement of the “granny” figure as the one in charge reinforced the emasculation of hillbilly men. Women were not only pictured as working (often while men lazed around), but they were physically larger in stature as well, frequently dwarfing their husbands in these caricatures. Finally, much of the comic emphasizes the continual “breeding” of these mountain families. One of the comics shows the three “boys” on the porch with a baby on the ground in front of them. The caption reads “That’s yer Oncle Rafe–Grand’maw jest had ‘im the other day.”31 The seemingly endless fertility highlighted in Mountain Boys and comics like it led to further cultural othering for Appalachians and would be reflected in several more similar publications that would succeed Webb’s. More than anything, Webb’s comic gave permission to readers to discard the seemingly obligatory nod to the hard manual labor of the South. Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken was instrumental in this transition: Mencken’s simian references, suggesting that the hill people were not only uncivilized but also evolutionarily less advanced than urban Americans, mirrored contemporary ‘scientific’ studies of mountain backwardness, most notably Mandell Sherman and Thomas Henry’s Hollow Folk (1933). A study of five communities in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, its authors conceived of this work as an effort to trace ‘the human race on its long journey from primitive ways of living to a modern social order.’ Focusing especially on what they considered the least advanced community, Colvin Hollow, they describe a place of sheer animality and squalor, where a six-month-old infant, his face ‘covered with flies,’ lies on a ‘bed of dirty rags’ that ‘had not been ‘changed’ since he was born.’ Although later scholars have challenged the preconceptions and methodology of this study, this supposedly scientific account reinforced widely accepted ideas of mountaineer wildness.32
30 Hollis, Tim. Aint That a Knee-Slapper : Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century, University Press of Mississippi, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=534340. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-22 12:45:10.
31 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40932731
32 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40932731
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1938/8/1/a-flight-of-fancy
In addition to The Mountain Boys, 1934 brought the introduction of comic book character Snuffy Smith. Initially a supporting character in Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google, “DeBeck read dozens of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and nonfiction books about the hill folk and his debt to earlier fabricators of southern Appalachia and the mountaineer is obvious. He was strongly influenced by the works of Mary Murfree and George Washington Harris, and his copy of Sut Lovingood is liberally annotated and includes his preliminary sketches of Snuffy Smith.”33 Building off of Washington Harris and Webb, audiences saw familiar tropes of the hillbilly fool in 33 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40920908
the cartoon moonshiner. Scholar Tim Hollis writes “Google encountered the sawed-off moonshiner Snuffy Smith; Snuffy’s gargantuan wife, Lowizie; and the other backwoods denizens of their home turf, Hootin’ Holler. The preliminary research undertaken by the strip’s creator, Billy DeBeck, has led comics historians to deduce that he had decided to permanently change the focus of his strip from Barney’s world as a racehorse owner—that is, if his lethargic steed, Spark Plug, counts as a racehorse—to a more or less authentic mountain setting.”34
Indeed Snuffy’s wife, Lowizie, is much larger in stature and is aesthetically reminiscent of the grandmother figure in The Mountain Boys. Snuffy himself is rambunctious, uneducated, quick to threaten violence, yet, still very much a “sanitized” version of the newspaper reports of the “jungle” hillbilly. He can be seen frequently with his squirrel gun and a moonshine jug, always ready to assuage the fears of urban readers and reinforce that the mountains, and their inhabitants, were a source of comedy, not fear.
1934 wouldn’t be complete without the third, and perhaps most famous hillbilly comic strip ever conceptualized: Li’l Abner
“At the height of its popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, Li’l Abner was carried by nearly 900 newspapers in the United States and another 100 abroad—a combined circulation of sixty million that helped make Capp the highest paid cartoonist of his day (estimated in 1947 at $250,000 annually). Capp’s cartoon appeared on the covers of Life and Time; launched the national phenomenon of Sadie Hawkins Day dances; spawned a Broadway musical, two films, and a theme park; and proved wildly popular with both average newspaper readers and the intellectual elite.”35
The comic focused on the Yokum family and their life in Dogpatch, Kentucky. Thomas Inge writes, “Dogpatch became a kind of fantasy community [...] The name Dogpatch, in fact, has entered our vocabulary as any community that is hopelessly backwards in its culture, economy, and attitudes.”36 Unlike the brothers in Webb’s comics, the titular character in L’il Abner was laughable, yet wholly endearing to readers. The juxtaposition between his large physical presence and his almost nonexistent intellectual capabilities was humorous and appealing. If Snuffy was an attempt at a sanitized hillbilly figure, Abner was its peak. Unlike Capp’s predecessors, the size differences between the “granny” figure and the men is reversed, though she still remains the matriarch for the family. This will have relevance as the horror genre begins to emerge. Abner also saw the introduction of what would become a hallmark of hillbilly representation throughout both sanitized and horror representations: the “Daisy Duke” figure. Daisy Mae Scragg is a heartsick buxom blonde forever set on marrying Abner. Their relationship evolves alongside the comic strip with their wedding eventually landing the cover of Life magazine.
34https://www.peacocktv.com/watch/playback/vod/GMO_00000000498084_01/cc025511-2f63-3f15-aff0f9ff72348909?paused=true
35 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-22 14:58:11.
36 https://acloudofdust.typepad.com/files/hillbillies-invade-chicago.pdf
https://hakes-www.s3.us-east-005.backblazeb2.com/images/items/61000/61826_1_2.jpg
https://www.cbr.com/superman-lil-abner-al-capp-crossover/ HILLBILLIES ON TV
The popularity of hillbilly comic strips was certainly reflected across television screens throughout America. The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, The Real McCoys, and the Andy Griffith
Show all capitalized off of the popularity of the hillbilly motif, but this time, in the center of the family home as a shared experience. Douglas Kellner summarizes this point from television theorist Horace Newcomb: “television is ‘the most popular art:’ a form of storytelling which presents narratives that orient people toward contemporary social reality, that articulate and help resolve conflicts, and that provide a steady stream of social commentary on existing society. Its defining features, according to Newcomb, are intimacy, continuity, and history. Television is usually watched in the intimate setting of the family home or with close friends, and its figures likewise become home companions.”37 Indeed these sanitized, rural icons would become household names throughout the next decade, providing comfort, conflict resolution, comedic relief, and a window to a “simpler” time. From Hollis:
“Those sophisticated types who thought the country was going to the pigs with all the rural humor that had taken place over the years could only scream and gnash their teeth after the 1960s arrived. Television was about to experience the biggest hillbilly explosion since Snuffy Smith’s still blew up, and it all started almost imperceptibly on the ABC network in October 1957. The Real McCoys documented the experiences of a family of hill folk who migrated to the more prosperous lands of the West Coast—or, as the theme song described it, ‘From West Virginny they came to stay in sunny Californi-ay.’”38
The opening scene of the pilot episode of The Real McCoys (1957-1963) shows the family loaded up on their jalopy, ready to head to California from West Virginia. They soon see a police officer pull up behind them, prompting a blustering defensiveness from the patriarch, Grandpappy Amos: “...not so far [from West Virginia] that we don’t know our rights! We’re property owners, taxpayers, and legal residents of this here state of California!” The officer gently replies, letting them know that the reason he stopped them was simply to return the tire that had fallen off a few miles back. The scene is resolved with laughter and the family continues on their way. This initial scene almost immediately neutralized the fears of urban audiences. For them, Appalachians distrusted authority and had a propensity for violence–but this confrontation is resolved with a laugh and mild-mannered conversation. Right away, audiences are clued in to the fact that these are not the hillbillies from the pages of Norma Lee Browning–these hillbillies are funny, wholesome, and patriotic.
37 https://www.proquest.com/docview/2721404023?_oafollow=false&sourcetype=Magazines
38 CBS 1964 Dec 21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh4rJbJ0SKE
Similarly, The Beverly Hillbillies’ (1962-1971) opening scene opts into this same approach. The series opens with the patriarch walking into his quaint cabin, rifle-in-hand (a far cry from the unclaimed guns littered throughout the Mountain Boys cartoons). He hangs his hat and coat and then immediately goes to the sink to wash his hands. Right away audiences are shown that this is not a filthy, animalistic hillbilly, but a decent, hard-working frontiersman who takes pride in his work. The granny figure is mending clothes and soon the “Daisy Duke” figure comes in wielding an unsuspecting urban surveyor over her shoulder. The subversion of power lends comedic relief, but not necessarily at the expense of the “hillbillies.” Scholar Horace Newcomb writes:
“Inevitably the plots of the show revolve around a deep conflict of basic values. Their world, the part of it that is located in California, is filled with the greedy, with swindlers and crooks and good people blinded by the dazzle of the hillbilly fortune. All these people are out to somehow obtain the Clampetts' wealth. To them the Clampetts are not merely ignorant of the amount of their money, but of its meaning as well. The hillbilly does not use his money in an acceptable fashion. Why, when they have the means to do otherwise, do they insist on eating, dressing, and behaving as simply as they do. Indeed, they are often conned into purchasing the classic images of American suckerdom: the Brooklyn Bridge, the White House, Manhattan Island. Or they are tricked into investing in schemes that are patently worthless to all but the swindler. But such events are never allowed to define the equilibrium of the show. Invariably, the simpler values of the Clampetts win out over the morally deficient swindlers. What appeared to
be simple mindedness turns out to be deep wisdom simply expressed. Those good people who were momentarily misdirected by greed learn their lesson and become believers in the virtues of the Clampett morality. Granny's superficial jokes become keen ways of seeing the complexities of the world.”39
If these sitcoms were showcasing a wholesome, good-natured side of the displaced Appalachian, could that potentially be a good thing for mountain migrants? While these shows were enthusiastically embraced, even occasionally by Appalachians, they perpetuated damaging legacies. First, these shows did not translate to more accepting behavior toward mountain migrants. This will be further explained in Chapter 3. Other damaging legacies include the idea of Appalachians as simple-minded, particularly as it relates to larger physical bodies. Newcomb writes, “...producers seem to be working a refrain on "bigger is dumber."40 This has relevance later for our mountain monster prototype. Additionally, many scenes throughout these comic strips and sitcoms take place outside of the domestic space. This idea of mountain families being more at home outside, or the rural landscape being their “natural environment” confirmed, in many cases, the inability of migrants to be “domesticated.” Their need to “roam” can be satiated in a TV set, but not in a lived, urban environment. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0512477/mediaviewer/rm2453832449/
The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968) has perhaps the best visual evidence for how these sitcoms were actually doubling down on the bias against Appalachian people, rather than effectively mediating their perceived “otherness.” The show, which followed the small town life of
39https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-a-new-yorker-article-launched-the-first-shot-in-the-waragainst-poverty-17469990/
40https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-a-new-yorker-article-launched-the-first-shot-in-the-waragainst-poverty-17469990/
widower and Sheriff, Andy Taylor, featured two mountain foils: Briscoe Darling and Ernest T. Bass. John Otto explains, “Briscoe Darling and his family were superstitious but sober and honorable. They farmed, lived in a log cabin, and sang traditional ballads, as the plain folk had once done. Ernest T. Bass, on the other hand, was the very embodiment of the negative ‘hillbilly’ stereotype. He was poor, lazy, and dissolute. Ernest T. searched vainly for a woman to share his squalid life; and when frustrated, Bass howled in the streets, broke windows, and disrupted the peaceful town life of Mayberry, North Carolina.”41 In season 4, episode 5, “Briscoe Declares for Aunt Bee,” we see Mr. Darling being taught table manners. He initially inhabits the hillbilly hallmark of lack of domestication, but is, to put it clearly, “trainable.” Aunt Bee asks him to pass the potatoes and he proceeds to take the wooden spoon, full of mashed potatoes, and pass it around among the table. Aunt Bee corrects him, reminding him to pass the bowl. The dinner goes on like this, with Aunt Bee reminding Mr. Darling at nearly every step to be mindful of traditional table etiquette. Ernest T Bass undergoes a similar attempt at assimilation later in season 4, during episode 17, “My Fair Ernest T Bass.” The episode is a spin on the classic My Fair Lady where a sophisticated man attempts to change the dress and speech of a peasant woman to pass her off as a learned lady. The episode begins with Ernest in prison after wreaking havoc at a society party. In the vein of Aunt Bee, Andy tries to teach him table etiquette, but his animalistic behavior proves more difficult than Mr. Darling’s. He throws a roll at a child, regularly wipes his nose with his hand, and seems totally unable to adapt to a meal inside of a domestic space.
At the end of the episode, Ernest has to be physically thrown out of a society event and remarks, “Bachelor life ain’t too bad if you get enough chipmunks and squirrels to move in with you.”42 Despite his behavior, a young woman follows him out of the party and expresses interest in courting him. At the end of the episode, Sheriff Andy and Deputy Barney Fife are remarking on how incredible it is that someone is actually pursuing Ernest T Bass. Barney comments, “Now what would cause a quiet, sweet, demure girl to suddenly go ape? I mean she comes from a respectable family. The Ancrum Charcoal Company has been in business for years!” Andy replies, “Well you’re getting close…she’s the granddaughter of ‘Rotten Ray Ancrum.’ Come down out of the hills in 1870 and burnt the town down.” Barney replies, “You see? Blood will tell, breeding will out.”43 Harkins summarizes: “Although he continually tries to fit into society and social institutions—different episodes portray his effort to join the army, to mingle at a formal reception, and to gain a primary-school education—his every encounter with civilization inevitably proves disastrous and each episode closes with Sheriff Taylor hastening him back to the mountains hoping he will not return.”44 This dichotomy between these two characters is a telling summary of the anecdote many prescribed to the problem of Appalachian migration: either learn to assimilate to urban ways, or go back to the mountains. Even Albert Votaw identifies this in his scathing take on mountain migration writing, “The focus of any program must be to prod the newcomers to help themselves. [...] The few who have come from cities are ripe for assimilation and critical of the rural folk, particularly of the mountaineers.”45 In other
41 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/01/19/our-invisible-poor
42 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/01/19/our-invisible-poor
43 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/01/19/our-invisible-poor
44 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/436499/pdf Harry Caudill and Night Comes to the Cumberlands Revisited
45https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-proposing-nationwidewar-the-sources-poverty
words, these sitcoms did not offer up a fresh take on the image of the Appalachian migrants–they simply reinforced them. If Mr. Darling could adapt, then why couldn’t their neighbors? Why couldn’t the Ernest T Basses of urban centers realize their inability to be domesticated and, like the character, go back home to the mountains where they “belong?”
The popularity of the hillbilly icon in the mid-20th century cannot be overstated. Paul Webb’s Mountain Boys were used to sell Barbasol shaving cream. The popular soda “Mountain Dew”– a well known moniker for mountain moonshine, used a character known as “Willy the Hillbilly” in their advertising campaigns. The antics of Ma and Pa Kettle were household staples. Even the Clampett family from The Beverly Hillbillies was used widely in advertising. Several lasting stereotypes emerged during this era including the hillbilly’s inability to adapt to the domestic space. The Daisy Duke figure would become a well-known component of rural Southern representations, and would be seen even decades later in dramatized television shows like Ava Crowder in FX’s Justified (2010-2015) and G'Winveer Farrell in WGN’s The Outsiders (2016-2017). There was a heavy association with pigs throughout nearly all of comic strips and advertising, which will be especially relevant for the development of the mountain monster (more on this in Chapter 5). Li’l Abner had a pet pig, “Salomey,” and Snuffy Smith was often shown tending to the pigs. There were pigs present in Mountain Dew advertising and “hawgs” in the Mountain Boys. As previously discussed, laziness was a through line, as was a lack of shoes, patchwork clothing, overalls, and the matriarchal, overbearing “Mamaw” figure. Dialectically, the speech patterns of these sources varied, but many put little to no effort into authentic representation of Appalachian dialects. Linguist Kirk Hazen explains, “[...]media representations rarely put in the effort to get the complex patterns of Appalachian dialects right. Instead, they’ll use clothing and one or two dialect features like a-prefixing (‘They were arunning’) and the demonstrative ‘them’ (‘He ate them apples yesterday’) to create a broadly sketched, stereotypical portrait. These stereotypes have become so pervasive that they occur in nearly every portrayal of Appalachia.”46 An affinity for moonshine, unfounded pride, and a tendency toward violence were elements that brought comedic relief in comic strips and sitcoms, but would evolve into dangerous characteristics in succeeding dramatic representations.
The hillbilly “craze” didn’t simply end with the conclusion of these pop culture mainstays. With increased technological capabilities and the seemingly endless involvement with the Vietnam War, television networks were turning their attention toward “escapism” programming. I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970), Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967) and Bewitched (1964-1972) all began to replace the rural comedy of the preceding decade. Could the hillbilly fool have remained forever confined to the pages of comic books and black and white television screens? It is unlikely. A significant movement was brewing alongside the antics of Snuffy and Abner: The War on Poverty. At the same time urban audiences were finding relief in the sanitized take on Appalachian migrants, others were developing real concern for the plight of these hardworking Americans. Appalachians themselves were also pushing back: urging citizens and councils to make room for newcomers and break down cultural barriers. When individual efforts weren’t enough to spur large-scale change, many tried to sound the alarm from within the Appalachian 46 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-21 17:37:34.
region. If urban centers were so desperate for Appalachians to go back to the mountains, then we need to collectively find a way to make the mountains worth going back to, economically speaking. This culminated into a call to action from the highest level of government, one that many were unwilling and ill equipped to take on, as the nation had just emerged from the Great Depression and many felt they were beginning to find solid footing again for the first time. Sobering black and white images, a national campaign, and a series of revealing non-fiction texts collectively began to drown out the laughter and call American’s attention to the reality in Appalachia America.
CHAPTER 3: THE WAR ON POVERTY
CHRISTMAS IN APPALACHIA
Picture this: it is December 1964, four days before Christmas. You’re in the family living room with the colorful glow of the Christmas tree lights reflected in the shiny presents wrapped underneath. You’re finishing up an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, or maybe a repeat of The Twilight Zone. 10:00 pm rolls around and you hear the familiar voice of journalist Charles Kuralt emanating from the black and white screen, as the camera pans across a holler in Letcher County, Kentucky. Kuralt remarks that, along the road he is walking, lie the “shacks of tar paper and pine, which are the homes of a million permanently poor.”47 Kuralt goes on to describe the harrowing journey that the children of these mountains take to get to the one-room schoolhouse every day. Perhaps at this point you remember the comics you used to read in your dad’s copy of Esquire. Your first impulse might be frustration, as you think of how selfish it is of those fathers to allow their children to go hungry rather than finding an opportunity for work to support the family. Kuralt then describes the vocation of several of these households, describing “hard working” men who are doing far more backbreaking work than you’re asked to, like digging coal from the mouth of mountains. Your impulse to dismiss the dire circumstances you’re seeing as the result of Appalachian laziness suddenly becomes more difficult. You then hear the voices of children singing “Silent Night” juxtaposed behind the title screen “Christmas in Appalachia.” Do the presents in the living room now suddenly appear extravagant? Does the fact that your children have separate rooms, while these families are sharing one room among thirteen people, feel indulgent? This is just one example of the cognitive dissonance that might have occurred when middle and upper class Americans were confronted with real footage of the systematic economic inequalities within the Appalachian region. The rural family sitcom and hillbilly stock characters had provided comedic relief for almost a decade, while reinforcing urban superiority; however Americans were now being shown real mountain families, with coaldusted faces and starving children. Worse yet, the mountain men weren’t lounging on the steps drinking moonshine, or cooking up hair-brained schemes–they were doing backbreaking work for pennies on the dollar.
47 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-the-congress-the-state-the-union-25
NIGHT COMES TO THE CUMBERLANDS
Would middle class audiences really be surprised that such poverty existed in America? From The New Yorker’s “Our Invisible Poor:”
“In his significantly titled ‘The Affluent Society’ (1958) Professor J. K. Galbraith states that poverty in this country is no longer ‘a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought.’ Dr. Galbraith is a humane critic of the American capitalist system, and he is generously indignant about the continued existence of even this nonmassive and afterthoughtish poverty. But the interesting thing about his pronouncement, aside from the fact that it is inaccurate, is that it was generally accepted as obvious. For a long time now, almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal’s social legislation and—more important—the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.”48
One of the first fractures in the image of post-war America as a society of large-scale affluence came from writer Michael Harrington in 1962. Harrington published The Other America which highlighted several pockets of disenfranchised areas throughout the U.S., with special attention on rural Appalachia. The book did little at first to stoke the fire of the American public until Dwight Macdonald’s review in The New Yorker from 1963, firing what some would call “the first shot in the war against poverty.”49 Harrington sold 70,000 copies of The Other America in the year after Macdonald’s essay was published. It even eventually made its way into the hands of John F. Kennedy, igniting his advocacy for the region’s economic situation.50 The then-president would be assassinated only a few months later during a November 1963 motorcade in Texas. One of the most important things Macdonald did with his review was to draw attention to to the demographics Harrington felt were most at risk:
“These invisible people fall mostly into the following categories, some of them overlapping: poor farmers, who operate 40 per cent of the farms and get 7 per cent of the farm cash income; migratory farm workers; unskilled, unorganized workers in offices, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, laundries, and other service jobs; inhabitants of areas where poverty is either endemic (‘peculiar to a people or district’), as in the rural South, or epidemic (‘prevalent among a community at a special time and produced by some special causes’), as in West Virginia, where the special cause was the closing of coal mines and steel plants; Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who are a fourth of the total poor; the alcoholic derelicts in the big-city skid rows; the hillbillies from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Oklahoma who have migrated to Midwestern cities in search of better jobs. And, finally, almost half our ‘senior citizens.”51
Macdonald concludes his lengthy review with a proposed solution to problems Harrington outlines writing: “The problem is obvious: the persistence of mass poverty in a prosperous country. The solution is also obvious: to provide, out of taxes, the kind of subsidies that have
48https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-proposing-nationwidewar-the-sources-poverty
49 https://www.life.com/history/war-on-poverty-appalachia-portraits-1964/
50 https://www.life.com/history/war-on-poverty-appalachia-portraits-1964/
51 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22nmbtj.8
always been given to the public schools (not to mention the police and fire departments and the post office)—subsidies that would raise incomes above the poverty level, so that every citizen could feel he is indeed such.”52 The direct, and indirect criticism of the Kennedy administration throughout Macdonald’s essay finally caught the attention of lawmakers and government officials, who were further encouraged by the 1963 publication of Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of Depressed Area by Harry Caudill.
https://www.kentucky.com/news/special-reports/fifty-years-of-night/article44393733.html
Caudill was born in Letcher County, Kentucky–the same area that Christmas in Appalachia would explore in the December 21st documentary. After serving in World War II and earning his law degree at the University of Kentucky, Caudill returned to the mountains to open his own law practice, later serving two terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives.53 Caudill was, by all accounts, a voracious writer who was particularly motivated when it came to creating better understanding around the issues in Appalachia. The one-time Director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College, Loyal Jones, writes of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, “In the 1960s, Harry Caudill was the only person in the coalfields with the intellect, perseverance, courage, and anger too, to do that book. Harry's mixture of Old Testament and nineteenth-century lawyer's rhetoric and outrage rolled majestically from its pages. One gauge of the book's importance was that Alfred H. Perrin, a bookman if there ever was one (then director of publications at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati), bought 100 copies and asked the Council of the Southern Mountains to send them to the President, his cabinet, to Appalachian members of Congress and other influential Americans.”54
52 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29853472
53 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22nmbtj.8
54 Batteau 1990 7 Invention of Appalachia
JOHNSON’S WAR ON POVERTY
Following Kennedy’s assasination, Lyndon B Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States and continued pursuing many of the causes that Kennedy had initiated, including eradication of the poverty addressed by Harrington and Caudill. On January 8, 1964, Johnson formally declared his War on Poverty: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”
55 On March 16th, 1964, Johnson addressed Congress: “On similar occasions in the past we have often been called upon to wage war against foreign enemies which threatened our freedom. Today we are asked to declare war on a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people. If we now move forward against this enemy--if we can bring to the challenges of peace the same determination and strength which has brought us victory in war--then this day and this Congress will have won a secure and honorable place in the history of the nation, and the enduring gratitude of generations of Americans yet to come.”
56 The language chosen for these proclamations by Johnson was intentional. His impassioned speeches emphasized that, much like the war efforts of the past, this particular movement was going to require broad participation. He spoke about “enlisting” almost synonymously with war efforts: “Among older people who have retired, as well as among the young, among women as well as men, there are many Americans who are ready to enlist in our war against poverty.”57
Many of the specific programs and congressional tools for which Johnson advocated have now faded from the public consciousness, but the photos that accompanied the movement have not. Shortly after his initial declaration in January, Life Magazine ran a 12-page feature showcasing the “Valley of Poverty.” Ben Cosgrove writes, “At the time, LIFE was arguably the most influential weekly magazine in the country [...] LIFE was in a unique position in the early days of Johnson’s administration to not merely tell but to show its readers what was at stake, and what the challenges were, as the new president’s ‘Great Society’ got under way.”58 Cosgrove goes on to describe the photos as “an indictment of a wealthy nation’s indifference.”59 Near Neon, Kentucky, photographer John Dominis documented a mother holding her daughter Riva, critically ill with measles. A photograph from Branch Creek shows thin walls plastered with newspaper. One of the captions of two young children reads: “The commonest sights around Appalachia were aging men and ragged urchins.”60 In an increasingly visual society, these images would contribute heavily to the mold for the horror genre’s mountain monster. The stark
55 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/436499/pdf
56 Butterworth , Keen. “The Savage Mind: James Dickey’s ‘Deliverance.’” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 1996, pp. 69–78.
57 Glenday, Michael K. “Deliverance and the aesthetics of survival.” American Literature, vol. 56, no. 2, 1984, p. 149, https://doi.org/10.2307/2925750.
58 Boorman, John, director. Deliverance.
59 Ibid
60 Ibid
use of black and white, weather-worn houses, and coal-dusted faces all stoked strong reactions in viewers ranging from sympathy to fear, and even disgust. In Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film, author Meredith McCaroll writes “While there are notable exceptions and opportunities to subvert a system that privileges the director, the stereotypes of Appalachia have made their way into even well-intentioned documentary films. The earliest documentary images of the region carved out a path that few filmmakers have been able to resist. Drawn to the staid images of poverty, family, landscape, and brutal living conditions, documentarians have consistently shown the same Appalachia.”
61 President Johnson himself embarked on what’s known as his “Poverty Tours” throughout 1964, making stops from Pennsylvania to Kentucky to address communities there and share his plans to bring relief. One of the most lasting images from this time came in Martin, County Kentucky at the cabin of Tom Fletcher. Fletcher was a former sawmill operator, unemployed at the time of the now-infamous photograph. Tom’s son Calvin, seen in the photographs remarked to BBC in 2014: “The president's visit was the worst thing that ever happened to the family. Since then we've had nothing but people wanting to talk about that day and taking photos of this house."62
https://www.life.com/history/war-on-poverty-appalachia-portraits-1964/
61 Ibid
62 Dickey, James, and Van Gordon Ness. The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1970-1997. University of Missouri Press, 2005.
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/08/260151923/kentucky-county-that-gave-war-on-poverty-a-facestill-struggles
1964 began with a State of the Union from President Lyndon B Johnson declaring a War on Poverty, and ended with the December 21st documentary Christmas in Appalachia. The year was an impactful one for Appalachia, taking the well-known, loveable, hillbilly fool and turning it on its head. Only twelve years beforehand, Life Magazine featured the marriage of Li’l Abner and his “Daisy Duke” on their cover. Now, the same publication was creating spreads a dozen pages long, full of gritty images from the real “Dogpatch.” Middle and upper class Americans had heard, or in some cases even seen, this kind of abject poverty in war efforts taking place abroad in faraway, exotic locations, but many couldn’t have imagined similar conditions only a few hours away. In The Invention of Appalachia Allen Batteau writes, “Following the launching of the War on Poverty, with Appalachia as the ‘first battlefield in the War on Poverty’ in 1964 and the airing of the CBS/Charles Kuralt documentary Christmas in Appalachia at the end of the same year, attention centered on the Appalachian region.”63 Batteau goes on to claim “For several years afterward, poverty warriors,planners, bureaucrats, and the publics that supported them saw Appalachia through Kuralt-colored glasses.”64
Like any public campaign, there inevitably came an expiration date on patience from the American public and government officials. Readers eventually became desensitized to the influx of imagery from out of the region and even early champions of involvement efforts were beginning to flag. Loyal Jones writes, “Nobody was more disappointed than Harry [Caudill] that his efforts didn't do more. He was dissatisfied with the Appalachian Regional Commission for not being able to deal with absentee ownership and power production. He was critical of the
63 Creadick, Anna. “Banjo boy: Masculinity, disability, and difference in deliverance.” Southern Cultures, vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 63–78, https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2017.0005.
64 Engelhardt, Elizabeth Sanders. The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature. Ohio University Press, 2003.
War on Poverty. He thought we were all too timid, which we were.”65 Mich Yonah Nyawalo summarizes:
“The complexities of Appalachian realities are often reduced to discourses about poverty in the region. Media portrayals of Appalachia, such as CBS’ 1964 special Christmas in Appalachia, CBS’ 48 Hours 1989 episode ‘Another America,’ (qtd. in ‘Flashback: Eastern Kentucky Responds to 48 Hours Report’) Rorry Kennedy’s 1999 documentary American Hollow, or even Dianne Sawyer’s 20/20 special A Hidden America: Children of the Mountain, have repeatedly highlighted ‘a devastating poverty that plagues part of the region while simultaneously ignoring the presence of middleclass and upper-class mountain residents’ (Locklear 92). Rather than examining the systemic roots of poverty existing in some parts of the area, a common narrative is to blame Appalachia’s economic realities on ‘cultural’ characteristics that are supposedly unique to the location. Thus, the ‘culture of poverty’ diagnosis conveniently sidesteps the ways in which the region’s land and resources have historically been exploited in ways that never benefited the majority of its inhabitants.”66
THE RISE OF HORROR
As major broadcasting networks were moving more toward escapist programming to better accommodate the taste of viewers, the film industry was similarly evolving. By 1964, Alfred Hitchcock had captivated audiences with Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). Rosemary’s Baby premiered in 1968, along with Night of the Living Dead. Color television was becoming more mainstream, and technological advances were making filming locations more exotic and special effects more believable. Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson (1960) may have been the highest grossing film of 1960, but it was followed closely by Psycho, which was inspired by the serial killer Ed Gein.6768 An early precursor to the mountain monster came with the campy, “Brigadoon” inspired film, Two Thousand Maniacs! from 1964, written and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. The film follows a group of Northerners as they venture into a Southern town on the one-hundredth anniversary of their Civil War defeat. Told they would be honored guests for the celebrations, the unsuspecting urbanites are killed by the local townsfolk in increasingly gruesome ways, (even cooking and serving some of them). Ultimately two of the group are able to escape, but when they return to “Pleasant Valley,” Georgia, it has completely vanished. Well ahead of its time, Two Thousand Maniacs! didn’t make much of an impression at the box office, but in retrospect is seen as one of the earliest examples of the “slasher,” film, which will be discussed in Chapter 5. American screenwriter Paul Schrader writes, “When I first saw Two Thousand Maniacs! on a double Paul Schnider's Guilty Pleasures bill with Blood Feast at a drive-in in Zeeland, Michigan, I knew I was neither a well nor a healthy person. I loved it.”69
The 1970s were primed to bring even more attention to the horror genre with the launch of films still considered classics by 21st century standards. These include The Exorcist (1973)
65 Ibid
66 Butterworth
67 Creadick
68 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly. A Cultural History of an American Icon. Oxford University Press, 2005.
69 Dickey, Christopher. Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son. Touchstone, 1999.
and Jaws (1975), but both owe a debt of gratitude to their critically acclaimed and commercially successful predecessor, Deliverance (1972). Deliverance moved into the hillbilly vacuum created after America shifted away from the fool as cultural “other,” combining it with the influx of disturbing documentary images coming out of the region and resolving the cognitive dissonance felt by many middle class Americans. One cannot understand why Deliverance, and so many of the mountain monster films that succeeded it, were so successful without understanding the context in which they was launched. Deliverance transported viewers back to the days of Norma Lee Browning, reminding audiences that they needn’t pity Appalachians. In fact, the best thing they could do is stay far away from the road Charles Kuralt walked down in 1964. Appalachians, increasingly hostile to the influx of urbanites into their area, were to be feared.
CHAPTER 4: DELIVERANCE
JAMES DICKEY AND HIS ENVIRONMENTAL MANIFESTO
James Dickey was born in 1923 and grew up in the American South, most notably Atlanta, Georgia where he attended high school. Already an accomplished poet (Dickey won the National Book award for poetry in 1966 for his collection Buckdancer’s Choice), Deliverance was his debut novel, published in 1970.70 While many view Deliverance as an intentional affront to Appalachian culture, such a notion was only passively addressed in Dickey’s interviews. In fact, he often expressed shock that such an idea was a takeaway for audiences. As Keen Butterworth points out in his article “The Savage Mind: James Dickey’s ‘Deliverance,” Dickey was actually trying to make a commentary on the growing chasm between humans and our natural environment. Keen writes, “And so the eye of Dickey's book sees us: subdued creatures of an urban industrial civilization, separated from Nature, save our own; and that nature-inourselves we cannot understand because of our isolation from the natural world which could furnish the analogies necessary for understanding.”71 The “eye” Keen writes of is a reference to the original cover of Dickey’s novel: an eye peering out at the viewer from behind a circle of vegetation. The vegetation is, notably, poison hemlock. The cover is not, as some might suspect, a hillbilly leering out from the dense woods, but rather an unidentified eye (intended to represent Man), gazing at us, the reader. This steady gaze is to remind us that nature is omnipresent: watching, judging, encroaching, and meting out its own brand of justice.
70 Butterworth
71 Silver, Timothy. “The ‘Deliverance’ Factor.” Environmental History, vol. 12, no. 2, Apr. 2007, pp. 369–371.
https://www.betweenthecovers.com/pages/books/566835/james-dickey/deliverance
If Dickey’s intention was to deliver a commentary on Man’s separation from the natural world, how then did his novel, and John Boorman’s subsequent film, become the model for 21st century Hillbilly horror? Ask any moviegoer and they will likely point toward the infamous rape scene, made even more horrifying by dialogue instructing the victim to “squeal like a pig;” however the aesthetic of Deliverance as Appalachian horror goes well beyond that pivotal scene. Scholar Michael Glenday writes, “[...]rather than seeing in Deliverance a call to resist the draw towards urban comforts and environments, viewers are more likely to see it as a cautionary tale warning against the dangers of an untamed, uncivilized, primitive wilderness.”72 The basic premise of Deliverance follows four men as they escape their comfortable, urban environments and venture into, as Glenday writes, the “primitive wilderness” of rural Georgia. The men have decided to canoe down the fictional Cahulawassee river before it too succumbs to urbanization. It is important to note that there are few distinctions between Dickey’s book and the film, directed by John Boorman (1972). While these differences are noteworthy, the legacy
72 Billings, Dwight B., et al. Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. University Press of Kentucky, 2001.
of Deliverance (similar to Stephen King’s novel and Stanley Kubric’s film, The Shining) lies primarily in Boorman’s visual interpretation of the source material.
The film opens with a tracking shot across the natural landscape with a voiceover of Lewis (Burt Reynolds) explaining, in response to Bobby’s (Ned Beatty) questioning his motive for the trip, “Because they're buildin' a dam across the Cahulawassee River; they're gonna flood a whole valley, Bobby, that's why. Dammit, they're drownin' a river; they're drownin' a river, man.”73 The scene goes on to show heavy machinery digging into the landscape–leveling trees, moving dirt, and exploding hillsides with Lewis lamenting, “We [society] are going to rape this whole goddamn landscape. We’re going to rape it.”74 Lewis’ friends explain away his assertion as “extremist,” but of course this idea of urban and suburban developers “raping” the landscape will have a bold parallel later in the film. As previously mentioned, Dickey felt that through his novel and subsequent screenplay, he was making a claim about environmentalism, While one may presume that this opening is intended to reflect this overarching message, Glenday is correct in that few moviegoers recognized this motive. In the next shot (less than three minutes into the film), the men are piled in the car as the camera shows them driving deeper into the winding roads of rural Georgia. Bobby asks, “Any hillbillies up here anymore Lewis?” Lewis responds, “Yeah there’s some people up there that ain’t never seen a town before.”75 Less than ten minutes into the film and Director John Boorman already setting up what will be the central conflict in the film: the urban men versus the rural, primitive “hillbillies.” The four men, Lewis, Bobby, Ed (Jon Voigt) and Drew (Ronny Cox) pull into a rural gas station, cementing what will become a future hallmark of the mountain monster genre: decrepit gas station as last stop before the end of civilization. Bobby explains that he believes they’ve found “where everything finishes up. We just may be at the end of the line.”76 Adam Scovell of the BBC writes “From the very beginning, the four vacationers are shown in contrast to the local people in virtually every conceivable way. Whereas the mountain folk have vehicles rusted to the point of collapse, the men travel in brand new cars, including an appropriately named Ford Country Squire. The car's name alone hints at their naivety. Boorman highlights how the contrast between the men and the environment drove the film's drama. ‘It was really about men living in a city suddenly experiencing nature in all its terror,’ he says. ‘That was what people identified with."77
APPALACHIA AND INBREEDING
Not long after the gas station attendant delivers an ominous warning to Bobby: “you don’t know nothing,” (yet another foreshadowing of the men’s ineptitude for this excursion), Drew begins an impromptu duet with an adolescent boy strumming a banjo. The boy’s face is unique, resembling features of inbreeding including small, wide-set eyes. The banjo savant,
73 “Deliverance at 50: A Violent Battle between Urban and Rural America.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 30 July 2022, www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/30/deliverance-1972-film-johnboorman-anniversary.
74 Creadick
75 Tincher, R.B. (1980), Night Comes to the Chromosomes: Inbreeding and Population Genetics in Southern Appalachia. Central Issues in Anthropology, 2: 27-49. https://doi.org/10.1525/cia.1980.2.1.27
76 https://www.foxfire.org/it-still-lives-season-1-episode-5/
77 https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/revisiting-deliverance/
known as “Lonnie” (Billy Redden) was hand-picked by Director John Boorman for the role, presumably for the insinuation he knew viewers were draw upon seeing him.78 Redden did not actually play the banjo, therefore filmmakers had to use a double who could pluck out the tune that so many now recognize as “Dueling Banjos” by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith.79 “In the novel, Lonnie is described as a mute, albino boy with ‘pink eyes like a white rabbit’s.’ He cannot speak or focus his gaze, but when Drew begins playing, he changes.”80 This scene is arguably one of the most recognized from Deliverance; It is a rare moment of comradery between the mountain locals and the urban men. It is important to note however, that the harmonious moment ends abruptly when Drew, eager to shake Lonnie’s hand, prompts Lonnie to shut down completely. It is a reminder that, despite their shared interest, they are not the same and Lonnie is unable to participate in societal conventions like shaking hands. Bobby remarks that Drew should just “give him a couple of bucks” and move on.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tom-margie/2128778611
Assertions of inbreeding have pervaded Appalachian stereotypes and hillbilly horror for decades. Isabel Machado writes:
“In the film’s DVD audio commentary, director John Boorman notes that the people he encountered in the Georgia Mountains were ‘all hillbillies’ whose ‘notorious’ inbreeding he maladroitly explains: ‘The reason, I discovered up there, is that these are the descendants of white people who married Indians, and they were then ostracized by the Indians and the whites, and so they had to turn in on themselves, and this strange, hostile, inward-looking group grew up around that history. And you can see, in some of those people’s faces, traces of the Indian.’81
This narrative can be traced back to journalists’ sensational accounts of “hillbilly” families during the Great Migration and local color writers who regularly emphasized the isolation of mountain
78 JW Williamson Hillbillyland 165
79 Williamson 166
80 Williamson, 167
81 https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/revisiting-deliverance/
families. In his article “Night Comes to the Chromosomes,” Robert Tincher writes “These notions have been incorporated into the popular stereotyped portrayal of Appalachia, which is continually embellished, as, for example, in the motion picture ‘Deliverance’ (1972). As a result, today's general public seems to assume that inbreeding is responsible for the presumed low intelligence, ‘genetic deficiencies,’ and ‘rare hereditary diseases’- of the region.82 Tincher’s research tracked over 140 years of data in mountain communities and found “inbreeding levels in Appalachia do not seem extreme enough to justify labeling inbreeding as unique or particularly common to the region, when compared with those reported for populations elsewhere or at earlier periods in American history.” In other words, like much of Appalachia, the idea of rampant inbreeding is a construction engineered for the entertainment of the wider public’s imagination. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the evidence persists. 2004 saw the release of popular clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch’s line of t-shirts sporting the phrase ‘It’s all relative in West Virginia.”83 Much of this staying power is thanks to the intentional casting choices in Deliverance and the many look-alike films that succeeded it.
“SQUEAL LIKE A PIG”
After the four men depart the gas station, they arrive at a homestead where they hope to recruit a “local” to meet them at the other end of the river. Scholar Elizabeth Engelhardt created a theoretical framework for Appalachian outsiders, outlined in her 2003 book, The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature. She uses the categorizations of voyeur, tourist and social crusader to help organize and define the influx of “outsiders” to Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century.84 This framework is helpful for contextualizing the men’s interaction with the locals. Ed (Jon Voigt) looks through a window and finds an elderly woman sitting with a severely disabled child. This shot, a close-up of Ed’s face peering through the window at the scene, encapsulates perfectly what Englehardt describes as an Appalachian “voyeur.” There is no interaction, context, or complexity–only a snapshot from which viewers will draw their own conclusions. The elderly woman pictured in this scene was not an actress, but, along with her granddaughter, a local to Rabun County where Deliverance was shot. Her name was Bashley Webb and in a 1973 article for Foxfire Magazine she describes herself: “I’m just what I am and I ain’t no different. You can find me today just like you’d find me tomorrow. I ain’t no high son of a gun. I guess you think we’re the biggest fools there ever is. If these people that’s a’growing up now had to go through with what I have, they wouldn’t be here.”85 The crew used Mrs. Webb’s actual home for shooting, digging up her
82 Cartwright, Ryan Lee. Peculiar Places : A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity, University of Chicago Press, 2021.ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6660307. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2024-06-06 18:15:3
83 Williamson
84 https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/revisiting-deliverance/
85 Cartwright, Ryan Lee. Peculiar Places : A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity, University of Chicago Press, 2021.ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6660307. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2024-06-06 18:15:3
garden in the process. Mrs. Webb reported that while they paid her for the ruined potato patch lost to this cinematic “necessity,” they didn’t compensate her “ what they ought to have.”86
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nUzJlggLb-o5Kvi82h-nfmTLXHzTq3_w
Later in the same scene, Lewis approaches an outbuilding with loud clanging emanating from within. He opens the door, startling the man (“Griner”), who accidentally brings his tool down on his hand. The slats in the outbuilding, combined with Griner’s curse-fueled dash to escape through the opened door, all visually represent a wild animal being released from a cage. Griner even looks briefly at Lewis, with a barely perceptible tilt to his head, before running by him out into the open. The moment of hesitation is so easily paralleled with videos of animals being released from captivity. The man had been “working” in the dark and emerged as reactionary, easily startled, unpredictable and possibly dangerous, making it clear that the men’s cavalier attitude toward him could spell disaster. After a moment of uncertainty, the man calms and remarks that the wound “isn’t as bad as he thought,” which draws a smirk of superiority from Lewis.87 Unlike Mrs. Webb, “Griner” was a paid actor named Seamon Glass, flown in from the West Coast for the role. While Glass had the physical stature Boorman preferred, he didn’t have the menacing, hillbilly voice producers felt was required of this pivotal scene. Additionally, Glass was instructed to come out of the dark shed punching the air, with explosive energy. After a few failed attempts, Boorman asked Frank Rickman, location scout and Rabun county native, to act out the scene. Scholar J.W. Williamson includes this memory from Richman in his book:
“I go in there and I hit my thumb. And I come out over the top of Burt Reynolds and Jon Voigt, and I draw back with my right foot and kick [a car] door shut…so hard, it breaks and all the glass flies out of it, and then I spin around and I kick that barrel out down
86 Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action? docID=1024590.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-22 12:42:15.
87 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220727-how-rural-horror-deliverance-set-a-controversial-trend
through the field. Then I got up in Burt Reynolds’ face and I said “what did you say, pretty boy?”88
A final take (less boisterous and more menacing), became perfect foreshadowing for the scenes to come. Williamson goes on to point out the irony of this dynamic on set: “While Rickman was allowed to bubble creatively with better ideas about how to make Bobby the insurance salesman suffer, the fictional hillbilly characters were coached into a depiction of awfulness that would be against Rickman and his kin forever.”89
After a mad drive through the winding roads of rural Georgia, the men finally paddle out onto a seemingly peaceful stretch of river, only to look up and see Lonnie standing on a bridge high above them. It should be noted that in the dueling banjos scene, Lonnie was also positioned physically above the men. As scholar Anne Creadick points out, this is a “classic horror-movie fashion for filming monsters.”90 In this scene, Lonnie isn’t playing his banjo, but rather swinging it gently from side to side, locked in on the men as they drift under the bridge. Drew tries to prompt a reaction, but Lonnie only looks down at him with a vacant stare, as his banjo continues to swing like a pendulum. The gentle back and forth functions as a kind of metronome, indicating to the viewer that the second the men set out onto the water, the metaphorical timer has started and not all of them are going to make it out on the other side. The only one who seems to recognize the warning in Lonnie’s gaze is Ed, who looks back at him, clearly troubled. Similarly to how animals are the first to alert to an incoming natural disaster, so does Lonnie serve as a warning to the urban men, who aren’t accustomed to recognizing such signs.
Less than halfway through the film and all of the “hillbillies” the four men have interacted with have been carefully curated to showcase animalistic, primitive, deviant qualities. Lonnie’s lack of speech, keen sense of danger, and physical “deformities” all highlight his belonging to the natural world, as opposed to society. Audiences witnessed the highly disabled young girl and presumably her grandmother, unbothered by Ed looking in on them. Finally, Griner represents a potentially violent, agitated animal released from a cage into the wild where Lewis repeatedly tries to “tame” him into submission (haggling over the cost of driving the cars, reminding him to help him load in the canoes, etc). All of these interactions are intended to present the mountain men they later encounter as further proof of the “hillbillies” animalistic nature and affirm what was written in the novel Deliverance–that North Georgia is a region of “nine-fingered people.”91 It is foreshadowing of the violence to come. If the urban “Man” is going to “rape” the landscape, as Lewis asserts, then nature is preparing to rape them back.
After camping overnight, Ed wakes to a deer in the brush behind the campsite. He readies his bow, but misses the shot. This “test” is an important setup for what will come later in the film. When he returns to camp, Drew remarks “I don’t understand how anyone can shoot an animal.” By this point in the film, the personalities of the four men have become more
88 Satterwhite 133
89 https://www.the-numbers.com/market/1972/top-grossing-movies
90Langberg, Eric. “‘The Hills Have Eyes (1977)’ Is Hicksploitation Done Right.” Medium, Everything’s Interesting, 3 Oct. 2016, medium.com/everythings-interesting/the-hills-have-eyes-1977-is-hicksploitationdone-right-39320f870218.
91https://medium.com/spring-2018-introduction-to-appalachian-studies/misunderstood-how-the-portrayalof-the-banjo-in-film-and-television-has-impacted-appalachia-323ffbeab885
pronounced and recognizable through the various challenges they’ve encountered. Butterworth even goes so far as to assign each man a specific element of the Freudian paradigm: Lewis is ego (survival, strength, showmanship), Bobby is id (quick to complain, immature, reactionary), Drew is superego (focused on institutions, morality, law and order), and Ed is the psyche (able to draw all three together to survive). Butterworth writes:
Although this Freudian structure may not be immediately obvious, once discovered it seems too precise not to have been a consideration during composition. In my own conversations with Dickey, however, he has denied that he was conscious of this division of the Freudian paradigm among the four characters of the novel. If this is so, an interesting possibility is raised:Freudian metaphor has become so imbedded in modern thought that it often functions today at a subliminal level92
Regardless of Dickey’s intention the various personalities of the men can be seen to play out according to the Freduian paradigm. Bobby spends the majority of the experience complaining, making crude jokes, and mocking the locals. Drew consistently makes attempts at connection through shared language (music) with Lonnie and showcasing his focus on morality and community. Lewis, outfitted in a skin-tight wetsuit, regularly reinforces their need to conquer the raging river, putting his “ego” on full display. After a few harrowing scenes of the men being catapulted through the raging rapids, Bobby and Ed pull off to a bank to reset and catch up with the other half of their party. Almost immediately, they spot movement in the trees above them. Two unnamed men (Herbert Coward and Bill McKinney) emerge from the depths of the woods, wielding a long-barrel shotgun. While every local man they have encountered seems to have the menacing potential for violence, it is clear in this scene that the viewer has, at last, met the mountain monsters.
Ed and Bobby, uncomfortable with this unexpected confrontation, begin to try and talk their way out of the situation while the two “monsters” stalk them. Akin to a predator circling prey, the mountain men look at one another, seemingly making a decision to strike. The situation then turns from menacing to outright hostile. McKinney’s character swipes at Bobby with an open palm, grazing the side of his face like the paw of a wild cat. Ed assumes the men are brewing moonshine and quickly tries to deescalate the situation, but is confronted by the muzzle of Corward’s gun. The men demand that Ed and Bobby walk further up into the woods, away from the relative safety of the river. Ed is tied to a tree while Bobby is instructed to undress. As Bobby tries to escape, one of the men pursues him and pins him down while exclaiming that he “looks like a hog.” He tells his comrade “Looks like we got us a sow here instead of a boar,” commenting on the soft, feminine nature of Bobby. After a lengthy physical altercation where Bobby scrambles futiley, the man forces Bobby onto his knees, instructing him to “squeal like a pig” while he rapes him in front of Ed. Interestingly, the line demanding Bobby “squeal like a pig” was suggested by Rickman, the local Ruban County location scout, and was not in the original book by Dickey.93 Scholar Meredith McCarroll writes:
92 KVARAN, KARA M. “‘You’re All Doomed!’ A Socioeconomic Analysis of Slasher Films.” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 4 (2016): 953–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44162808. 93 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22nmbtj.6
With few words, and lasting only a few moments, a key scene in Deliverance establishes one of the most damning caricatures of Appalachia— the ‘monstrous mountaineer.’ The isolation of the hills leads to a depravity— often sexual in nature. Without the presence of a civilizing force, monstrous mountaineers are given reign to hone their self- serving cruelty. The pair of men who emerge from the woods in Deliverance, guns in hand, are the daguerreotype: physically repulsive, more animal than human, with overgrown hair and long utilitarian fingernails caked with dirt and oil. They are driven by desires— in Deliverance the desire is sexual, though in other iterations of the type the desire may be based on power, control, or greed. The monstrous mountaineer type, at least in Deliverance, is unwhite in that he exists apart from the white southerners, who are shocked to come across him, and because he has no access to the civilized white world that surrounds him at the foot of his hills.94
Creadick writes, “In Dickey’s narrative, the rape illustrates the power of ‘nature’; for Boorman, the rape is about ‘ritual humiliation.’ But in a drama of domination and submission, the banjo boy scene is actually the first time the city slickers are dominated by the mountaineers. The rape is the second.95 They leave the injured Bobby slumped over among the leaves and approach Ed, preparing to violate him as well. Coward’s character remarks “He sure has a purty mouth,”--another lasting legacy from the film. Just as it seems they have no escape from the trap laid for them by these mountain monsters, Lewis releases an arrow from a hidden spot along the bank of the river, killing McKinney’s character and frightening off Coward’s. The rapist’s body collapses against a long tree limb, lying on his belly–further extending the metaphor of the mountain man as a wild cat. On the topic of the infamous rape scene, Anthony Harkins writes, “Dickey presents this action not as an aberration but a pattern of mountaineer behavior, for Ed thinks as his captors tie him to a tree just before they assault Bobby, ‘they must have done this before; it was not a technique they would have just thought of for the occasion.”96 Dickey, whose erratic behavior got him thrown off the set for most of the filming, was contacted by his son, who took his place on set. Christopher Dickey recounts pleading with his father to remove the infamous rape scene:
“That night I called my father. I was sick of the film, sick of the whole story. And I wondered why the hell he had to have this homosexual rape. ‘I had to put the moral weight of murder on the suburbanites,’ was what my father told me. It was what he always said. He had to portray the mountain men as such monsters that the suburbanites would decide not only to kill, but to try to cover up their crime. [...]In the movie—it was becoming what the movie was about, it was the thing everybody was going to remember. ‘Squeal like a pig!’ Not Lewis’s survivalism, not the climb up the cliff, not Ed’s conquest of his own fear. It was all going to be about butt-fucking. ‘You’re wrong, son,’ my father said.”97
94 https://libguides.uky.edu/horrorfilms/slasher
95 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974
96 Sayad, Cecilia. “Found-Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing.” Cinema Journal 55, no. 2 (2016): 43–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44072414.
97https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt1g0b9f4.17.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default %3Ab77c986d234f1dafaa1c0312b7d27e9a&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1
In his chapter “Banjos, Chainsaws, and Sodomy: Making 1970s Rural Horror Films and the Apex of the Anti-Idyll,” Ryan Cartwright writes: “Lonnie was not involved in the rape scene, but his banjo-strumming specter haunts the ordeal; the horrors of the rape scene are conjured with the strum of a banjo just as they are through the infamous lines ‘squeal like a pig,’ and ‘he sure has a pretty mouth.’ The rape scene, unlike urbanoia representations of women being raped, was not eroticized. The film offered an allegorical interpretation of the assault— disenfranchised white rural male characters asserting what little power they have over the privileged white suburbanites.”98 Indeed this scene would have been shocking to 1970s audiences, and provided much needed absolution for those who were fatigued by what felt like constant pleas for aid to rural, Southern communities. Enthusiasm for the War on Poverty initiatives was beginning to dissolve, and what better way to rationalize less involvement than the notion that these mountain people were sexual deviants who didn’t want urbanites trespassing into their landscapes anyway? In addition to a shocking, brutal twist that laid the groundwork for body horror to come, it also gave audiences a justifiable “out” that would continue to inform a lack of outside involvement in the Appalachian region for decades into the future. Immediately following Ed’s liberation, the men begin to strategize in alignment with their respective Freudian identities. Drew (superego) begins to discuss the court system and how this would be considered justifiable homicide. Bobby (id) tries to attack the dead man in order to seek some kind of revenge for what was done to him. Lewis (ego), stares the corpse in the face, proudly studying his “kill.” After much deliberation, Ed (psyche) is the tie-breaking vote charged with reconciling all three perspectives. Ultimately he decides they will need to conceal the death. He doesn’t feel that this community would take kindly to their plight–perhaps even feeling as though the men deserved what happened for their emboldened trespassing into this land. As the men begin to bury McKinney, you see all three tap into their more primitive nature, digging ferociously in the dirt with their bare hands. As they begin preparations to abandon the scene of the crime, Drew refuses to put his life jacket on, and upon nearing a cascade of furious rapids, launches himself overboard. Butterworth argues:
What happens to the characters during their ordeal on the Cahulawassee, and what they learn from that experience, is directly related to the personalities they reveal during the course of the narrative. Drew is a corporate executive with a highly developed sense of social and moral order. He is an organization man, but in the best, not the pejorative, sense of the term. He is also a family man with a strong sense of duty. His love of music, which has a mathematical order and logic, but also an emotional warmth, reflects these qualities in him. Even his last name, Ballenger, might suggest balance. Because of this highly developed sense of order and social morality, Drew is not able to cope with the chaos of the primitive drama in which he is forced to participate. Consequently, he is destroyed.99
98https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt1g0b9f4.17.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default %3Ab77c986d234f1dafaa1c0312b7d27e9a&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1 99https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt1g0b9f4.17.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default %3Ab77c986d234f1dafaa1c0312b7d27e9a&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1
With half of their party now injured or lost to the rapids, the men have to navigate a treacherous journey downstream. During the ordeal, Lewis is incapacitated by a debilitating, gruesome leg injury. The men find a place to regroup and Lewis expresses strong beliefs that Drew did not throw himself out of the boat, but rather was shot by the mountain man that fled during the altercation. The insinuation is that the men are being tracked and stalked. To investigate, Ed must scale a stone palisade or, as Lewis puts it “now you get to play the game.” Through the falling darkness, Ed climbs with his bow on his back, finally arriving at the summit where he finds a man who looks eerily similar to his would-be assailant holding a long-barrel shotgun. He readies his bow–a clear parallel to the scene with the deer toward the beginning of the film–and releases. The man collapses dead and when Ed goes to investigate he finds, to his horror, that he isn’t sure this is the same man. This ambiguity around the identity of the mountain man cements the portrayal of these hillbillies as interchangeable animals. After discovering Drew’s body, the men finally emerge from the river. Ed leaves to find where the cars are parked and runs into five “mountain people,” perched in the back of a pickup, sitting on armchairs like thrones. This positioning sets them up as having emerged victorious. Like Lonnie, this physical positioning reminds the viewer that here in this rural wilderness, these “natives” are superior. They are a part of the landscape, the ultimate judge and jury of the natural world, if James Dickey is to be believed. The film ends with Ed dreaming of a bloated, pale hand reaching up out of the river’s waters, before waking up next to his wife in his safe, suburban bedroom.
https://www.imcdb.org/m68473.html
THE LEGACY OF DELIVERANCE
The legacy of Deliverance was profound and lasting. Appalachian State professor Timothy Silver writes:
Perpetuation of hillbilly stereotypes was not the movie's only legacy. Its popularity spawned a boom in tourism that inevitably led to overdevelopment, pollution, and a host of other environmental problems within the Chattooga watershed. Since 1972, more than thirty people-many of them outsiders-have died trying to run the Chattooga. Most
telling, perhaps, Deliverance is now part of everyday life in the southern Appalachians. Not long ago, at a favorite breakfast spot, I encountered several local people talking and drinking coffee at a comer table. When I spoke, they immediately identified me as an outsider-’someone from the college.’ They were cordial, but hardly welcoming, and I quickly moved on. Hanging above their table, I noticed a T-shirt offered for sale by the restaurant's proprietor. The shirt read: ‘PADDLE FASTER. I THINK I HEAR BANJO MUSIC.’100
Dwight Billings, a professor at the University of Kentucky adds: Unfortunately, one cannot escape Appalachian stereotypes simply by avoiding politics and the news; they appear almost everywhere, including leisure and entertainment writings. Increasingly, they are online as well. Thus a contributor to Rock and Ice describes rock climbing in Kentucky's Red River Gorge by writing, ‘We drove by clumps of locals who eyed us with smoldering hostility. Hollywood could not have made these guys up. They were the sorriest looking dudes I'd ever seen. As I pulled into the trailhead, I noticed Ray's truck wasn't behind me. We waited awhile, hoping they hadn't broken down in front of the cast of Deliverance.’”101
Isabel Machado summarizes, “Although other, more positive images of working-class white southerners were also emerging in the late 1970s, the ‘redneck nightmare’ trope popularized by Deliverance became iconic and enduring.”102 Indeed the legacy of Deliverance cannot be overstated. The film experienced tremendous commercial and critical success, earning multiple Academy Award nominations including one for Best Picture (losing to Godfather). It was added to the National film registry in 2002. In 2005, the novel was listed on Time Magazine’s best english language novels since 1923.103 More importantly, however, it laid the groundwork for a much larger influx of rural, hillbilly monsters to come. AA Dowd writes for the Guardian, “You could call Deliverance the ‘reputable’, mainstream cousin to contemporaneous classics of deepsouth-west mayhem like The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Boorman’s backwoods bogeymen aren’t quite as inhuman as the cannibalistic redneck monsters of those movies, but they’re still ghoulish caricatures, fulfilling the quintessential stereotype of the rural south as an enclave of toothless, depraved cousin-fuckers.”104
More importantly, Deliverance served as an absolution for urban audiences. Appalachia scholar Emily Satterwhite writes: “Deliverance readers sought both titillation and reassurance from Dickey’s premise that Appalachia permitted primitivism to endure in the modern world. Fans credited both authors with intimate knowledge of mountain people and with documentary accuracy in their representations—with only a rare complaint directed at Dickey. Readers’ faith in Marshall’s and Dickey’s right relation to their settings—which both authors cannily claimed for the sake of marketing—was key to the novels’ fabrication of authenticity.”105 Indeed the rural inhabitants of the squalid poverty shown in the film are all seemingly satisfied with their 100 https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/history-graphic-novels-1960s
101 ANTI-IDYLL Rural horror David Bell 94-95
102https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/ed-geins-childhood-the-butcher-of-plainfield-fixated-on-hisdomineering-mother
103 ANTI-IDYLL Rural horror David Bell 99
104 Sharrett, Christopher - The Idea of Apocalypse in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre": 272
circumstances. When Ed peers into the window at the disabled girl and her caretaker, they don’t gaze at him imploringly or run to the window begging to be saved; they don’t even acknowledge him. When the locals aren’t indifferent towards the urban outsiders, they’re hostile. The gas station attendant at the Texaco station reminds Bobby that he doesn’t know anything. Lonnie, stares forebodingly at them as they begin their journey on the river. Even Griner, who successfully drives their cars to the meeting point, comes at them screaming during their first interaction. These mountain dwellers are a far cry from the sympathetic children highlighted by Charles Kuralt, and they certainly did not entice audiences to find ways to support the economic devastation in the region. In response to the character of Lonnie, Anne Creadick writes, “But the evidence of the film and the hit song suggests that his is a mystical difference, in which he is both lesser-than and greater-than these men from the city.”106
In many ways Deliverance can be seen as an original case study for horror as a means for exploiting the cultural “other.” American media had turned a culture into a caricature through the comic strips and sitcoms of the early 20th century. Through the War on Poverty, these caricatures were subsequently turned into real people, now pictured within their lived environment. Dickey, and consequently Boorman, used exoticism and violence to transform those same people into vengeful, primitive monsters. Deliverance taught audiences to move past the domestic, vaudevillian distraction that the hillbilly trope had provided, and opened the door for justifiable hostility toward this cultural other. From Ryan Lee: “As author J. W. Williamson contends, urbanoia films don’t reflect a pre-existing white fear of the mountains so much as they teach it to their white viewers.”107
CHAPTER 5: THE ERA OF HILLBILLY HORROR
“[Anthony] Harkins argues that this comic stereotyping of the rural poor as ignorant premoderns is part of a larger strategy of discrimination and containment which eventually led to the extremely accessible “sanitized hillbilly” portrayals found in popular and longrunning 1960s television programs such as The Real McCoys (1957–63), The Andy Griffith Show (1960–8), and The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71). Deliverance, and the lowbudget rural slashers that follow it, share an investment in countering these user-friendly representations, de-sanitizing the hillbilly, turning him from a figure of familiarity and comedy into something terrifying and abject. In both cases, but especially in his desanitized variant, he is a modular cultural signifier: a vaguely white cultural “other” that includes white trash, rednecks, hicks, okies, mountain men, etc. That is, despite the term's invocation of the rural South and specifically Appalachia, in the wider cultural
105https://www.jstor.org/stable/24352405?searchText=Monster+Mishmash&searchUri=%2Faction %2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DMonster%2BMishmash%26so %3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default %3A838cb2932f62b1e02a7e4a97fde7def0&seq=2
106https://www.jstor.org/stable/24352405?searchText=Monster+Mishmash&searchUri=%2Faction %2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DMonster%2BMishmash%26so %3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default %3A838cb2932f62b1e02a7e4a97fde7def0&seq=2
107 Bell, 97
imagination the hillbilly inhabits any rural area at the fringes of civilization, regardless of its specific region. So while, for example, Deliverance is explicitly set in northern Georgia, “Hillbillyland,” the imagined home of hillbilly folk is a mythical, geographically ambiguous place, about which Harkins notes that “most cultural consumers, to the extent they [consider] the matter at all, [conceive] of ‘hillbillyland’ as, at best, an amorphous area of the upper South and, more often, as anywhere on the rough edges of the landscape and the economy.”108
The 1970s brought the de-sanitized hillbilly to the forefront of the film industry. Deliverance performed well critically and at the box-office, landing in the #4 position of highest grossing films for 1972, proving that audiences had an appetite for this particular brand of horror.109 Similar to how serial killer Ed Gein, despite not being from Appalachia became amalgamous with the rural hillbilly murderer, so too did the film trope of what lies beyond “where the pavement ends,” or as Harkins alludes to, the “fringes of society.” “Hillbilly” was no longer confined to the Appalachia region; the construction had become disengaged from place, and was free to evolve and shift throughout numerous different rural locales including the Ozarks, the deserts of the American Southwest, and even in some cases, the European countryside.The reason for such disentanglement lies with the self-sustaining trope of the mountain monster and the consistencies among these “visions of rural dystopia[s].”110 Scholar Emily Satterwhite writes, “horror films cast the countryside as deserving of misery because of its monstrosity, its refusal to conform, and its opposition to urban progress.”111
As previously discussed, the comedic hillbilly provided some baseline characteristics that would be relevant for the evolution of the mountain monster including an incongruity with domestic spaces, a temper (particularly toward outsiders), an infantile attachment to the family matriarch, an affinity for (and comparison to) pigs, and a general lack of sophistication or intellect (often juxtaposed against a large physical stature). Sensational news reports of mountain migrants in urban areas added to that list. Hillbillies were frequently described as untrusting of authority/institutions, “clannish” among their kind, primitive, content in their squalid conditions, isolated, and sexually deviant (news reports listed child-brides, but this particular taboo would spiral into a number of other manifestations following Deliverance). While most of these descriptors are wholly out of context or outright baseless, there was little circulating throughout public media to dispel such myths, and Deliverance only added to the construction. Post-Deliverance hillbillies were sexually deviant within a whole new context. The construction began to focus on trapping and stalking (predatory, rather than reactionary, behavior) and perhaps most notably, physically deformed (with frequent references to this as a result of
108 Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action? docID=1024590.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-29 16:18:06.
109 Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action? docID=1024590.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-05-29 16:25:45.
110 https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre#tab=summary 111 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43797439
inbreeding). To quote Daniel Roper of the North Georgia Journal, “Deliverance did for them [North Georgians] what ‘Jaws’ did for sharks.”112
Components of the 21st century hillbilly canon as audiences know it today that hadn’t yet made it into the public consciousness by the end of 1972 include cannibalism, primitive/tribal dress (often sporting necklaces of teeth or pelts in place of real clothes), an aversion to modern technology (even guns will begin to drop away throughout the 1970s in favor of more primitive tools like spears and traps), and unfiltered sadism. These elements were yet to come, but would round out our contemporary image of the mountain monster. From her 2017 chapter “The Politics of Hillbilly Horror,” Satterwhite writes: “Comments posted in Internet customer reviews indicate that the subgenre is readily recognized by viewers, who tend to refer to rural villains with some combination of at least two of the following terms: ‘mutant,’ ‘inbred,’ ‘cannibal,’ ‘hillbilly,’ and ‘redneck.’ (These terms are interchangeable as adjective or as noun, as in ‘Hideously deformed inbred hillbilly cannibals,’ ‘the usual bunch of Southern inbreds,’ or ‘superhuman inbred religious hillbillies.’). Film scholars identify as “hillbilly horror” or “urbanoia” are in fans’ terminology usually identified as ‘backwoods horror’ or ‘backwoods slashers.”113
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
The first big horror film to hit the box office following the success of Deliverance came in 1974 with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Some film critics credit this as the first installment of the “slasher genre:” or “a genre of horror most popular from the late 50s to the early 90s, defined by its use of a generally masked killer harassing and murdering groups of people.114115 David Bell writes, “The point where ‘local patriotism’ merges into xenophobia is the point where the slasher movie sits—where strangers are not merely avoided, but erased.”116 Unsurprisingly, the film featured many of the same hallmarks of rural horror as Deliverance, though this time with a more frenzied, violent, and homicidal energy. The film was directed by twenty-eight-yearold Tobe Hooper, and was produced for under $140,000, (just under a million dollars by today’s standards). Surprisingly, it went on to gross nearly 30 million dollars at the box office (comparable to 195 million in 2025).117 The film opens with scrolling text, over which the narrator reads:
“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annal of American history. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”118
112 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1260707
113 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43797439
114 https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/02/remembering-wes-craven/
115 https://www.bechtel.com/projects/yucca-mountain-nuclear-waste-repository/
116 Hills have eyes 1977
117 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43797439
118 https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3448707/40-years-later-hills-still-eyes/
At the time, audiences would have surely conjured parallels between this opening and the crimes of Ed Gein, his morbid farmhouse massacre having been discovered less than twenty years before, and still very much in the public consciousness.119 Gein was known to have had an abnormally close relationship with his mother–the extent of which the public may never know. Louis Schlesinger, a psychology professor tells A&E True Crime, “When you look at the crime scene photos, his house was an absolute disaster, but his mother’s room was immaculate, just as it was when she died. Did he have a very abnormal relationship with his mother? It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to conclude that the answer is obviously ‘yes.”120 A parallel can be drawn here between Gein and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s family of homicidal “locals,” comprised of men with the exception of the grandmother, who is discovered by the terrified urbanites to be mummified and untouched since her death. The notion of rural men with little intellectual capacity, physically serving under the omnipresent direction of the family matriarch (even after death) will be seen several more times and in slightly different variations throughout the hillbilly horror genre.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-stand-up-desk/texas-chainsaw-massacre-behind-the-story/
As previously discussed, the fact that the film takes place in Texas has done little to spare it from the hillbilly horror canon. David Bell writes: “The Appalachian landscape of Deliverance is not unlike that of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only without the cannibal-fetish objects: a grim, beaten terrain of decaying car carcasses, ramshackle shacks and discarded farming equipment (allusions to poultry processing mirror the cattle-slaughter landscape of Texas). But, as with the kids’ encounter with the slaughtering Sawyers, it is the people who most horrify the city folk.”121 “Car graveyards” as a cinematic tool throughout the hillbilly horror genre serve two roles: first, they indicate the shuttering of urban progress and the arrival of rural stagnation. Second, they foreshadow the fate of the urban individuals who stumble into this isolated world.122 In keeping with Deliverance, many understand Texas Chainsaw Massacre to have an overtly political message. Following the scrolling “newsreel” introduction, Hooper’s film
119 https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/15238%7C0/Michael-Berryman#biography
120 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43797439
121 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43797439
122 https://www.americangenrefilm.com/theatrical-film-catalog/whiskey-mountain/
follows five young adults (Kirk, Pam, Jerry, and siblings Sally and wheel-chair bound Franklin) as they drive through the rural, economically devastated Texas countryside. They elect to go on a detour in order to check on the condition of Sally and Franklin’s grandfather’s grave, after hearing reports of troubling activity occurring in and around the local cemeteries. In an act of good faith (far more common in the 1970s), the young adults pick up a hitchhiker, who proceeds to mutilate Franklin, start a fire, and wreak havoc upon the gang of unsuspecting city dwellers. In an attempt to regroup, the gang stop at the abandoned homestead of Sally and Franklin’s grandparents where true horror is awaiting them. The town, having been economically decimated following the closure of the slaughterhouse, is now “forcing” the remaining residents, like the homicidal Leatherface, to turn to cannibalism and human trafficking of unsuspecting outsiders in order to subsist in the abandoned rural environment. “In a detailed reading of Texas Chainsaw Massacre as an apocalyptic allegory, Christopher Sharrett echoes Wood’s comments about country people marginalised by the onward march of capitalism; in his view, the film shows ‘the violent disruption of the security and stability of rural and suburban life.”123 One by one the travelers are destroyed by the family of crazed mountain monsters, leaving only Sally as the “final girl,” covered in blood, but triumphant as she is plucked from the nightmare and ushered back into civilization, much to the dismay of the deranged, chainsaw-wielding Leatherface who is left behind, yet again.
Just as James Dickey argued he was making a statement about the “rape” of the natural world with the reckoning that befell the feminized, urban men, so too was Hooper trying to make a political commentary with his take on the hillbilly horror genre. From Ecocinema Theory and Practice:
“Hooper’s apocalyptic landscape is a deserted wasteland of dissolution where once vibrant myth [of frontier] is dessicated. The ideas and iconography of Cooper, Bret Harte, and Francis Parkman are now transmogrified into yards of dying cattle, abandoned gasoline stations, defiled graveyards, crumbling mansions, and a ramshackle farmhouse of psychotic killers. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [is]… recognizable as a statement about the end-time of American experience.124 “In the original production notes, [director Tobe] Hooper said he wanted to make a film ‘about meat,’ and the structure of the scare scenes is a profile of our food industry, with people cast as the animals.”125
There have been several theories posited from fans and scholars alike aligning with Hooper and arguing that viewers should broaden the scope of Texas Chainsaw Massacre beyond a simple slasher film. Scholar Larrie Dudenhoeffer argues that the shift away from one predatory killer (see Hitchcock’s Psycho) to a group of killers with undefined ties to one another, should be interpreted as a nod to the Manson murders of 1969, when cult leader Charles Manson encouraged his “family” of followers to murder a number of influential, white LA residents with the hope of triggering a race war.126 Dudenhoeffer goes on argue, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for example, takes its villains from Universal's monster series, specifically from Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy, reconceptualizing these icons
123 https://letterboxd.com/film/whiskey-mountain/crew/
124 Astral Films
125 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/68defbc42de0437184087a4afd070ae3
126 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43451026
while also codifying some of the sociocultural disturbances since the 1960s affecting America's collective sense of identity, stability, and ethicality.127 It also bears mentioning that, like Deliverance, the mountain monsters from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remain nameless throughout the film. The perpetrators are known only as “Leatherface,” “Hitchhiker,” “Old Man,” and “Grandfather.” While some of the ambiguity is resolved in the sequel from 1986, the original film maintains the anonymity of the attackers, while being careful to designate names to each of the urban “intruders.” This sets up a distinction between the intruders and the nameless, forgotten residents of the rural countryside who have been turned into primal, animalistic standins for humanity (defined by their role, rather than real names). The family serve as perfect foils to the young, vibrant city dwellers whose relatives once shared land with the now-cannibals, before moving onto better economic opportunities elsewhere and leaving their former neighbors to disappear into obscurity. While the urbanites have progressed, Hooper is arguing that their abandonment had direct and irreversible consequences for those left behind.
CANNIBALISM AND APPALACHIA
Perhaps the most important legacy from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the introduction of the mountain monster as cannibal. While Gein consistently denied it, rumors have persisted that his continual exhumation of his victims involved some kind of cannibalistic ritual. While investigators knew him to use the corpses on his property to fashion furniture and even clothing (inspiration for the infamous Buffalo Bill character in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs, which will be discussed in Chapter 6), cannibalism was never definitively proven. Even so, the rumors have persisted. Long before the sensationalistic newspaper accounts of Gein, came the “Kentucky Cannibal.” Levi “Boone” Helm was born in Lincoln County, Kentucky in 1828.128 Author and researcher Emerson Hough writes of Helm, “… nothing in the world could ever have made him anything but bad. He was, by birth and breeding, low, coarse, cruel, animal-like and utterly depraved, and for him, no name but ruffian can fitly apply.”129 Helm regularly abused his wife before eventually abandoning her and moving out west, routinely engaging in random, violent duels and physical confrontations before landing in an asylum for a time. After escaping and continuing his attempt out west, his traveling party became increasingly starved and sick, leaving him only one companion, Burke. After Burke succumbed to his despair and shot himself, Helm “proceeded to eat Burton’s leg before he wrapped up the other leg in an old shirt and took it with him.”130
127 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41219701
128 https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/inaugural-address-1981
129 https://www.the-numbers.com/market/1970/top-grossing-movies
130 Crowdus, Gary. Cinéaste 10, no. 3 (1980): 32–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41685946.
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-boonehelm/
Helm as the “Kentucky Cannibal,” isn’t well known; however any association with rural persons and depraved acts carries over into the evolution of the mountain monster, a trope which was becoming more primal with each passing iteration. Cannibalism was the next natural step among the checklist of societal taboos that rural monsters could inhabit for the benefit of horror-seeking audiences. Sexual deviancy had been established with Deliverance, therefore the next wave needed to be even more bold for audiences who were in no short supply of shock value throughout the 1970s (The Exorcist was released in 1973 and remains one of the most notorious horror films to ever be produced). In 1985, famed horror director Wes Craven, who would feature cannibalism heavily in his 1977 follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, told interviewer Christopher Sharrett: There's a peculiar thing about cannibalism. Obviously it's one of the last taboos, but there's also something intellectually very appealing about it, in that it's absolutely direct, an absolutely honest way of going about the idea of someone killing someone else. It goes directly against the tradition of portraying violence in an antiseptic way. Even on the news there is the basic tendency to show people being put into plastic body bags and sort of carefully tucked away on a shelf somewhere, as if the bloodshed never happened. Grenada was a recent example. Cannibalism is much more direct. The cannibal takes the other person's strength, the person's vital fluids. It's symbolic but it also strikes a chord about the nature of violence. The person's essence is being taken. It's a good opposite not just to the way violence is portrayed in movies, but to the whole notion of how we "knock somebody off," even in a business sense. Cannibalism tends to expose the casual aspect of all of it.131
The cannibal imagery would persist through several future iterations of the genre, especially after the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was caught in 1991 and his “house of horrors” was revealed. “Several heads were in the refrigerator and freezer; two skulls were on top of the computer; and a 57-gallon drum containing several bodies decomposing in chemicals was found in a corner of the bedroom. There was also evidence to suggest that Dahmer had been 131 United Artists 1980
eating some of his victims.”132 This only added more morbid fascination for cannibalism, including one notable scene from Wrong Turn 2 when a rural family of cannibals actually join hands to pray together before feasting on the meal of human meat. Satterwhite writes, “A number of reviewers commented upon the dinner table scene, when the cannibal family ‘join hands and say grace before devouring a potful of human stew.’ A few reviewers mentioned the ‘very touching moment . . . , when the father, [lets] his boy shoot the bow and arrow, and like the two just look at each other in a cool, father and son moment.’ While some reviewers saw such scenes as ‘cheeky touches’ or ‘macabre humour,’ others felt that such scenes humanized the inbred mutants.”
Hooper’s monsters were also notable for their choice of weapon. The crazed hillbillies were no longer wielding guns, but rather, carried tools from their abandoned slaughterhouse trade. The close-contact weaponry included chainsaws and knives, and made the violence even more intense and frightening. While Drew’s demise was left ambiguous for much of Deliverance, Hooper’s particular brand of gore didn’t leave much up to the imagination. He embraced the close-up, almost documentary style of homicidal violence. Finally, the motivation for Dickey’s monsters, dominance and primitive sexual deviance, had shifted to pure, unadulterated consumption of the intruders via Hooper. The “Sawyer” family (as they would later be identified in the sequel) didn’t just want to violate, or maim the intruders, they wanted to fully eradicate them. Their pursuit was primal. While one could argue that the central violation in Deliverance was one of opportunity and polluted impulse, Hooper’s monsters were more strategic and their preference for cannibalism rings true with what Craven was describing. They wanted to consume the life force of their victims–to feed off of their privilege in order to persist in an otherwise barren landscape.
THE HILLS HAVE EYES
The landscape of hillbilly horror experienced yet another geographic expansion with Craven’s 1977 film, which follows a quintessential family of seemingly do-gooder urbanites as they stumble into a trap laid by a feral family of cannibals in the Nevada desert. Eric Langberg writes for Medium, “[...] the choice to set the action in the desert rather than the backwoods swamps traversed in Deliverance (another movie with mythic resonances) calls to mind that most mythic of American genres, the Western, and it forces us to think about what this film means for American society. This is very self-consciously the story of an All-American nuclear family pitted against the ‘savages’ who live in the wilds of the West; the mutant cannibals could easily be read as an allegory for the worst stereotypes about Native Americans.”133 While the comparison Langberg draws between the systematic “othering” of indigenous populations and the film’s family of cannibals is noteworthy, Craven is said to have actually been inspired by the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean:
“Legend has it that Sawney Bean and his wife left their home in East Lothian and came to live in this cave on the Ayrshire coast where they developed a penchant for human flesh. What they used to do was kill travellers who were on the road up there, bring them back and cook them. But I have to stress that this is simply folklore and legend. There's
132 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tvjv9.13
133 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mothers-day-1980
no factual evidence to back this up at all. The couple had children, their children had children, and eventually the incestuous breed numbered about thirty, which meant that more and more people went missing from the road along the coast.134 Wes Craven even went so far as to propose an updated cave system for his cannibal family built of shell casings, though the budget prohibited that particular inclusion.135 Craven had clear motivation for setting his film deep in the Nevada desert. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was a known site where nuclear and toxic waste was dumped. “Located at the edge of the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site)—part of a nuclear testing ground established by U.S. President Harry Truman—Yucca Mountain is far from any population centers, has a very dry climate, and is protected by an Air Force range on three sides. It’s about a hundred miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas. Key to Yucca Mountain’s suitability as a repository are its geological characteristics.”136 Unlike Boorman’s insinuation that the rural locals’ deformities were results of inbreeding, Craven wanted his cannibals’ deformities to stem from a more subversive origin. Kim Nicolini writes “Military toxicity collides with a nuclear family and a family of mutants who are nuclear casualties. The drama unfolds in a nuclear fallout zone and unveils the horrific gory ugliness that encompasses American ‘values.”137 The result of the effects of the nuclear, radioactive environment can be seen most prominently in the character of Pluto (played by Michael Berryman), who was also featured heavily in publicity for the film. Berryman suffers from hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, a condition that affects the development of sweat glands, hair, fingernails and teeth.138 He has a very pronounced forehead and deep-set eyes, making him the perfect embodiment of Craven’s “deformed” victims of the US’s harmful exclusion.
134 https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2021.1879887
135 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctvtv937f.14
136 http://www.coolasscinema.com/2014/10/mothers-day-1980-review.html
137 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43796999
138 https://www.nps.gov/grsm/learn/historyculture/pigs.htm
https://www.horrormoviesreviewed.com/post/the-hills-have-eyes-1977-movie-poster
In an almost direct parallel to Deliverance, an early scene of The Hills Have Eyes (1977) takes place at a mostly defunct gas station, operated by a man on the fringes of society, where the urban characters are warned against their journey. A pig also makes an appearance within the first few minutes–as will continue to be the case throughout most of the hillbilly horror genre. Not only is the wholesome “Carter” gang the prototypical all-American family, they are also meant to be personifications of wholly “patriotic” values, though rarely rise to meet the standards expected of their relative station. The patriarch is a “tough on crime” retired cop who early on comments, in response to his wife’s navigation, “Twenty-five years I'm a cop in the worst goddamn precinct in Cleveland. Niggers shoot arrows at me and the hillbillies throw dogs off the
roofs at me and I'm even shot at on two separate occasions by my own men, but none of these bastards ever come as close to killing me as my own goddamn wife.”139 This kind of angerfueled tirade is a far cry from the wholesome cops made loveable by sitcoms like The Andy Griffith show. The decision to have the patriarch represent law enforcement becomes representative of the larger American “institution,” and the cultural mainstream. Bob and Ethel’s teenage daughter, Brenda, is spoiled, vain, and quick to complain. The eldest daughter, Lynne, seems similarly unable to resist her more primitive urges, deciding to have sex with her husband in the station wagon while much of the family is still stranded or missing, and leaving the remaining members of the family in jeopardy. The film will proceed to take these spoiled urbanites, and throw them into the fringes of civilization to see if they have the ability to overcome their impulses towards self-centeredness and greed, in order to survive. Rounding out Mr. Bob and Mrs. Ethel Carter (no doubt a nod to the wholesome country music Carter family of the mid 20th century), are their three children (Brenda, Bobby, and Lynne), along with Lynne’s husband Doug, their baby Katy, and two German Shepherds, “Beauty” and “Beast.”
After leaving “Fred,” the gas station attendant, the family proceeds to travel on a back road in search of a silver mine that was willed to them in honor of the couple’s “silver” anniversary. They end up making at least one wrong turn, before wrecking their station wagon and camper due to spikes laid down by the mountain predators. Stranded in the Nevada desert, the family splits up to see if they can find a way to call for help, while slowly realizing that their faulty tire was no accident at all. They learn from Fred that there is a family living in the mountains overlooking the desert who survive by capturing unsuspecting outsiders as they travel through the rural landscape. Their patriarch Jupiter, a clear foil to Bob Carter, is described as an anti-christ of sorts by Fred, who turns out to be his biological father. Jupiter’s birth was so traumatic that it killed his mother. As he grew up, he killed his only sister, leaving only Fred and he until one day Fred attacked him with a tire iron and he escaped up to the desert hills nearby, where he’s been ever since. Jupiter is said to have groomed a prostitute to be his wife (known only as “mama”) and proceeded to father four children: Mars, Pluto, Mercury, and Ruby. Craven comments:
Well, they were planetary names and absolutely primal. The family, Jupiter's family, was absolutely outside the normal skein of earth societies. They represented bodies of great force, tremendous power. On the other hand, of course, is the idea that the cannibal family is a mirror image of the "whitebread" family, the Carters, and that each member of the Carter family has a correlate in Jupiter's clan. I also wanted people to confront this basic xenophobia by showing that a group of seemingly reprehensible people can be like anyone else in one's experience of so-called normal, everyday, middle-class life. Papa Jupiter has his own wife and sons. Their behavior is not at all different from the behavior of Carter and his sons, although Jupiter is first seen as the aggressor.140
In keeping with the introduction of Jupiter as anti-christ, Bob is captured first and crucified before being set on fire. Whereas the monsters in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre use castoffs from the slaughterhouse as weapons, (a nod to the excesses of capitalism and the resourcefulness required of a disenfranchised existence), the men in The Hills Have Eyes use the leftovers from the former military operation that took place in the area including walkie-
139 The Day is Far Spent,’ by Kenneth A. Tabler, Montani Publishing, 2006 140 https://www.thespinningimage.co.uk/cultfilms/displaycultfilm.asp?reviewid=13696
talkies and other castoffs. In contrast to this technological gear, they wear adornments including animal pelts and necklaces of teeth (with at least one dried pig nose). When the assaults begin, it quickly becomes the mainstream Carters versus the disenfranchised societal rejects. The film pushed audiences to the edge of what was palatable within cinema, stopping just short of killing Baby Katy for the sustenance of “Papa Jupiter.” Zachary Paul writes “Craven was contemplating having baby Kathy wind up as an amuse-bouche for Papa Jupiter. The majority of the cast revolted against the idea. Michael Berryman (the iconic Pluto) stated if it came to it, he would refuse to do the scene. Craven eventually acquiesced, and baby Kathy remained off the menu. That’s not to say the film holds back in any other regard.”141
Ultimately, it is the quick-thinking of Jupiter’s daughter Ruby who saves Baby Katy, turning on her “family” to allow the Carters a chance at escape. In this way, Craven subverted the “final girl” trope, designating the societal reject, Ruby, as the one most able to reconcile the competing ideologies of the two camps. The scene ends with the two counterparts, Brenda and Ruby, holding hands–each having seen herself revealed in the other. Craven intended to focus on themes of the American dream, manifest destiny, and post-colonialism with this film. He shared:
When I wrote the original script I was thinking of a new version of The Grapes of Wrath. In that draft, people were leaving New York because of the really horrendous pollution. It takes place just before the 1984 primaries, in other words right about now. People are trying to escape the pollution and going from state to state; each state has a check point and you have to hold a passport. No one is allowed in California because it's one of the sunbelt states but everyone wants to go there because fuel prices are so high. So you have this middle-class family trying to sneak into California in their trailer via the desert and they're set upon by this tribe. I was talked out of that opening, and of course much of it was window dressing, but you do have The Grapes of Wrath and this modern Western.142
While Craven may have been eyeing his 1977 film as a means for larger social commentary, there were several look-a-like slashers that came out in the same year with decidedly less staying power behind them.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE SLASHER FILM
Rituals (alternative title The Creeper) was a 1977 Canadian slasher film by Director Peter Carter. The film follows five surgeons who escape to the remote wilderness for an annual reunion. Once the gang is dropped off via seaplane and effectively make it “off the grid,” they begin to experience strange and unsettling happenings with increasing escalation. Early on their boots are stolen, prompting the doctors to wonder if their stalker is a patient who followed them to camp to exact revenge on a prior grievance. The posters for the film all carry a now-familiar warning: “A story of survival- and the price some men pay for it.” Another version features: “If you go down in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise.”143As the acts of violence increase, including gnarly bear traps and hornets’ nests, so too does their concern about returning home
141 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/southern-comfort-1981#google_vignette
142 https://meathookcinema.com/2021/01/23/review-southern-comfort-1981/ 143 http://www.terrortrap.com/interviews/markarywitz/
from the wilderness alive. Ultimately their assailant is revealed to be a brain-damaged war veteran named Matthew Crowley. The decision to make Matthew a veteran is not altogether surprising, given the growing trend of directors featuring their monster’s “origin” story. For a good portion of hillbilly horror, there’s emphasis on society having created the monster or monsters, usually through systematic disenfranchisement of that person’s identity or livelihood. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the family is left to fend for themselves after their industry is shut down due to urban migration. In The Hills Have Eyes, the individuals are an afterthought in the Government’s use of Yucca Mountain as a toxic dump site. In Rituals, audiences see a psychotic, disfigured veteran who has been relegated to the remote wilderness where he exacts his rage on these representatives of the society that left him behind after sacrificing everything for his country. Wes Craven writes:
“One thing I think my films do express-and this is shared by some of the more recent horror films-is a sense of rage. This is something not very easily expressed, not normally found in the American cinema. Rage against the culture, against the bourgeoisie or whatever you want to say. It may be rage against the horror of life itself. Certainly one of the things that the horror genre does at its best is express that rage that Kurtz expresses at the end of the river, a sort of primal scream, and it's done by people who are in one way or another outside the usual mainstream of art who figure they have nothing to lose.
144
1977 also saw the release of Whiskey Mountain by William Grefe. This film is frequently touted as an “exploitation” film, or a film that traffics in societal taboos, usually with little attempt at deeper meaning or thoughtful budgetary considerations. For this film, we return to Appalachia (North Carolina specifically), where two couples embark on a motorcycle trip to find ancestral rifles from the Civil War, said to be hidden in a cave. Swapping a gas station for a general store, the couples are confronted by a group of locals early on and consider abandoning the journey. Ultimately they continue on, walking into the trap laid for them by the mountain monsters, who are revealed to be growing marijuana. The “locals” attack the men, and repeatedly rape the women. The group hopes to find salvation through the local police force; however they are found to be corrupt and ultimately the viewer is left to assume that the urbanites will remain lost forever to the violence of the North Carolina backwoods. The American Genre Film Archive describes Whiskey Mountain as “A twist on Deliverance from exploitation legend William Grefe. Featuring fist fights, dirt bikes, wild stunts, and a starring role from Christopher George, the movie follows four motorcyclists who arrive at ‘Whiskey Mountain’ for a treasure hunt, only to be terrorized in the woods by a gang of murderous hillbilly drug dealers.”145 One noteworthy reviewer writes, “Whiskey Mountain takes its time getting to the backwoodsmen and their ‘treasure’ with lots of talking and long stretches of country music over biking footage. It's a boring hicksploitation thriller rather than horror movie, but things do pick up and get mean in the last half hour.”146 The 1970s also brought a loose retelling of the Ed Gein murders with
144 https://www.flashbackfiles.com/jeff-lieberman-interview
145 https://collider.com/just-before-dawn-horror-movie/
146 JW Williamson hillbillyland 150
Deranged from 1974, notably set in the rural midwest, along with several other low-budget mountain monster tropes including Race with the Devil from 1975.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, and The Exorcist are all studied today as prime examples of the evolution of the horror canon. With this emerging golden age for horror, also came the mold for the mountain monster, and the exploitation or “hickspoitation,” that followed. Brooke Krancer, author of Horror Cinema, Trauma, and the US in Crisis in the 1970s writes: “Horror movies of the era were an attempt for filmmakers and audiences to express the hopelessness that they felt living and growing up in an era defined by distrust, grim conditions, and seeming hopelessness for the future. In turn, this explains the horror genre's newfound popularity, as young people turned to metaphors to make sense of their fears and the world around them.”147 Indeed much 1970s horror can be seen as a revolt (or rage, as Craven describes it) against mainstream cultural expectations. From religious fundamentalism, the exploits of capitalism, or the ongoing war effort, many of these films were making a social commentary using monsters we “know,” as opposed to the fictional monsters of the early to midtwentieth century (Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, etc). The 1970s monsters were funhouse mirror images of society; though how well audiences were attuned to recognizing and splitting these constructions apart from the actual rural people who would suffer deeply from such representations, remains unclear.
THE 1980S SLASHERS
On January 20th, 1981, conservative Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th president of the United States, sparking the “Reagan Revolution” in American culture.148 Reagan ran his campaign on a platform of family values and decreased government interference, remarking during his inaugural address, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”149 Reagan’s popularity can be seen as a symptom of collective fatigue with 1970s counterculture. The desire to leave the conflicts and tragedies of the previous decades behind was reflected in film. The highest grossing films of the decade included action-packed blockbusters like Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back (1980), E.T. (1982) and Top Gun (1986)150 The 1980s also saw the release of two films focused on Appalachia that weren’t related to horror– The Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and The Dollmaker (1984). The former was based on the 1976 biography by George Vecsey. It starred Sissy Spacek and focused on the meteoric rise of famed country singer Loretta Lynn (1932-2022), born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. The latter, a made-for-TV movie starring Jane Fonda, was inspired by the 1954 novel by Harriette Arnow, and follows an Appalachian woman who surrenders her homestead to migrate to Detroit, Michigan with her family, seeking better economic opportunity. These films were influential thanks to their famous leading women, both of whom would go on to win awards for their portrayals (the Academy Award for Best Actress to Spacek and the Primetime Emmy Award for Lead Actress to Fonda). The Coal Miner’s Daughter in particular, would remain a classic, with lasting power well beyond the 1980s. It was the seventh highest
147https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/eberts-guide-to-practical-filmgoing-a-glossary-of-terms-forthe-cinema-of-the-80s
148https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3759111/stephen-king-praised-the-evil-dead-back-in-1982-andnow-hes-praising-evil-dead-rise-in-2023/
149 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/26/evil-dead-review150 ttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/26/evil-dead-review-
grossing film of the decade, earning nearly 70 million dollars at the box office and seven Oscar nominations. The film highlights the realistic situation in the pocket of Appalachia where Loretta is from without sensationalizing, or romanticizing, it for audiences. Reviewer Gary Crowdus writes “What it does emphasize is a strong family situation, with two hard-working, loving parents who obviously have their hands full trying to raise seven children. We also learn of the bleak economic opportunities in the area- more or less a choice between the dangers of illegal ‘moonshining’ and black lung from working in the mines. Above all, we can understand why, as the lyrics of her hit song proclaim, Loretta Lynn is, indeed, ‘proud to be a coal miner's daughter."151
Despite the cooling public attention on horror, the 1980s still produced some of the most celebrated films of the genre including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980). While the mountain monster wouldn’t again reach the popularity of Deliverance for the foreseeable future, the trope was still alive and well, though primarily relegated to “budget” slasher films cast with relative unknowns. 1980 saw the release of Charles Kaufman’s Mother’s Day and Kevin Connor’s Motel Hell, two slashers that followed in the footsteps of the many Deliverance “dupes.” Motel Hell was a horror comedy in which rural farmers Vincent and his sister Ida trap unsuspecting urban invaders and “plant” them in their garden up their necks (cutting out their vocal chords), until they’re ready for “harvest.” The poster reads “It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent fritters.”152 The film was intended as satire, combining the many themes in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, and The Hills Have Eyes to create a parody of the naivety of outsiders toward the (obviously) cannibalistic nature of the rural farmer. In perhaps the most pivotal scene from the film, Vincent faces off with his comically naive law enforcement brother Bruce. Vincent wields a chainsaw while wearing a bloody pig’s head over his own, laughing maniacally. In a 1981 interview, famed Night of the Living Dead (1968) Director George Romero was asked about the many “cheapie horror pictures” being produced. He remarked:
A lot of these films are made simply because there’s a wave going on. They’re being made in Buffalo, North Carolina, everywhere. That happens anytime there’s a trend that’s within the reach of small independent filmmakers. I don’t think many of them are any good. They don’t have much integrity, or even an affection for the genre. They’re just deals. Motel Hell was one of the more interesting of the bunch. It was actually very funny. Rory Calhoun plays this innkeeper-butcher who turns his guests into pork sausage. It was intended to be a send-up of horror pictures. The problem was they tried to play it both ways, as horror and comedy.153
Romero’s comments on the “trend that’s within reach,” is referring to the affordability of the rural horror trope. At a time when Star Wars, a top grossing film of the decade, was using every technological development in the special effects playbook, the mountain monster was a relatively cheap plot to carry out, within an already financially accessible genre. Directors didn’t need special effects teams, complex sets, or large-scale fight scenes; they needed a handful of actors, an outdoor set, and a dash of gore to carry out the relatively straightforward plot.
151 Williamson 150
152 Williamson 151
153 Nowell, Richard. (2011). "There's More Than One Way to Lose Your Heart": The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films, and Female Youth. Cinema Journal. 51. 115-140. 10.1353/cj.2011.0073.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/392450214534
https://www.rogerebert.com/far-flung-correspondents/it-takes-all-kinds-of-critters
Mothers Day was a case-study in the exploitation-slasher genre: two backwoods, deformed, adult sons trap unsuspecting urbanites and torture, rape, and kill them for the enjoyment of their domineering matriarch. Roger Ebert, by this time a vocal opponent to the violence of these low-budget slasher films, writes: “During the next 100 minutes or so, the ‘Mother’s Day’ audience witnessed a series of violent events, held together by the flimsiest of
stories. [...] In between, they behave like pigs.154 Indeed despite their claims of being “citified,” the family eat “slop” from buckets, behaving more like animals than humans. In an article from 2021, Kyle Christenson writes, “ U.S. horror has recently given rise to a figure that I dub ‘the monstrous man-boy.’ The monstrous man-boy is a villainous and almost always white male character who, despite being of adult age, lives in a perpetual childhood state, engaging in petulant and immature behaviors that often have violent consequences. What makes the monstrous man-boy so horrifying is his uncanny nature: he looks like and has the physical presence of a man, but he also has the disposition and worldview of a stunted (and bratty) little boy.”155 Indeed, even the “slop” buckets the men eat from contain Trix cereal, Gerber baby food, cheese spread, and Quik chocolate powder, further reinforcing their almost infantile existence.156 While Christenson argues that the emergence of this white male “boy” monster is a recent development (he cites The Boy from 2016 and The Prodigy from 2019), this figure, or at least an important precursor for it, was certainly present within the 1970s and 80s mountain monster genre.
https://www4.fusionmovies.to/film/mothers-day/3xiak8uf
HILLBILLY HORROR AND MATRIARCHAL DEVOTION
Mother’s Day also notably takes what had historically been a secondary trope of the genre, the presence of the domineering mother, and moves it front and center as the direct cause of the mens’ stagnated emotional states. Feminist horror scholar Barbara Creed writes, “In these films, the maternal figure is constructed as the monstrous-feminine. By refusing to relinquish her hold on her child, she prevents it from taking up its proper place in relation to the Symbolic. Partly consumed by the desire to remain locked in a blissful relationship with the
154 https://crypticrock.com/the-final-terror-nearly-forgotten-40-years-later/
155 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULksrPYVmZE&t=30s
156 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctvtv937f.6
mother and partly terrified of separation, the child finds it easy to succumb to the comforting pleasure of the dyadic relationship.”157 Mother’s Day is a direct continuation of the domineering matriarch figure in many of the Appalachian cartoons of the early 20th century, as well as a natural progression for the mummified mother figure seen in Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though now with direct agency over the men in her family. Due to her age and physical limitations, the men are her conduits, embodying her agency physically. The influence of the “monstrous feminine” in horror villains’ origin stories wasn’t novel for the time. The primary relationship featured in the 1976 horror classic Carrie revolves around an overbearing mother figure. Similarly, Hitchcock invoked many maternal figures throughout his body of work. Scholar Bernard Dick writes, “Hitchcock's terrible mother is like the wizard of Oz: remove the mask and you have women grappling with their own demons: Mrs. Bates, whose son discovered her double life when he walked into her bedroom; Lydia Brenner, whose husband's death left her petrified of being abandoned; and Bernice Edgar, who paid the price for converting her bedroom into a brothel.”158 The difference with the golden age of mountain monster slasher films, is that the mother is rarely granted the “unmasking,” alluded to by Dick. Instead, they became a convenient answer for how storytellers could reconcile animalistic, infantile men with complex hunting and trapping strategies. They serve as the brains behind the brawn, dictating their will by proxy while using emotional manipulation (occasionally even sexual persuasion) to enact unspeakable evil in order to demonstrate their control. In this way, they aligned with the Ed Gein mother figure–whose overbearing nature and unnatural relationship to her son was often explained as the source of his psychopathy.
ADDRESSING THE “PIG” IN THE ROOM
Given the chainsaw wielding pig head in Motel Hell and the slop bucket meals of Mother’s Day, it seems important to address the growing prevalence of pigs in so many hillbilly horror representations. There is of course, the obvious connection: historically pigs were an influential part of agrarian, mountain homesteads. From the National Park Service: “Pigs were the primary source of meat for mountain families for several reasons. For one, almost every part of the animal could be used. Secondly, pigs were self-sufficient and could be raised at little cost to the farmer. Pigs were especially good foragers and were allowed to roam the forest in search of food. They would eat many things that other livestock could not.”159 In other words, pigs are correctly associated with mountain culture. Pig slaughter or “hog killings” were often a community endeavor that marked the changing seasons and involved a full day and multiple steps to ensure every part could be used for the upcoming winter.160 Whether or not film directors were aware of the historical significance of pigs is mostly unclear, but they were undeniably tapping into tropes used in previous iterations of reductive hillbilly tropes. There’s also the association of pigs with filth and depravity, despite their intelligence and complex social structures. Interestingly, like many communities, pigs are a matriarchal society. They are also place-based in that they don’t migrate or wander far from their primary territory. From a
157 https://www.jstor.org/stable/432309
158 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.128.509.0333
159 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.17.2.0178
160 https://www.jstor.org/stable/432310
cinematic perspective, they’re also relatively easy to manipulate for film. They are used for meat, so the slaughterhouse connection is easy and present. They don’t require the extensive transportation or fencing that cows or horses would require. They’re also less frenzied and fragile than chickens. In short, they were the perfect prop to hold up against the mountain families. They were key signifiers that this was a rural community and were a great visual parallel for directors wanting to emphasize the slovenly, animalistic nature of their mountain monsters.
THE EVIL DEAD AND “SPLATTERPUNK”
The 1980s saw several more hillbilly horror slashers come onto the scene. Final Terror (1983) by Andrew Davis and Hunter’s Blood (1986) by Robert C. Hughes both featured groups of ill-equipped urbanites viciously pursued by mountain monsters.161 Trapped by director William Fruet from 1982 follows a group of four idealistic young adults as they attempt a weekend camping trip. Inadvertently, the group witnesses a psychotic “redneck” kill his wife and quickly become his next target. Reviewer Andrew Pragasm writes, “Ten years after the significantly more potent and poetic Deliverance (1972) a proliferation of backwoods horror movies still perpetuated an image of America’s rural South as a hotbed of homicidal hillbilly rapists[…] the cast of Southern-fried goons look more like comics fresh off performing a skit on the oncebeloved variety show Hee-Haw.”162 Southern Comfort by Walter Hill is one that has experienced some staying power and is now categorized more as a “survival thriller” than a slasher film. Roger Ebert writes:
The film is set in the Cajun country of Louisiana, in 1973, and it follows the fortunes of a National Guard unit that gets lost in the bayous and stumbles into a metaphor for America’s involvement in Vietnam.[...]The guardsmen are clearly strangers in a strange land, and they make fatal blunders right at the outset. They cut the nets of a Cajun fisherman, they ‘borrow’ three Cajun boats, and they mock the Cajuns by firing blank machine-gun rounds at them. The Cajuns are not amused. By the film’s end, guardsmen will have been shot dead, impaled, hung, drowned in quicksand, and attacked by savage dogs. And all the time they try to protect themselves with a parody of military discipline, while they splash in circles and rescue helicopters roar uselessly overhead.”163
While Ebert stops short of making a direct comparison to Deliverance, other reviews didn’t including Meathook Cinema who wrote: “On its release the movie drew inevitable comparisons to Deliverance, but this feels rawer, leaner and more suspenseful. This has the sensibilities of an edgier independent film. And there are no cringy scenes involving banjos.”164 Just Before
161https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/#trust-ingovernment-by-generation
162 https://www.jstor.org/stable/432310
163 Fenwick, James , and Diane A. Rodgers. "Introduction: A critical reflection on thirty years of The XFiles." In The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rodgers , 1–18. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Accessed June 6, 2025.
164 Fox, season 4 episode 2
Dawn by Jeff Lieberman from 1981 may focus on an Oregon-based mountain monster, but it was originally set in Appalachian Tennessee. In an interview for The Terror Trap, screenwriter Mark Arywitz discusses the evolution of the film:
TT: Tell us about The Last Ritual, which we understand is an earlier version of Just Before Dawn.
MA: That was not the original title. It was originally called The Tennessee Mountain Murders. Which almost sounds like a documentary. I did a treatment for Middleton, which I still have. It's dated 1978.
TT: Take us further along the evolution.
MA: Well, it was The Tennessee Mountain Murders and then it began to change and eventually it became The Last Ritual.
TT: Were there differences in the plot, aside from dropping a character?
MA: Well, there were changes in the order of the scenes.
TT: But the mountain twins were there...
MA: They were there and the last ritual was there. The ritual is a whole situation where the Connie character gets taken by the mountain family and is put through this ritual of snake handling. And it was an idea I liked a great deal. I'm sorry it did not get done although I can see certain reasons from a "shooting" point of view. You need to get a snake wrangler or something like that. (Laughs.) And maybe the actors don't want to deal with the snakes...but you could get close-ups of hands and you could use other hands. I think the real reason they dropped the scene is that Middleton kept wanting all this stuff about God in the script.
TT: Like what?
MA: Well, the two things he kept insisting on, no matter what pages I brought him, were that he wanted more dialogue about God...and he wanted to lift any number of things from Deliverance. Those were the two big things that he kept pushing.165 Lieberman takes issue with Just Before Dawn being described as a slasher film. He expresses that his legacy should be considered his departure from the trope, claiming he never even saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. In an interview featured on The Flashback Files, Lieberman speaks to his experience in making Just Before Dawn: “I hated the script. It was called The Last Ritual, it was about a snake ritual in the Smoky Mountains. I don’t even remember why they had a snake ritual in there, but it was important enough to the story that they called it that. I thought the script was awful and I did a page one rewrite, under a pseudonym.[...] Why is it that twenty-five years later we’re still talking about Just Before Dawn? Because I didn’t give into the pressure of making a movie like Don’t Go Into the Woods or whatever.166 Regardless of Lieberman’s intention, Just Before Dawn has remained solidly in the “slasher” camp, and is frequently included in lists alongside other rural monster plotlines. In 2024 reviewer Shawn Van Horn wrote a piece on Just Before Dawn for Collider entitled “This Accidental Slasher Movie Is ‘Deliverance’ Meets ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'.167
Despite the seemingly endless line of slasher films and Deliverance dupes, there was arguably some innovation within the genre throughout the 1980s. Pumpkinhead (1988) by Stan Winston and The Evil Dead (1983) by Sam Raimi both included supernatural elements in their rural mountain horror (perhaps inspired by the 1979 success of Ridley Scott’s Alien). While it would certainly fall into Roger Ebert’s disdained category of “dead teenager movies,” in the case of Pumpkinhead, it is not a hillbilly assailant, but an alien-scarecrow hybrid who is risen up from a cemetery with the help of a local witch.168 The motivation for Pumpkinhead’s resurrection comes from protagonist Ed, whose only child was thoughtlessly killed by the antics of the urban invaders, prompting him to exact his revenge. In his book Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies author J.W. Williamson writes, “Using dry Nevada hills and machine-fogged studio sets, this movie, too, portrayed the southern mountains as seething with a potent evil.”169
http://www.moviegoods.com/movie_product_static.asp?master_movie_id=9962&sku=259386, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23051417
One of the largest cult classics to emerge from the 1980s was The Evil Dead I (1983) and II (1986). These films launched a franchise that includes multiple sequels, video games, and fan fiction. The popularity of the film can be partially attributable to famed horror writer Stephen King who lauded it as “The most ferociously original horror film of 1982,” after which it was picked up by New Line Cinema.170 In a creative twist on the mountain monster, the evil spirit which permeates the Michigan woods (filmed in Tennessee) infects the urbanites, effectively transforming them into tools for destroying each other, as opposed to pursuit from the typical monstrous “redneck.” The film has been criticized for its treatment of women, subverting the final girl trope and having the final “guy” be “the wussy bystander who eventually discovers his
168 ISBN 0898201802
169 Sydlik, Andrew. "‘A collection of human curiosities’: Disability in The X-Files." In The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rodgers , 301–314. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Accessed June 6, 2025.
170 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/arts/television/the-x-files-home-scary-tv.html
‘masculinity.”171 This approach, while perhaps an attempt at innovation, didn’t sit well with reviewer Steve Rose who wrote, “These women are variously raped by vegetation, hacked to pieces, stabbed, bludgeoned, incarcerated, buried and burned – and none of them survive to get justice.”172 Debates about the representation of women throughout this era of violent slasher films were widely circulating by the 1980s. Richard Nowell writes, “It has been claimed that films like My Bloody Valentine, Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Friday the13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) were made to feed the fantasies- misogynistic, masochistic, or sadistic- of young men. This position first emerged in late 1980, when movie reviewers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert used teen slashers as easily identifiable reference points during a crusade against low-budget horror films, a crusade on which they embarked to piggyback debates among cineastes about cinematic femicide that emerged in the wake of the adult thriller Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980).173 J.W. Williamson expressed similar negativity about the legacy of The Evil Dead and its relevance for the mountains as “monstrous.” He writes, “Horrible, unreasonable, nature itself is awful, evil, the ambiguous Other. [...] Their [the urbanites’] sin is the sin of Burt Reynolds’ party in Deliverance: they have touched raw Nature without respect of caution, have arrogantly gone where they shouldn’t go, and have heedlessly done what they shouldn’t do.”174 Williamson goes on to say, “These movies don’t just reflect our fear of nature; they actively teach that fear with the subverting thought that nature can easily have us for supper, and that we might even submit to it in a kind of ecstasy. So don’t dare go beyond where the pavement ends.”175
The Evil Dead could be considered an early example of “splatterpunk,” or work that “aimed to shock, generally through displays of corporeal transgression encompassing anything from extreme mutilation and transformation to mutation or severe body modification and graphic sex.”176 This broad category could be applied to anything meeting the general criteria (horror director Rob Zombie’s body of work, for example); however it was primarily a descriptor for a subgenre of horror novels written in the mid 1980s to early 90s. In Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, our authors argue that splatterpunk was eventually absorbed into the larger canon of horror, which is why it is seen less as a means for categorization, but the tropes that were most closely associated with splatterpunk are still circulating. Perhaps one of the best-known examples comes from Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, published in 1991. The novel was quick to receive the “splatterpunk” label due to its “stomach churning,” depraved violence, which included the titular psycho Bateman “masturbating with the decapitated head of one female victim, and forcing a starving rat into the vagina of another.”177 One of the genre’s most famous writers, Jack Ketchum, uses a number of mountain monster motifs in his work. His first novel Off Season, published in 1980, was, like so many others, inspired by Texas Chainsaw Massacre and follows the grisly, cannibalistic
171 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/arts/television/the-x-files-home-scary-tv.html
172 Sydlik, Andrew. "‘A collection of human curiosities’: Disability in The X-Files." In The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rodgers , 301–314. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Accessed June 6, 2025.
173 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/arts/television/the-x-files-home-scary-tv.html
174 https://dailyyonder.com/x-files-guide-rural-america/2016/01/30/
175 https://dailyyonder.com/x-files-guide-rural-america/2016/01/30/
176 Fox, NCIS Season 2 Episode 3
177 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3054114
sacrifice of a group of New York City urbanites by inbred “locals” while on vacation in Maine.178 While rural splatterpunk examples are numerous, there are two in particular that lean heavily into the mountain monster trope.
https://www.amazon.com/MOUNTAIN-William-Ollie-ebook/dp/B0083XGCPI
The Mountain, published in 2012, follows Mark and Eddie as they head up “Rickert’s Peak” to capitalize on the abundance of pine trees, hoping to harvest them to sell over the holiday season. The night turns horrific as the men are attacked by inbred, hillbilly cannibals who push them to their physical and psychological limits. The cover of the novel warrants examination: a deformed man in bloody overalls wielding an ax above a screaming person’s head in front of the blood-spattered title. The monster’s outfit is clearly coded “rural” with the familiar crescent moon (originally associated with Appalachian cartoons due to the abundance of outhouses bearing the same shape). The monster appears deformed, emerging from a mountain pictured in the background. The reviews on the popular site “Goodreads” are particularly telling. One reviewer writes, “Fastpaced, bloody, sick, and depraved. Awesome! Of all the backwoods, inbred redneck stories I have read this one kept me turning the pages. Makes you wonder if this kind of shit could really happen…”179 Another writes, “The Mountain is one of those little surprises which keeps you coming back to the well for more. Inbred hillbillies,
178 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23381964
179 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40933059
drug use, murders, sexual assaults and corrupt cops have all been done before, it's true. But I'm not sure they've been combined in such a way as William Ollie here manages.”180
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223500876-swine-mountain
An even more extreme example of Appalachian splatterpunk fiction comes from Bryan Smith’s Depraved, published in 2009. The description reads, “Welcome to Hopkins Bend, the remote little Tennessee town where the backwoods inhabitants are cannibals and the local law operates a sex-trafficking ring. Unlucky travelers are frequently ensnared in the town’s sinister web. Some are held captive and tortured while others face even more gruesome fates. And beneath it all is the town’s darkest secret, the curse of the depraved and mutated Kincher clan.”181 The particular details of the plot are less important than the takeaway for readers which is the idea that clans of inbred, homicidal cannibals lurk in the mountains, waiting for unsuspecting urbanites to feed on in every conceivable way. As of June 2025, the book had 2,576 reviews on Goodreads. One reviewer writes, “A thrill a minute from beginning to end, with blood, guts, gore, rape, cannibalism, and all the other ‘great’ extreme stuff worthy of splatterpunk. If you like movies such as ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, ‘Wrong Turn’, and ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, then you’re gonna love this.”182 Another described it as “a cross between films like: Deliverance (“squeal like a pig”), Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes.”183 Author Bryan Smith has gone on to write three sequels, capitalizing off of the success of the first installment. While splatterpunk as a categorization isn’t used as often in recent history, there is
180 Fox, NCIS Season 2 Episode 3
181 Season 9 Episode 20
182
183
still a market for horror that pushes readers or viewers to the edge of what can be tolerated. Swine Mountain, for example, is a 2025 horror novella published by Thomas Stewart as a follow up to his 2023 novella Finding Pig Man. The plot follows the protagonist Brandon’s journey into the North Carolina mountains and eventual capture by the mythic “Pig Man.” One reviewer writes, “Once they get partly up the mountain, shit hits the fan. This is an intense story that will leave you squealing for more.”184 The origins of splatterpunk from the 1980s and 90s directly influenced the subsequent direction of the hillbilly monster in the next decades and beyond. The 1980s was undoubtedly the golden era of the “slasher” film. By this point, the backwoods mountain monster was a known quantity for horror fans and through various, subtle curatorial innovations like unique origin stories (the “redneck” as disgraced veteran), swapping the hillbillies for “cajuns,” or making their plot satirical, filmmakers were able to maintain an affordable budget and play into a trope that continued to be popular with audiences, while still putting their own “spin” on it. Despite the emerging counter-narratives seen in The Coal Miner’s Daughter and The Dollmaker, backwoods slashers were still being produced. Harmful rural dramas were also gaining traction: the 1980s saw the release of the drama film Next of Kin (1989) which follows policeman Truman (Patrick Swayze), a transplant from Kentucky who is hellbent on exacting revenge for a family murder. Directed by Tony Williams, the film relied heavily on mountain stereotypes, and was reviewed critically by Roger Ebert, despite its wellknown cast.185 Moving forward, the popularity of The Evil Dead and Alien would prompt more consideration of supernatural happenings for the future of horror as the medium began to shift away from film toward other avenues. Photography, TV shows,and video games all started to incorporate the mountain monster motif in the 1990s and beyond before leading into the reality TV boom of the early 2000s.
CHAPTER 6: 1990s and 2000s. THE HILLBILLY HORROR EXPANSION
By the 1990s, the mountain monster was firmly established within the horror genre. He is always white, male, and usually between 20-50 years old. He frequently attacks in groups with other men (often brothers or relatives of some kind). Often the motivation for his violent pursuits are a symptom of an overbearing mother figure, but not always. He is frequently compared to, or accompanied by, pigs. He lives in an indoor-outdoor hybrid space (usually a shack, distressed cabin, cave, or abandoned structure) and is deformed in some way (which should be read as a result of inbreeding if not otherwise addressed). He sometimes engages in cannibalism, is almost always sexually depraved and physically disheveled. He harbors ill-intent toward trespassers due to their privileged status, whether it be their occupations, their access to modern conveniences, or their naivety. Finally, the mountain monster prefers primitive methods of torture like face-to-face contact or hunting/trapping over distance weapons like guns and explosives. With these tropes pretty firmly cemented, the question becomes: what continued to shock audiences about such a predictable figure? There are the obvious elements that remain universal for human nature. The mountain monster lurks in isolation and humans are inherently
social beings. The idea of being trapped away from civilization is something that would stoke fear in anyone who values the conveniences of our modern communities. As we’ve moved more toward city centers with cell phone towers, emergency alerts, and 24-7 surveillance technology, the idea of isolation has become even scarier, as our ability to adapt becomes more difficult. Humans similarly value predictability as a means for survival and the mountain monster is often violently unpredictable. He keeps the upper hand, as he is in his natural environment, and is therefore able to simultaneously be strategic and unpredictable. A great deal of monster stories showcase a monster in pursuit (hiding under your bed, for example), but the mountain monster is activated when you cross into his territory. In this way, they are omnipresent throughout rural landscapes. The lore keeps them tied to place in such a way that they’re unable to be slain in the same way previous monsters were.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2018/07/12/stephen-king-sequel-pennywiseclown-already-scaring-jessica-chastain/778431002/
THE UNCANNY AS A TOOL FOR HORROR
Another psychological experience prompted by the mountain monster is the uncanny. The concept of the “uncanny” comes from Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, who tried to explain why certain things prompt discomfort and fear in adults. Freud writes, “The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.[...]We can also speak of a living person as uncanny, and we do so when we ascribe evil intentions to him. But that is not all; in addition to this we must feel that his intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with the help of special powers.186 In order to see how this concept might apply to the mountain monster, one
186 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3586530/reviews/
must start by looking at other monsters throughout horror. Pennywise the clown, an invention of horror writer Stephen King for his 1996 novel It, is frightening because it takes a figure that we all know and are familiar with and transforms him into a monstrous threat. Aesthetically, Pennywise has all the hallmarks of the friendly, birthday-party clown: face paint, balloons, oversized clothing, etc. King, and later creatives who adapted the novel onto film, conjured the uncanny through the inclusion of horrifying teeth, cracked makeup, inhuman speed, and yellow eyes (among other things). Noël Carroll writes, “Approaching our question from the opposite direction, clowns, of course, are already categorically incongruous beings. Thus, they can be turned into horrific creatures by compounding their conceptually anomalous status with fearsomeness.”187 Another example, born out of early 2000s meme culture, is “Slenderman.” This figure takes the everyday “known” (a man in a suit), and prompts the uncanny through a variety of exaggerated features. Andrew Peck writes, “Performances began to portray the creature as more human-like, though still with uncanny limb proportions and a featureless face. His black tendrils remained but were often hidden. His shadowed body now resembled a black suit.”188 Extended arms and legs, a blurred face, and the incongruous positioning of a man in a suit on a playground, or standing in isolated woods, all stoked fear in those who engaged with “Slenderman.”
The uncanny might be prompted by Leatherface and his choice to wear a suit and tie in the 1974 film. The dissonance created by his formal attire, while also sporting a skin mask and maniacally wielding a chainsaw, used the uncanny to make an already horrifying figure even more terrifying. A suit is traditionally associated with professionalism, industry, and productivity. Leatherface, despite wearing the “costume,” subverted those characteristics. Furthermore, the rural family sitcoms of the mid 20th century had fully ingrained the image of the sanitized hillbilly in audiences. Characters like Ernest T Bass, Pa Kettle, and Jed Clampett were well known icons, which is why the uncanny lends itself so well to the mountain monster. The physical deformities, primitive behavior, and sexual depravity would all be seen as a horrifying transformation for what were historically noble, do-gooder, male patriarchs. It was precisely the familiar aspects of these figures that made their funhouse mirror parallels so frightening. Marita Nadal writes, “Like trauma, the uncanny implies fear, haunting, possession, uncertainty, repetition, a tension between the known and the unknown—the familiar and the unfamiliar, heimlich and unheimlich, in Freud’s terms—and the intrusive return of the past.”189 Whereas the sanitized hillbilly was meant to bring comfort and relief to urbanites grappling with the influx of the cultural “other” into their cities, the uncanny hillbilly desanitized them in a directly visceral way.
X-FILES “HOME”
There were few examples of sanitized hillbillies left in circulation by the time media reached the 1990s, but the mountain monster marched onward, finding footing in new formats including TV. One of the best known examples can be found in the infamous X-Files episode from 1996, “Home.” In many ways, “Home” epitomizes the mountain monster trope and, along
187 https://fox56news.com/news/kentucky/chronicling-the-kentucky-cannibal/ 188 https://fox56news.com/news/kentucky/chronicling-the-kentucky-cannibal/ 189 https://fox56news.com/news/kentucky/chronicling-the-kentucky-cannibal/
with the 2003 film Wrong Turn, serves as a natural bookend for Deliverance in its evolution Before jumping into the specifics of the episode, it is important to consider the context and viewership for X-files, which ran on the Fox network from 1993-2002. The show follows two FBI agents, paranormal believer Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and skeptic Dana Scully (Gillian Armstrong) as they investigate unexplainable phenomena including extraterrestrial life, monsters, and the occult. Scholar Douglas Kellner writes: “...the series articulates a panorama of contemporary fears, anxieties, and fantasies, drawing on classic figures of the occult, present-day horrors, and political conspiracies as material. It thus uses conventions and iconic figures of media culture and references to contemporary historical individuals and events to comment upon present day issues and to represent salient disturbing aspects of the current era. In so doing, it raises questions concerning dominant institutions, ideologies, and values.”190
The series picked up on the public’s increasing interest in aliens, along with the distrust of the government stemming from recent events: the Watergate scandal that occurred under President Nixon (1969-1974), the assassination of outspoken political opponents, and the Vietnam War. According to the Pew Research Center, “The erosion of public trust in government began in the 1960s. The share saying they could trust the federal government to do the right thing nearly always or most of the time reached an all-time high of 77% in 1964. By the end of the 1970s, only about a quarter of Americans felt that they could trust the government at least most of the time. Trust in government rebounded in the 1980s before falling in the early to mid-1990s.”191 The X-files leaned into the idea that the federal government regularly covers up important happenings, eschews details, and curates what the public sees, while also highlighting a genre that had rarely been seen on television before. This approach resonated well with its key demographic, Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980). The show’s creator, former journalist Chris Carter, was inspired by a couple of the few horror television series that preceded the 1990s. James Fenwick and Diane A. Rodgers include some of the initial plans for the show in their book The Legacy of the X-Files writing, “He later revealed in interviews that his intention had been to create a ‘scary’ television show that drew upon his formative childhood and teenage television experiences, specifically the original series of The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–5). In an interview with the Las Vegas Review in 1993, Carter said ‘I didn’t have any agenda … I just wanted to create a wildly entertaining show that would scare the pants off you.”
192
Of all the two hundred and eighteen episodes of The X-Files, “Home,” which aired on October 11, 1996, remains the most controversial. The episode opens on a stormy night with the camera positioned behind brush (assuming the position of voyeur) looking over a rusted sickle in the foreground toward a decrepit farmhouse in the distance. The next shot takes viewers inside the house, and captures an unknown person screaming, with only the occasional lightning illuminating the faces of the occupants. Very quickly the viewer recognizes that the scene is of a woman giving birth, with three men assisting in the delivery using unsanitary, crude tools (a fork and rusted scissors). The three men take the crying baby and lumber out into a downpour, heading toward the field adjacent to the house. One of the men buries the infant (presumably still-alive) in the mud while another moans incoherently, his cries becoming lost
190 https://acloudofdust.typepad.com/files/hillbillies-invade-chicago.pdf
191 https://acloudofdust.typepad.com/files/hillbillies-invade-chicago.pdf
192 https://www.cablefax.com/programming/life-off-the-grid-wgn-americas-outsiders
among the rumbles of thunder. The viewer, still lacking in context, would recognize that the writers intended for these characters to have clear physical and intellectual deficiencies, prompting the uncanny as a means for provoking early horror. They stalk, rather than walk and even in silhouettes, it is clear their faces and figures are malformed. The scene closes on the men silhouetted by the lightning before leading into the opening credits. The first postintroduction scene opens on a completely inverted reality from what viewers had just seen: a kid’s baseball game on a sunny day. After a foul ball flies over the fence, it is revealed that the field the kids are playing in is the same field in which the occupants of the farmhouse buried the infant. The viewer learns that “the Peacocks” live in the house and the kids are fearful and avoidant of the area. The suspense builds as the kids continue to disturb the earth around where the infant was buried until finally, one of the players notices blood bubbling up around his heel, an infant’s hand becoming visible from out of the dirt. The game abruptly ends and Scully and Mulder are called onto the scene.
https://evil.fandom.com/wiki/Peacock_House
As the two FBI detectives begin their investigation, Mulder is distracted, drawn back into memories of “a simpler time.” He holds the baseball to Scully’s nose: “It's perfume. Eau de ball. God, this brings back a lot of memories. My sister... all day pick-up games out on the vineyard, ride your bikes down to the beach, eat bologna sandwiches. Only place you had to be on time was home for dinner. Never had to lock your doors. No modems, no faxes, no cell phones.”193 He goes on to say that, were it not for his work, he would like to live in a place like “Home,” clearly enjoying the rural, picturesque Pennsylvania town. Scully offers a retort, “Would be like living in Mayberry,” (the setting of hit sanitized hillbilly TV show, The Andy Griffith Show). The 193https://slate.com/culture/2016/02/outsiders-on-wgn-could-have-been-the-next-great-prestige-dramabut-here-s-why-it-s-not.html
sheriff arrives and introduces himself as Sheriff “Andy Taylor,” the same name as the Sheriff in The Andy Griffith Show. It is immediately made clear that this is indeed a small town like Mayberry, where the Sheriff knows everyone personally (even remembering all of the pregnant women in the town) and never locks his door. As their attention turns to the Peacock’s farmhouse, where the three residents have been hoisted upon the front porch railing watching the investigation unfold, Sheriff Taylor remarks, “That farm belongs to the Peacock family. Three boys now. Well, men. Guess you could call them human.”194 After explaining that the brothers’ parents were presumed dead after a terrible car accident in which they refused medical assistance, Sheriff Taylor remarks, “The Peacocks built that farm during the Civil War. It still has no electricity, no running water, no heat... they grow their own food, they raise their own pigs, they breed their own cows... raise and breed their own stock... if you get my meaning.”195 Less than ten minutes into the episode, viewers have been given several elements of the mountain monster trope. The three brothers are white, male, inbred, and living in a hybrid indoor-outdoor space where they’re raising pigs. They are physically deformed, violent, and skilled in survival without the aid of modern conveniences. In the otherwise picturesque town of “Home,” this family is clearly a black mark.
Sheriff Taylor escorts the agents to the local station where he introduces his deputy “Barney” Paster (Andy Griffith’s character’s deputy is Barney Fife, in yet another nod towards Mayberry). The agents conduct a crude autopsy in the restroom of the station due to lack of proper facilities. There they uncover the deceased infant and Scully is horrified by the number of genetic defects and physical abnormalities present. They discover that the child was likely still alive when it was buried prompting Mulder to suggest, “There’s something rotten in Mayberry.” As the agents leave the station, they begin to postulate about the circumstances that led to the conception of the child. While Mulder argues that the baby is likely just the unlucky product of two scared teenagers, Scully feels that the Peacock brothers couldn’t resist their instincts to breed, and thus must have taken someone, maybe a relative, against her will. She remarks, “But if the instinct and the need is strong enough, they will answer it any way that they can. Now a woman gave birth to that child, Mulder, and my guess is, against her will.”196 The comparison to feral animals and the argument for what would be considered sexual depravity among humans (not necessarily among animals, which seems to be the point Scully is making), all further develop the image of the Peacock brothers as feral animals. When Scully and Mulder finally approach the Peacock home, they’re met with discarded farm equipment, a rusting vintage Cadillac, and a bloody pig head. The pig head and the farm equipment are all things that should come as no surprise for those familiar with the mountain monster trope, but the Cadillac is an interesting addition. Like the many references to Mayberry, this can be seen as a nod to the 1950s and 60s when Elvis’ pink Cadillac was considered the height of luxury. After spotting bloody scissors on the table inside the home, the agents find just cause to enter, and locate additional evidence including shoe prints that match those left near the crime scene. They enter one of the back rooms, darkened completely with the exception of dozens of pinhole punctures that dapple in small amounts of light. One of those rays of modest light illuminate a set of eyes accompanied by heavy breathing, indicating someone is watching
194 https://appvoices.org/2016/04/08/outsiders/
195 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/arts/television/tv-review-outsiders-wgn.html
196 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/arts/television/tv-review-outsiders-wgn.html
Mulder and Scully from inside the house. Some time later, viewers watch as the Peacock brothers make preparations to leave their farmhouse, throwing weapons and other assorted instruments into the Cadillac. They take off driving to the tune of “Wonderful, Wonderful” by Johnny Mathis (re-recorded for this episode with a different singer after Mathis refused to lend his version).197 Notably, this song spent thirty-nine weeks atop the Billboard Top 100 chart when it was released in 1956 and, in addition to the song being yet another artifact from small town idealism, it also serves as a foil to barbaric actions taken by the Peacock brothers as they brutally beat and kill both Sheriff Taylor and his wife.198 As the lyrics “What a moment to share, It's wonderful, wonderful. Oh, so wonderful, my love,” viewers watch a violent scene where the brothers, seemingly impervious to bodily harm (including a baseball bat to the shins), violently bludgeon Sheriff Taylor. Just when the viewer is led to believe that perhaps the Sheriff’s wife, who was instructed to hide under the bed, would be spared, the brothers sniff the air and discover her, tapping into their primitive instincts and heightened animal-like senses. The scene reinforces that, in an otherwise idyllic town, the Peacock brothers are “rotting” element that Mulder alludes to.
Upon discovery of the bodies, Mulder remarks, “they really went caveman on them.” Meanwhile, Scully uncovers troubling DNA evidence from the murdered infant indicating that perhaps all three brothers were a part of the conception of the child, with a female-member of the family as the carrier. With this in hand, the two agents and the Sheriff’s deputy head toward the Peacock family home to confront them. In the meantime, the hidden, fourth Peacock family encourages the mens’ agency exclaiming, “They'll be coming now. We knew this day was going to happen. That they'd try to change the way things are. All we can do about changing things... is be ready for it... be ready for them. Let them know, this is our home and this is the way it's going to stay.” Immediately upon entering the house, Deputy Paster activates a bobbie trap, releasing an axe that swings from above the door frame, killing him and prompting one of the most telling scenes of dialogue from the episode:
SCULLY: Pastor's dead. The brothers moved in like a pack of animals.
MULDER: The eldest will move in to ensure the prey has been killed, and circling the prey signals to the others that it's safe to approach.
(Scully looks through her binoculars to see the brothers starting to beat Pastor's carcass. They snarl.)
What we're witnessing, Scully, is undiluted animal behavior. Mankind, absent its own creation of civilization, technology and information, regressed to an almost prehistoric state, obeying... only the often savage laws of nature.
(Scully shakes her head.)
We're outsiders invading the den, trying to take away their one chance at reproducing, which we're going to do.
SCULLY: Even though we have the firearms, I imagine the place is rigged with traps.
197https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/read-online/17d2fd7c-1439-4b9e-a2d6-1e960d836f08/book/ epub?context=ubx
198 https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a41830004/modern-westerns-masculinity-menpopularity/
At this point, the comparison to the Peacock brothers as animals isn’t just insinuated, it's spoken outright. In order to distract the brothers, Scully and Mulder break open the pig pen, prompting notice from one of the brothers who grabs the other two to try and collect them. While they’re out of the house, the agents move in, discovering that the “house” has been in a state of stagnation since at least 1977, as Mulder finds a newspaper announcing the death of Elvis Presley (yet another cultural reference from the 50s-60s). After stumbling upon dozens of family photos, showing a long lineage of inbreeding and deformities, they find Mrs. Peacock on a rolling board, under the bed. She screams at them but is unable to fight, as she has no arms or legs. The dialogue reveals that this is the person who has been directing the men, including the directive to set the traps for law enforcement: the family matriarch.
After further conversation with Mrs. Peacock, Scully learns that the family has a genetic condition which prevents them from feeling pain–explaining their seeming immunity to physical harm. She expresses her eternal love for her sons, explaining that they are devoted to, and would do anything for her. Meanwhile Mulder notices the men have picked up the “scent” of the outsiders and a physical confrontation inside the house ensues. Two of the brothers are killed during the altercation but one, Edmund, is able to escape with the mother. The final scene shows the Cadillac, still playing “Wonderful, Wonderful” over which Mrs. Peacock’s voice can be heard comforting Edmund “There, there. Sherman and George were good boys. We should be proud. And you got to know, Edmund, you can't keep a Peacock down. There'll be more. One day, there'll be more. Now we have to move on... start a new family... one we'll be proud of. Find a new place to call ours. A new home. A brand new home.” In A Collection of Human Curiosities’: Disability in The X-Files, Andrew Sydlik writes:
A different kind of demonic cripple, the monstrous hillbilly, appears in ‘Home’. [...] Critics often overlook the eugenic roots of the monstrous hillbilly, as the trope populates several beloved horror and thriller films such as Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes. Tosha Taylor notes that the monstrous hillbilly is itself a variant of the ‘white trash’ figure, a label that eugenicists used to describe genetically and morally inferior poor rural whites, who should be eliminated to create a purely white, abled society (2020: 168).199
199 Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly : A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3052414. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-06-18 17:12:30.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751137/
Glen Morgan and James Wong were the writers responsible for the infamous episode. When asked about where the inspiration came from, Morgan responded:
“My wife, Kristen, had shown me “Brother’s Keeper” [a 1992 documentary about an illiterate rural man’s suspected murder of his brother], which was about this family close to where my brother and I grew up. The other major thing was, in college I had read Charlie Chaplin’s biography. Before he was famous he was traveling in musical theater, and he rented a room in a tenement with a family that took a liking to him. They said, ‘Hey, we got something to show you.” And they take him up to a room with a cot, and under the cot was a man on a platform, and he was wheeled out and they stood him up and they clapped and danced and the guy did tricks. It just seemed like such a horrifying situation, and I’d been trying to use it. So we had been working out the story where there was another brother under the bed, and Jim Wong one day goes: ‘It’s the mother! The mother’s under the bed!’ And I felt Freud and Joseph Campbell do back flips, and that was that.”200
Morgan goes on to specify:
“The Peacocks were an actual messy family that lived next to my fastidious grandmother in Rochester, N.Y. The Peacocks had been a running joke in my family for decades. A joke more about my grandmother than her neighbors.The Peacocks were actually lovely people. Just slobs. My grandmother, who had moved from Rochester 20 years earlier, 200 Read more at: https://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/tv-movies/article44150238.html#storylink=cpy
was anxious when the episode aired that her old neighbors, the Peacocks, would find out.”
Morgan’s anecdote really serves as a microcosm of what happened nationally with the hillbilly icon: the comedic, slovenly but friendly neighbor to the south is turned into a demonic, crazed, primitive monster for the purposes of morbid curiosity, urbanoia, and sensationalism. The entire episode takes the idealized vision of Americana circa the 1950s and 1960s and projects it onto the town of “Home,” Pennsylvania. Even the opening scene, a baseball game (America’s pastime), is making a statement about the blight of the mountain monster on urban potential. If Home is a modern-day Mayberry, then the Peacock brothers are Ernest T Bass, only inbred and psychotic. Sydlik writes:
While praised for its shocking themes and imagery, ‘Home’ reinforces some of the most pernicious eugenic ideas of rural people as inbred, murderous and barely human (Taylor 2020: 169–70). Mulder even bases his strategies in his fight against the Peacock brothers on his previous night’s viewing of a nature documentary about predatory animals, while the family name ‘Peacock’ ironically juxtaposes the brothers’ grotesque bestiality with the colourful beauty of the bird of the same name. Mulder and Scully view the Peacocks as entirely monstrous, leaving viewers with little reason to empathize with them (as is usually the case for the monstrous hillbilly), completely ignoring the economic inequalities and lack of resources that disable those living in rural American spaces.201
https://www.fangoria.com/theres-no-disgrace-like-home-the-x-files-episode-too-horrifying-fortelevision/
The Peacock brothers inhabited the same deviant matriarchal devotion viewers saw in the Ed Gein story, as well as in horror slashers like Mother’s Day. Notably none of the three
201 https://www.hulu.com/series/2faf68df-e153-4e47-b117-a048427b250f
brothers speak one line of dialogue throughout the entire episode. Instead, they are lending their agency to their disabled mother. Additionally Mrs. Peacock’s almost mythic fertility dates back to the comic strips of the early 20th century, which poked fun at the many children of Appaalchian families and represented the “mamaw” figure as fertile in perpetuity. We know from Sheriff Taylor that the oldest son, Edmund, is 42 years old, yet she still conceived the child we saw at the start of the episode and, according to the closing dialogue, plans to have more. While the mountain monster has always been difficult to kill, this episode took it to an almost supernatural level– claiming that the Peacock brothers were unable to feel pain, and had to be regularly checked for wounds by their mother. What little political or civic ideologies they embrace is archaic, as Mrs. Peacock only passively addresses “The War of Northern Aggression.” They also navigate their surroundings using senses more commonly seen in animals. They attack as a pack, can smell their enemy approaching, and set traps with found materials. Even after Deputy Paster is killed with the falling axe, viewers are treated to a frenzied engagement of the corpse from the brothers. They move and behave like hyenas, devouring what is left of the already-dead man. Finally, their deformities were far more than the mere suggestion viewers saw in Deliverance. As the mountain monster became more familiar to audiences, so too did the tropes and taboos. Directors consistently needed to up the ante in order to maintain the shock value, therefore it only makes sense that the deformities needed to escalate with each passing iteration. The Peacock brothers are broad in the forehead, with several malformed features, thin stringy hair (if any hair at all), and large statures.
The legacy of the Peacock family was deep and lasting. In 2015 the New York Times wrote:
“Mention the Peacock family to an unsuspecting “X-Files” fan and enjoy the reaction. It’s likely to be some combination of a shudder, a squeal and a groan, a mix of delight and revulsion. (A reporter’s wife: “Please, God, not at the dinner table.”) The Peacocks are at the center of “Home,” an “X-Files” episode that originally aired in October 1996. Viewers complained that the tale about the murderous inbred clan was too disturbing and network executives apparently agreed. While “Home” appeared later on the cable channel FX, it was never again broadcast on Fox, save for a special Halloween airing in 1999; network ads at the time billed it as “an episode so controversial, it’s been banned from television for three years. The episode has since become a fixture on various “scariest shows ever” lists and endures as one of the most beloved in the series’s history.”202
Indeed the episode remains one of the most talked about in X-Files franchise history, but it wasn’t the only poor representation of Appalachians during the show’s run. Dale Mackey of The Daily Yonder writes, “In another episode, Theef (S7, E14), an uneducated Appalachian man uses ‘backwoods voo-doo’ to murder the family of a doctor he wrongly believes is responsible for the death of his daughter.”203 Mackey goes on to point out, “In Our Town (S2, E24), residents of Dudley, Arkansas, go so far as consuming outsiders in a cannibalistic ritual to remain healthy. In Roadrunners (S8, E4), the people of Cedar City, Utah, kidnap visitors and use them to incubate a mutant worm they believe to be a religious deity.”204 In short, X-files, a hugely
202 https://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/tv-movies/article44150238.html#storylink=cpy 203 https://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/tv-movies/article44150238.html#storylink=cpy 204 https://www.filmsite.org/westernfilms.html
influential show known for its “monster of the week” format, did not do any favors to the skepticism and disdain that urban audiences had toward Appalachia, or its rural equivalents.
APPALACHIAN FEUDING
In 2004, the long-running CBS show NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) featured an episode entitled “Vanished,” which zeroed in on “Smoky Corners,” West Virginia. Investigators are called to a remote field, where they find a Cobra helicopter parked in the middle of a series of strange crop circles. Even more troubling, the marine flying the helicopter is nowhere to be found. As the agents move into the town, their first stop is (what else), a gas station where they’re met with distrust from the locals, bordering on outright hostility. The Sheriff, also an owner of the feed/grain store in town, quickly appears wherever the agents are asking questions. It becomes clear over the course of the episode that the root of the defensiveness and intrigue in Smoky Corners is related to a long-running feud among the town locals, and that the pilot is somehow connected. When the team of investigators contacts the local authorities to inquire about the Smoky Corners, his response is telling:
Gibbs: “Do you get to Smoky Corners much?”
Officer: “Well, not unless they call, and they don't.”
Gibbs: “No crime?”
Officer: “Nothing we get involved in. There's a few fights. There's been some kind of feud going on up there. It goes back decades.”
Gibbs: “What, like Hatfields and McCoys?”
Officer: “Yeah, something like that. You know, I honestly don't think anyone remembers how it started. It split the valley down the middle, east versus west. And l was told by my predecessor to stay clear. Truth is, they take care of their own problems.205
This dialogue harkens back to the Great Migration and the accusations that Appalachians distrust authority and prefer to mete out justice on their own terms. Other notable tropes from the episode include a multitude of discarded, rusty cars, a stagnant community (“I guess even people out here have cell phones”), pregnant teenagers, and violent, bloodthirsty locals.206
It is difficult to point to the association of Appalachia with feuding as a direct influence for, or antecedent to, the mountain monster. Based on the assemblage of films featuring the motif, the mountain monster is typically motivated by anger toward external forces–those who he feels have been granted privileges and access that he has not. An alternative motivation can be anger toward those who he feels could, intentionally or otherwise, jeopardize his taboo way of life. The last motivation seen throughout the canon is simple, pure, unfiltered psychopathy and its impact on the unfortunate individuals that unknowingly cross into “his” territory. Appalachian feuding, on the other hand, is internal to communities, therefore serves more as a dotted line to the mountain monster development. Certainly the mountain monster trope
205 https://www.ancestry.com/historical-insights/war-military/war-rebellion/harlan-county-war 206https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/LegislativeMoments/moments14RS/web/legislative%20moment %2046.pdf
capitalizes off of the idea that Appalachians are violent, quick to anger, reactionary, and defensive of their homesteads, all characteristics that could have been confirmed by the many legends of feuds. From Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings, “Feuding’ was the common term that contemporary commentators applied to sustained incidents of widespread violence throughout Appalachia, especially in Kentucky, in the 19th century. Although fragmentary data make it impossible to assess whether this area produced unusually high levels of violent confrontation, images of mountain violence in the New York Times and other national media did much to persuade middle-class readers throughout the rest of the United States of the strange and peculiar nature of Appalachia and its apparently ‘benighted’ population.”207
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0658037/characters/nm0101005/?ref_=tt_cl_c_8
The most famous of these legendary feuds is undoubtedly the Hatfields and the McCoys. Altina Waller outlined the beginnings of this feud in her 1989 article, “Feuding and Modernization in Appalachia: The Hatfields and McCoys.” She writes of a drunken Tolbert McCoy in August 1882, drunkenly harassing neighbors in Pike County, Kentucky. When Ellis Hatfield challenged Tolbert, the McCoy gathered up his brothers and, in a flurry of violence reminiscent of Caesar's death in the Roman Theatre, stabbed Ellis over twenty-four times. Waller writes that this murder, “escalated a long-simmering animosity between the Hatfield and McCoy families from the realm of neighborhood name-calling, into a bizarre series of murders, ambushes, and pitched battles which not only shocked the community but gripped the attention of a nationwide audience, contributing in no small way to mountaineer stereotypes of ignorance and violence which persist until this day.”208 Expert James Klotter writes: 207 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcuv06y3nOw 208 https://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/tv-movies/article44150238.html#storylink=cpy
“Like a ghost that haunts the Appalachian hills and hollows, the bloody specter of the Hatfield-McCoy feud continues to bedevil the people of the mountains. The image of the violent mountaineer hangs around their necks, weighting down generation after generation with its albatross-like guilt. And for many people outside the region the photograph of clan leader ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield-that picture of a man of tall, gaunt frame and scraggly beard, with rifle in hand and murder in eye-represents the typical mountaineer. Not only the Hatfields and McCoys were cursed with their feud; all Appalachians were and still are.”209
The legend of “Devil Anse,” who, along with Randolph McCoy, acted as the patriarchs of the feud, has had significant staying power within pop culture’s imagination of Appalachia. While the cast of NCIS showed little evidence that they’d been coached on either accurate wardrobe or accent for the West Virginia setting (the feud would eventually spill across state lines), the Sheriff’s costume suggested at least a passing awareness of the Devil Anse image. Throughout the episode he can be seen sporting a fedora, which perhaps was intended as a callback to the hat “Devil Anse” was often seen wearing in many of his portraits. In 2012, Fox aired an episode of Bones, a show with a similar format based on an investigative team and their series of oddball cases. This particular episode featured feuding in West Virginia, with yet another nod toward the Hatfields and the McCoys. The perception of homicidal feuds from the late 19th century continuing to inspire such violence in present-day is highly sensationalized and, like so much within Appalachian representation, a construction with little basis in reality.
CRIMINAL MINDS: “BLOOD RELATIONS”
2014 brought a pseudo follow-up to X-Files in the form of CBS’s Criminal Minds, a show that follows a team of FBI investigators as they work to profile and apprehend perpetrators. The episode, “Blood Relations,” opens on a black and white scene in the woods; a flashback of a teenage girl crawling along the ground, begging for help. The camera closes in on her as she looks up and sees a pair of tall rubber boots approaching. She whimpers “you?” before the episode pivots to modern-day, outside of Wheeling, West Virginia.210 In the present-day, viewers follow a hunter, later identified as Clark Howard, as he returns home to his trailer for the night. He hasn’t had time to wash his hands before he hears a knock at the door. When he opens it shotgun at the ready, he is quickly captured via a barbed wire noose from above. His legs dangle dramatically for moments before the unknown perpetrator snaps his neck, and he falls to his death, ending the scene on a vision of him laying on the ground, his neck turned at a grotesque 180 degrees. The team of investigators connect this grisly murder with an earlier homicide in the same area. Another hunter, Matthius Lee, was killed via a bear trap that was launched at him (a “makeshift projectile” lined with barbed wire). The team determines they’re looking for someone with nearly inhuman strength, who has skills in stalking and trapping, along with an uncanny knowledge of the rural environment. The next scene takes the viewer behind brush (reminiscent of the voyeuristic first scene in “Home”) where, again, we see a rural shack in the distance. Inside viewers are treated to an ominous display of pelts and other rustic materials, illuminated only by firelight. The camera zeroes in on a man, his shirtless back facing
209 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/144072642
210 https://www.metacritic.com/tv/justified/critic-reviews/
the viewer. Wearing only rustic suspenders, he uses his disfigured hands to perform a strangulation on a small doll, his mouth grimacing in contentment as the doll’s head comes off.
As the episode progresses, the team begins to uncover a decades-old feud between the two hunters’ families due to long buried moonshine rivalries. They meet with local authorities who remark, “Agent Hotchner, we see this all the time. A fella hates another fella, then a brother gets involved. And then a cousin. You know, they get convinced that the reason they can't find work or can't find a woman or can't get off of oxys, 'cause of that other family.”211 Meanwhile the locals begin sharing their suspicions that these murders must be the work of the sinister “mountain man.” The “mountain man” is, according to one of the investigators interviewing locals “a confluence of several local legends. Some say he's part of the backwoods Appalachian population, others say he's a confederate holdout trying to start a second civil war to turn brother against brother, but the one thing they all could agree upon is if you go into a darkened bathroom and you chant ‘I hate the mountain man’ three times, he'll pop up and k*ll you the next time you hear Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio.”212 Viewers are also treated to the overbearing matriarch figure via Cissy Howard, the mother of the murdered hunter from the opening scene. In her hostile attempts to assure the FBI agent that her son did not organize the bear trap attack on Matthius Lee she exclaims, “ In my family, under my roof, my word is law.”213 Meanwhile, the interview with Matthius Lee’s father, Malachi, is equally hostile. After insisting on addressing the female investigator as “Mrs” as opposed to “agent” he remarks, “Unless that ring on your finger is some kind of lesbian thing. I know how you all like to do it up there in D. C. You see, this here is a family matter. And we would appreciate it if the federal government just back off.”214
211 https://deadline.com/2015/04/justified-series-finale-spoilers-1201409470/
212 Silence of the lambs
213 Silence of the lambs
214https://athenacinema.com/hillssilenceofthelambs/#:~:text=Home-,From%20the%20Hills%20and %20Hollers%3A%20THE%20SILENCE%20OF%20THE%20LAMBS,Tiffany%20Arnold&text=Jodie %20Foster%20stars%20as%20FBI,of%20an%20emerging%20serial%20killer.
https://listofdeaths.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mountain_Man
After another barbed wire murder, the “feud” heats up. Meanwhile the real “mountain monster,” is pictured back at his rural shack with an older woman, clearly deceased, strapped to a crude butchering table. He plunges a knife into her, draining her blood while whimpering “oh mama,” later preserving her in salt. This scene leans heavily into the infantile mountain monster: inhumane strength, capable of heinous acts of violence, and emotionally child-like with taboo connections to his mother. While the investigators chase down a false lead, Cissy is kidnapped from her home by the “mountain man” and brought to his shack where he reveals that he is the son she abandoned as a 16-year old. The full story is finally revealed: Malachi Lee and Cissy Howard were siblings who regularly escaped to that same shack in the woods, where a local woman would watch them having sex. After Cissy became pregnant, Malachi abandoned her while the local woman (the ominous “you” in the flashback at the start of the episode) helped facilitate the birth in exchange for the child. When the mountain man’s voyeuristic, adoptive mother died from cancer, he made the decision to go on a homicidal revenge rampage, killing the children of Malachi and Cissy with crude barbed wire weapons. Cissy is rescued and, as she and Malachi walk out of the police station, they’re confronted by an angry mob of Lees and Howards, demanding to know what secrets they’ve been hiding. The episode ends with a blazer-clad urban couple entering a rural vacation cabin. The woman comments, “This place is certainly out of the way” to which her partner responds, “You are gonna love it. No one is gonna bother us. No phones. No Internet.” Just as they get settled in, the mountain man emerges from the shadows, fashioning a barbed wire noose around the man and threatening “you have three seconds to give me the keys to your car,” before the episode fades to black. The mountain monster is clearly still at-large, his bloodthirst alive and well.
“Blood Relations,” draws from nearly every violent Applachian trope in existence: incest, teenage pregnancy, physical deformities, feuding, unhealthy matriarchal devotion, ignorance, and more. Viewers were clearly able to identify “Home” as the inspiration behind the plot, evident by a selection of public reviews featured on the popular media website,IMDb:
“Blood relation" feel [sic] like an X files episode all the way, of course its not as good as the legendary show from the 90's. But this is one of the best episode from Season 9 and definitively a top 50 criminals Minds episode.”
“Would've been an 8 or a 9 if it wasn't so similar to one of the best and most disturbing xfiles episodes 'home'.”
Others took issue with the many stereotypes peppered throughout the episode:
“As a proud Wheeling, WV native I am offended by this episode of Criminal Minds. It is absurd to assume people of West Virginia behave this way. I understand this is just a TV show and for some reason West Virginia is blessed with this reputation of incest, moonshiners, and backwood hicks with no education, but when does it end?”
“Apparently none of the writers have been to Wheeling, because nobody talks like this. It's a big town only about an hour and a half away from Pittsburgh, PA where I live, and
it's not like in the middle of the sticks filled with hillbillies like apparently the CM team thinks it is lol. Very skippable episode.”215
As previously discussed, incest rates were not remarkable in Appalachia. Furthermore, whatever murderous blood feuds actually existed were artifacts from the 20th century. Despite this, the show's creatives ran with the theme, adding yet another example of hillbilly horror to the pop culture canon.
THE FARRELL FAMILY AND JUSTIFIED
In 2016 the WGN network premiered their new drama Outsiders, which ran for two seasons and follows the “Farrell clan” as they make efforts, by any means necessary, to protect their remote, mountain way of life. Located in the fictional town of Blackburg (Crockett County), Kentucky, the show highlights the primitive ways of the isolated Appalachian “clan.” From executive producer Peter Tolan: “In creating the world, we wanted to make sure that they were a noble people and that they lived by certain rules that they followed carefully. We’re talking about a world that’s in danger of being eradicated, so we wanted to make sure it was a world worth saving… It’s not that they’re savages on a hill, or drunks—there’s an actual working structure—that’s worked for over 200 years.”216 While Tolan argued he was careful not to embrace the “hillbilly fool” characterization seen in comics like The Mountain Boys, producers spared no violence or sensationalism throughout the show’s short run. From reviewer June Thomas:
“Judging from the five episodes I’ve seen, Outsiders’ producers are determined to squeeze at least one high-impact fight scene (Episode 2’s involved two Farrells jousting on all-terrain vehicles) and as many stomach-churning acts of carnage as possible into every hour. (In the pilot alone, Big Foster punishes a disobedient member of the clan by amputating two fingers with an ax, and a moonshine-addled teenager sticks a kitchen knife in his father’s neck.). I’m sure that’s an effective way to draw thrill-seeking viewers to a new show, but I can’t be the only person turned off by all that gore.”217
215 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/movies/blair-witch-project-1999.html 216 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40934148 217 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40934027
https://deadline.com/2017/04/outsiders-canceled-wgn-america-2-seasons-1202070195/
The central plot of the show follows a large coal company’s attempt to evict the over 200-year old occupation of a local mountain via reluctant local law enforcement. Meanwhile, there is infighting among the succession plan for the Ferralls’ matriarch, Lady Ray (yet another overbearing Appalachian matriarch). The opening credits feature a montage of the moonshine making process, superimposed over scenes of rustic interiors and animal pelts. In the pilot episode, “Farrell Wine,” Asa, having abandoned the clan for urban exposure, returns to the mountain and is quickly punished for his betrayal. His “family” locks him in a cage for months on end while they continue producing their special brand of moonshine. The Farrell clan cannot read, they don’t deal in money, and their dress evokes familiarity to the pelts and teeth of the cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes. Season one outlines a turbulent reckoning between “town” and “tradition” where the Farrells are just that–feral. Ron Rash, an award winning Appalachian writer doesn’t hold back in his review for Appalachian Voices:
“There is no need to worry about any instances of micro-aggressions in this show. Five minutes into the premiere, we are assured that these mountain folks are nothing but a bunch of incestuous ‘retard hillbilly animals,’ which the next scene confirms. We meet the Farrells at a clan-wide hoedown where everyone is at least a cousin and hell-bent on keeping it that way, openly fornicating when not swilling moonshine or brawling. No stereotype is overlooked: everyone is illiterate except for one heretic who left for some book-larning; Indoor plumbing? Are you kidding, these folks don’t have electricity except for a generator, whose sole purpose appears to be powering a screeching electric guitar. Otherwise, it’s candles and wood stoves. In the first three episodes, we get hexings, attempted matricide, fingers chopped off for violating tribal law, a Viking-like raid of the local Wal-Mart, and language that makes the bad guys in Deliverance sound
like Rhodes Scholars. No one plants anything but marijuana and the only hunting is for ‘furrinurs’ unlucky enough to get these folks riled up. So where does the food come from? I’m expecting a later episode to reveal why Ferrell and cannibal sound so similar.”218
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/arts/television/tv-review-outsiders-wgn.html
While Rash draws the parallel to Deliverance, most looked to Sopranos, or Sons of Anarchy, as more apt comparisons. The secluded clan with their own rules, and repeated violent reckonings serve as the thru-line, more than mountain monster tropes; however Outsiders did nothing to quell anxieties about Kentucky’s (or any area in Appalachia’s) ability to modernize and embrace progress. Additionally it leaned on prior sensationalized tropes of Appalachians as opposed to the “Celtic” roots they claimed they wanted to showcase. G’Win Farrell, played by Gillian Alexy and “Lady Ray,” played by Phyllis Somerville act as the perfect Daisy Duke/Mamaw figures. Their use of cages and violent punishments harken back to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre New York Times reviewer Mike Hale writes, “The show’s real models would seem to be ‘Justified,’ whose characters and Appalachian regional flavor show up in refracted form; ‘Game of Thrones,’ whose pomp and mysticism have been transferred from the fictional Westeros to actual Kentucky in sometimes hilarious ways; and the ‘Mad Max’ movies, whose sartorial and
218 Gregory, Rick. The Bell Witch in Myth and Memory : From Local Legend to International Folktale, University of Tennessee Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30755537.
Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-06-19 15:22:14.
vehicular styles have been adopted wholesale by the reclusive Farrells.”219 He goes on to argue that despite their best efforts, the actors simply cannot make the concept believable; however “the hillbilly vaudeville gives us something to watch and respond to.”220 Outsiders ran for two seasons before it was cancelled.
JUSTIFIED AND APPALACHIA AS THE WILD WEST
The comparison of WGN’s Outsiders and FX’s Justified is an apt one, though the show’s executives took starkly different approaches with their construction of the “Appalachian” region. Outsiders is focused on untamed wilderness and deliberate nods toward the “noble savage,” (one who remains uncorrupted by the spoils of civilization, often applied to indigenous populations) while Justified projects America’s love of Westerns onto an Appalachian landscape. Westerns have powerful themes that have continued to resonate with American audiences. Andrew Patrick Nelson, chair of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah writes, “In popular culture, the American West has long functioned as a mythical space where people are able to imagine themselves leading alternative, more authentic and exciting lives.”221 Since the early 20th century there has been overlap in the visual aesthetic and perception of cowboys and “hillbillies.” This could, in part, be explained through the country music industry, where there was much overlap between the west “frontier” and the mountain “frontier” of Appalachia.
Anthony Harkins writes, “Despite the examples of the upstate New York string bands, by the mid-1930s, the vast majority of country music performers and supporters sought a new image that did not carry the increasingly negative connotations of the term hillbilly and the image of the mountaineer. [...] Several related factors underlay the abandonment of the ‘hillbilly’ look and the widespread adoption of cowboy imagery in the mid- to late 1930s: ten-gallon hats, chaps, and pointed boots offered far greater romantic possibilities than did the traditional mountaineer costume.”222
219 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/movies/blair-witch-project-1999.html
220 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/movies/blair-witch-project-1999.html
221 Wrong Turn 2003
222
https://www.tvguide.com/news/justified-on-hulu-streaming-fx/
No one embodied the hillbilly cowboy persona better than Justified’s leading man, Raylan Givens (played by Timothy Oliphant). The pilot episode, “Fire in the Hole,” premiered in 2010 and was based on a novella by prolific crime fiction writer, Elmore Leonard, written in 2001. Givens is a Deputy U.S. Marshal tracking a powerful crime boss in Miami and, after winning a very public “draw”, is sent back to his hometown of Harlan, Kentucky to complete his penance. Givens is nearly always pictured with his off-white Stetson hat, a perfect foil to the black attire of his neo-nazi nemesis, Boyd Crowder (played by Walton Goggins). If the shootout wasn’t enough evidence, there are endless examples showcasing the producers’ intention to construct a modern-day western onto the Appalachian region. Historian James S. Greene III of Harlan County Independent schools writes, “it would be nice if the show was more authentic. But shows based in Hawaii, New York or Miami don't portray those places exactly as they are, either. It's not supposed to be a literal interpretation of Harlan.”223 Less than ten minutes into the pilot episode, viewers see the Sheriff’s office in Harlan County with a large poster of the popular western Tombstone displayed behind his desk. In the second episode a group of criminals go searching for hidden “loot,” digging by the light of a lantern. Even the description provided via the streaming platform Hulu, has the following as its pilot episode description, “Gunslinging U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens faces off against his oldest friend in Harlan, Kentucky, a 21st Century Wild West.”224 While Justified showcases its share of violence, it was received infinitely better than Outsiders from locals. In an article, updated in 2015 for Lexington’s The Herald Leader,
223 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1g0b9f4.17
224 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1g0b9f4.17
Jackie Cornett, host of the WTUK radio station said "You'll find that most people here like it."225 President of the Harlan County Chamber of Commerce, Mark Bell, said their office will get phone calls asking if the county is really like it's Hollywood counterpart. “It's a whole lot more like Mayberry than Justified,” Bell said.”226
This new construction of Appalachia coincided nicely with a larger resurgence of interest in the American western. From AMC “The popularity of westerns has waxed and waned over the years. Their most prolific era was in the 1930s to the 1960s, and most recently in the 90s, there was a resurgence of the genre. They appear to be making an invigorating comeback (both on the TV screen and in theatres). Modern movie remakes, such as 3:10 To Yuma (2007) and the Coen Brothers' True Grit (2010) have also paid homage to their mid-20th century predecessors.”227 It makes sense that producers had great source material in Leonard’s books, along with clear interest in resurrecting what viewers love about Westerns; however if audiences were curious about why Harlan County was chosen as the backdrop, the union conflicts of the 1930s may provide some explanation. As previously discussed, many Appalachian towns were essentially monopolized by coal companies throughout the 20th century and Harlan County was no exception, with only three of its incorporated towns not owned and operated by the large coal barons.228 When miners’ salaries were cut, protests erupted, launching one of the longest and most violent labor disputes in history. “Throughout the decade, the Harlan County War persisted with lockouts, walkouts, strikes, executions, and bombings as both sides struggled-miners to unionize, management to shut down attempts at unionizing. Union gatherings were tear-gassed, company men were ambushed in their cars by miners, and strikers were pulled out of lines and beaten.”229 The conflict would come to be known as “Bloody Harlan,” a perfect backdrop for a contemporary western.
225https://www.salon.com/2018/05/25/hillbilly-horror-reckoning-with-a-genre-15-years-after-wrongturn_partner/
226https://www.salon.com/2018/05/25/hillbilly-horror-reckoning-with-a-genre-15-years-after-wrongturn_partner/
227 https://www.deseret.com/2004/8/26/19847175/abercrombie-fitch-takes-another-jab-at-west-virginia/
228https://www.salon.com/2018/05/25/hillbilly-horror-reckoning-with-a-genre-15-years-after-wrongturn_partner/
229 https://www.dreadcentral.com/interviews/3370/marshall-neil-the-descent/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcuv06y3nOw
There was some outcry related to accuracy lodged against the show throughout season one, which was filmed in California. To rectify this, executives from FX sent scouts down to Harlan County to better understand the criticisms and address them, where possible.230 The characters’ drive from Harlan County to Lexington for instance, no longer took only a few minutes (in actuality this takes a few hours). Even so, some classic Appalachian media tropes worked their way into the show including a blonde Daisy Duke character, Ava (played by Joelle Carter) who in the pilot, upon seeing Givens after years apart, quickly kisses him. This scene echoes a 1952 episode of My Hero entitled “Hillbilly,” when an urban real estate agent (played by Robert Cummings), gets thrust into a mountain feud and the scantily clad “Daisy Duke” character, Lulubelle Hatfield, immediately draws him into a kiss.231 In season two, we see the “mountain matriarch” emerge with the character of Mags Bennett, played by Margo Martindale. In a 2011 interview with NPR entitled “Margo Martindale: A ‘Justified’ Backwoods Matriarch,” host Terry Gross discusses a scene wherein “Mags” uses a hammer to smash one of her son’s hands: “It's such an amazing scene. And, I mean, you're playing it both ways, like you're the loving mother who has to do this, as if you're about to spank your baby, but you're about break his - every finger in his hand with a hammer. But you're nice enough to spare his gun hand.”232
Justified lasted for six seasons and maintained a positive reception throughout.233 Though it contributed to the construction of Appalachia, producers balanced out the hillbilly horror tropes with contemporary western motifs to make it palatable and entertaining for locals and outsiders alike. In an article detailing the final episode, which collected a viewership of nearly 2.4 million people, writer Anthony D’Alessandro summarizes: “And then Justified, which
230https://www.dreadcentral.com/editorials/447113/down-south-where-the-devil-wont-stay-aretrospective-of-the-2003-hillbilly-horror-revival/
231 Baichwal
232 Brislin, Chelsea L., "STRANGERS WITH CAMERAS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF APPALACHIAN REPRESENTATION IN POP CULTURE" (2017). Theses and Dissertations--English. 59. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/59
233 Baichwal
has been awash with episodic shootouts, double-crossing characters and bullets through characters’ chests, ended on a poignant note as two fierce enemies — former teenage coalmining friends — looked each other in the eye and essentially made peace.”234
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS AND THE BLAIR WITCH
Horror films of the 1990s and early 2000s saw several slasher sequels and remakes. Despite Roger Ebert’s objections, “dead teenager” genre was thriving, though there were a handful of original horror classics that premiered during these decades. 1991 brought the introduction of one of horror’s most beloved villains, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). The film, based on a 1988 book by Thomas Harris, follows West Virginia FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) as she probes into the demented psychology of Lecter in order to capture a similarly psychotic serial killer, known as “Buffalo Bill.” The film earned universal praise including seven Academy Award nominations, winning in both the best actor and best actress categories for Hopkins and Foster respectively. The Buffalo Bill character was inspired by none other than Ed Gein, evident by their shared propensity for making “skin suits” from their victims, among other things. One of the lasting legacies from the film however, is the move away from the hillbilly as the “mountain monster.” Throughout the film, the “hillbilly” is unmistakably intended to be Starling. As one point Lecter remarks:
You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition's given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? You know how quickly the boys found you... all those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars... while you could only dream of getting out... getting anywhere... getting all the way to the FBI.”235
He begins to mimic a rural accent toward the end of his scathing diatribe, illustrating his disdain for her upbringing. Rather than retreating, Starling responds, “You see a lot, Doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself?”236 This scene was an important subversion of the mountain monster trope. The less experienced, economically disadvantaged, “rube” is the one tracking the highly educated, “cultured” doctor, who in turn, is the real monster. She is neither the Mamaw, nor the Daisy Duke, as she is both unattached and childless. Starling is not enacting agency through the men around her, but rather outsmarting them at nearly every turn. Rather than an urban individual invading her rural domain, she is invading his, peeling back layers of his monstrousness. Furthermore, whereas the rural mountain monsters are often “trapped” by their circumstances and are therefore required to lure in unsuspecting urbanites, in Silence of the Lambs, Lecter is the one who is trapped. She has the privilege of movement, whereas he is contained in a high security prison, trying his best to lay traps for her, even behind bars just as the mountain monster would. Dr. Tiffany Arnold writes, “Not only has it been recognized as one of the best films of all-time, the character of Clarice Starling (as portrayed by Foster) has been ranked as the ‘greatest heroine in film history’
234
235 Baichwal
236 https://walkyourcamera.com/looking-at-appalachia-shelby-lee-adams-part-one/
by the American Film Institute: Foster expertly conveys Starling’s back-story as a young woman with roots in rural West Virginia, showing that a person from Appalachia is capable of overcoming insurmountable odds.”237 Buffalo Bill turns out to be a man living in Ohio and, while one might cast him as the hillbilly monster, that is significantly more difficult when there’s such emphasis on Clarice as the rural interloper. Additionally, he doesn’t embrace much of the hillbilly trope, either in his dress or his environment. He lives in a neighborhood, not an abandoned farmhouse. He has a small fluffy dog “Precious” (played by Darla), not a pen of pigs. In short, the legacy of Silence of the Lambs remains the heroism of a West Virginian woman, not a cannibalistic hillbilly.
https://screenrant.com/best-silence-of-the-lambs-quotes-hannibal-lecter/ Arguably the strongest horror legacy to emerge from the decade came in 1999 with the release of The Blair Witch Project, which used a combination of strategic marketing and a “found footage” style of filming to instill a whole new brand of fear in audiences. The film, inspired by an Italian thriller from 1980 titled Cannibal Holocaust, follows three young filmmakers as they’re “on location” in a small Maryland town to collect local lore around the infamous “Blair Witch.”238 While Maryland barely squeaks into the Regional Commission’s map, there are important connections to the larger Appalachian region. Douglas Reichert Powell, in his article “Truth or Consequences: ‘The Blair Witch Project’, ‘Stranger with a Camera,’ and Regional Cultural Politics writes”
“The Blair Witch Project in many ways centers on, is fueled by,a body of stereotypical images and ideas about the Appalachian region (here, western Maryland) and mountain landscapes more generally that should be painfully familiar for most folks interested in Appalachian culture. It is not difficult to link the ‘city-folk-get-in-big-trouble-in-the-hills’ motif to the ur-text of Appalachian stereotyping, John Boorman's 1972 film version of James Dickey's novel Deliverance. In fact, the Blair Witch characters mention
237 Baichwal
238 https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/shelby-lee-adams
Deliverance specifically at (at least) one point in the story, comparing their plight to that of Ned Beatty and company.”239
In a different article, Reichert Powell goes on to make several apt comparisons, “In structure, The Blair Witch Project duplicates Deliverance (1972), The Evil Dead (1983), and Pumpkinhead (1988): arrogant urbanités go beyond where the pavement ends in a prideful attempt to use the wilderness to pump up their own egos. Instead, the uneven ground of the wilderness unmoors the interlopers from any logic or surety. Chaos and destruction follow.”240
The focus of the fictional filmmaker’s project, the gruesome “Blair Witch,” is inspired by the Bell Witch, a folktale out of Tennessee from the early 19th century. The legend goes that the Bell family began to experience strange happenings on their Tennessee farm. Sightings of odd animals, strange voices, and visions all began to warp the family’s perception of reality. Concern only grew when the frightful encounters turned violent. From Rich Gregory, author of The Bell Witch in Myth and Memory: From Local Legend to International Folktale, “The Spirit never gave a clear explanation for why she haunted the family, but it became clear that it hated John Bell and Betsy. The torture began in 1817 and continued until his death in 1820.”241 In addition to leaning into a well known Appalachian legend, the real Blair Witch filmmakers, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick capitalized on another of the consistent advantages of the horror genre: affordability. The entire film, which grossed $248.6 million dollars at the box office, was produced for only $60,000.242 The filmmakers were keenly aware of the power behind what is unseen, often even more frightening than what is pictured. Just as the mountain monsters are often shown in pieces–illuminated by a flash of lightning, or one ominous eye peeking out from behind a hemlock–the titular Witch is never actually shown in the film. This not only saved money, but it simultaneously led moviegoers to imagine the horrifying image she must occupy. Subsequent attempts at similar styles of horror didn’t quite live up to the initial thrill of The Blair Witch Project, in part due to the rapidly changing landscape of shareable media. Jake KringSchreifels writes in the New York Times: “In some ways, ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ with its blurring of fact and fiction, helped create that very media landscape that would preclude its viral success today.”243
WRONG TURN
Earlier in this chapter, the X-Files episode “Home”, along with 2003’s Wrong Turn, were identified as potential bookends for Deliverance and the evolution of the mountain monster trope. While there continue to be varied iterations of the genre in subsequent media portrayals, none capture the peak of hillbilly horror representation quite like these two case studies. Wrong Turn, in particular, launched a franchise of films that combined the “dead teenager” slasher flicks of the 1990s with the mountain monster trope popularized in the 70s and 80s. Director Rob Schmidt arguably takes the mountain monster as far as it can go while remaining recognizably “human.” The film opens in the dense woods of rural West Virginia, as a couple ascends a rock face (presumably a nod to the famous climb Jon Voigt’s character makes in
239 Baichwal
240 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40933780
241 https://appvoices.org/2014/02/07/whitewashing-reality-diversity-in-appalachia-2/
242 https://wvpublic.org/a-tennessee-photographers-guttural-photos-of-appalachia/
243 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/04/12/u-s-journal-jeremiah-ky-a-stranger-with-a-camera
Deliverance). After her climbing partner is inexplicably murdered at the summit of the cliff face, the young woman rapidly descends while her unknown perpetrator stalks her, leaping from tree to tree with ease. Despite her car being within feet, she is brought down by a barbed trip-wire and dragged to her death. The film then cuts to the opening credits: a series of menacing images and macabre headlines about deviants in West Virginia. There are images of isolated cabins and portraits of deformed Appalachians to “set the scene” for what is to come in the rural backwoods.
The film picks up in modern day “Greenbrier Backcountry, West Virginia” where viewers follow Chris Flynn (Desmond Harrington) as he drives the rural, windy roads. After becoming caught in a line of stopped vehicles, Chris gets a “dressing down” from a local truck driver who advises him to “fix his hair a couple more hundred times.”244 Less than ten minutes into the film, Chris has been firmly established as the naive, urban outsider, provoking the hostility of the rural “locals.” Chris makes his way to a decrepit gas station, reminiscent of The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance, though unlike the film’s predecessors he is neither rude or condescending toward the lone man working there. Nonetheless, the attendant utters a grave warning about the direction he’s headed only after Chris’ car has pulled away. He proceeds down a dirt road before crashing into the back of a stalled SUV, leaving him stranded with a group of five young adults whose tires were blown out by barbed wire. The group splits up to seek help with Francine (Lindy Booth) and Evan (Kevin Zegers) agreeing to stay behind with the car. If one were to assign Butterworth’s assessment of the Deliverance characters to their 2003 equivalents, Francine and Evan would certainly be the “Id” or, the “Bobby” character. The couple is selfish, sensation seeking, irreverent, and wholly unsuited for the grit required to survive the untamed wilderness. As with the 1972 classic, this behavior targets them as the first victims. After momentarily losing sight of Evan, Francine stumbles upon his dismembered ear before being captured from behind by a monstrous pair of arms.
https://screenrant.com/wrong-turn-movies-cannibal-family-different-last-names-reason/
244 Stranger with a camera
Chris, Jessie (Eliza Dushku), Carly (Emannuelle Chriqui), and Scott (Jeremy Sisto) finally reach a run-down cabin on their scouting mission, littered with abandoned cars. As the group contemplates breaking into the cabin, Scott makes the first direct Deliverance reference. Arguing against entering the ominous property he remarks, “Well, I need to remind you of a little movie called Deliverance.”245 The cabin has the signature hallmarks one would expect of hillbilly horror: a hybrid indoor/outdoor space, spoiled food, rudimentary remnants of past decades (in this case a record player), and crude instruments like a meat skewer and a machete. In addition, they find souvenirs that suggest ominous dealings including a toy crown, child’s music box, jars of teeth, and multiple sets of keys. This scene is an ideal use of the uncanny by producers. Many of these objects would bring pleasure or entertainment within their normal context, yet they generate unease from the characters and, in turn, the viewers because they shouldn’t be present in a remote West Virginia cabin. Their newly stoked fear prompts the group to abandon the cabin; however they’re forced to hide as the occupants return with Francine’s dead body, which they begin dismembering. It is here that audiences get their first look at the mountain monsters: three, horribly disfigured men. They communicate primarily through grunts and hissing, wailing and shrieking with delight as they cut apart the young woman’s body. The scene has the same frenetic energy as when the Peacock brothers descended on the decapitated body of the Deputy in “Home.” In subsequent films the men are identified as brothers: Three Finger (Julian Richings), One Eye (Ted Clark) and Saw Tooth (Garry Robbins). Exhausted by their efforts, the monsters fall asleep, allowing the four characters to narrowly escape.
During the chaotic altercation, Scott is killed by one of the brothers via a bow and arrow, while the three remaining urbanites flee to a fire tower, where they assess the full scope of their isolation. Finding they are nowhere near any sign of civilization, they prepare for a final showdown with the monsters. The brothers set fire to the tower forcing Carly, Jessie, and Chris to escape to the trees where Carly is decapitated by an Axe, again bearing striking similarities to the death of the deputy in “Home.” Jessie and Chris tap into their more “primitive instincts” using a branch to knock one of the men onto the ground below. After a failed rescue from law enforcement, Chris manages to rescue Jessie from the brothers’ cabin, but before escaping back into civilization, he makes a final stop. Limping out of the mountain monsters’ stolen truck, he rips the map he used to route his detour off of the gas station wall, before driving out of West Virginia on the same winding pathway he entered. Similar to Jon Voigt’s character in Deliverance, Chris and Jessie were able to revert to their more ruthless, animalistic selves in order to defeat the mountain monsters–the transformation symbolized through the decision to have them driving out of the region with the monsters’ antique truck as opposed to the fancy “urban” vehicles they originally had.
Seven films have been developed within the Wrong Turn franchise. In Wrong Turn 2: Dead End we are introduced to a matriarch who is seen giving birth to a deformed baby–a clear nod to 1996’s X-Files. Interestingly, there is also new context given to the rural mutants–summarized by Emily Satterwhite in her chapter, The Politics of Hillbilly Horror:
“In Wrong Turn 2, we learn that the cannibals are products of environmental injustice. They are figured less as products of inbreeding due to isolation in the wilderness (as implied in the first Wrong Turn) and more as victims of a toxic post-industrial landscape.
245 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/04/12/u-s-journal-jeremiah-ky-a-stranger-with-a-camera
As one reviewer explains, Wrong Turn 2 informs us that ‘an abandoned pulp mill released chemical wastes on the creek, killing the animals and transforming the descendants of a local family in[to] deformed mutants. Without animals to hunt or fish to catch, the next generation chases travelers to feed themselves.”246 Satterwhite writes that, when a film highlights, by way of explanation, “the realities of uneven economic development and environmental injustice” it is a way of the rural talking back. In other words, monsters like those of the Wrong Turn franchise can be seen as both a resistance to and exclusion from, urban progress. While the decision to include the monsters’ “origin story” took the franchise in a different direction, the intention of the first film would be difficult to mistake. The assemblage of images and headlines throughout the opening credits showcase inbreeding, videos of cells mutating, and portraits of deformed people. These visual clues imply that, at least to director Rob Schmidt, the hillbillies were acting according to their own agency and were not victims of anything other than their own brutality and deviance. Building on Satterwhite’s assertion, scholar Carol Mason writes:
“As Rebecca Scott’s and Emily Satterwhite’s recent analyses of slasher films set in Appalachia suggest, current popular culture portrays mountaineers as monsters whose sexual deviance and racial ambiguity are tied up with lapses in evolution as well as overexposure to toxic messes. Derived from Deliverance’s banjo-picking albino boy, the weirdly white grotesques of Wrong Turn and The Descent have mutated into a horrific version of mountaineers who perpetually suffer the inadequacies of living a backward life. Shifting from the usual depiction of helpless Appalachians whom viewers are called on to pity rather than save from ‘the environmental and economic costs of coal,’ movies present Appalachians as horrific predators from whom viewers need to be saved.247 Upon its release, Wrong Turn grossed nearly $29 million dollars at the box office.248 In a 2018 article Elizabeth Price writes, “In Wrong Turn, the recesses of a wealthy nation’s imagination envisions unseen poverty as a nightmarescape in which a storied history of neglect makes cannibals of people who live in exiled cabin slums.”249 Price goes on to identify additional legacies from the film including yet another cheeky tagline from Abercrombie and Fitch: a shirt that reads “West Virginia: No Lifeguard at the Gene Pool.”250 She goes on to outline subsequent, casting calls, not unlike the scouting trips made in preparation for Deliverance: “During the 2008 production process of ‘Shelter,’ casting director Donna Belajac posted a casting call searching for actors with physical abnormalities to extra in a scene set in a ‘West Virginia holler.’ The call beckoned responses from extras with the features ‘Extraordinarily tall or short. Unusual body shapes, even physical abnormalities as long as there is normal mobility. Unusual facial features, especially eyes.’ In response to public disapproval, Belajac told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, ‘I hope it’s not an offensive thing. It’s not meant to be a generalization about everyone in West Virginia. That’s why we put that it’s in a ‘holler’ in the mountains.’ Belajac was fired.”251
246 Children of the mountains
247 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jappastud.22.1.0136
248 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2622774/
249 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/10/former-harvard-fellow-discusses-dopesickadaptation/
250 Radden Keefe EMpire of Pain
The latest installation in the Wrong Turn franchise came in 2021, and while the deformities of the “locals” disappear, the brutality, trapping, and ruthless frontier “justice” are still very much present. Another important legacy of Wrong Turn is the combination of the “dead teenager” slasher, the “final girl” trope, and the hillbilly horror genre. While there had been some overlap among these horror approaches, rural horror didn’t always feature teenagers in the way that other blockbuster slashers had (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Final Destination, for example). Schmidt married these horror motifs together, cementing them in a way that capitalized off of all three’s immense popularity.
Wrong Turn wasn’t the only hillbilly horror installment of the early 2000s worth noting. Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses also premiered in 2003 and follows a group of college students who, at a rural gas station in Texas, become ensnared by the “Fireflys,” a depraved, rural family of sadistic killers. Brant Lewis writes for the popular horror website Dread Central, “Even if the main three Firefly villains in House of 1000 Corpses look relatively human, their monstrosity lies in their murderous and torturous nature. They gleefully torment, mutilate, and violate their victims before sacrificing them in a ritual. The rural Southerners become vilified and only exist to murder the victims in the narratives, contrasting with the civilized protagonists.”252 2005 delivered a new take on the rural nightmare in the form of The Descent by Neil Marshall. This film follows a group of young adults as they go on a spelunking excursion in North Carolina. After becoming trapped in the cave system, they are hunted by terrifying, humanoid creatures that navigate the foreign environment with ease. In an interview from 2006 Marshall comments on the opening scene of the film: a white water rafting trip. “It was an homage to Deliverance, which is one of my favorite films of all time and a huge inspiration for this film.”253 Pop culture has no shortage of “homages” to Deliverance, which is why the damage of that film to the reputation of Appalachia cannot be overstated. While films that follow the hillbilly horror trope have rarely reached the level of critical acclaim as their stated inspiration, they remain popular with audiences thanks to their formulaic plots and creative violence. In the 1990s and early 2000s however, pop culture media was about to turn its attention to a new medium of hillbilly exposure: reality TV.
CHAPTER 7: THE REAL APPALACHIA: PODCASTS, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND REALITY TV
SHELBY LEE ADAMS AND APPALACHIAN PHOTOGRAPHY
Before outlining the many iterations of reality TV and its connection to the hillbilly horror genre, it is important to outline what had been developing in the realm of nonfiction Appalachia representation since the War on Poverty. While the American public hadn’t seen that scale of documentary images from the region since the 1970s, there were attempts at capturing the
251https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/16/amerisourcebergen-pillbillies-emails-westvirginia-opioid-trial-
252https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/16/amerisourcebergen-pillbillies-emails-westvirginia-opioid-trial-
253https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10349683/#:~:text=The%20average%20number%20of %20deaths,132%20(470)%20in%202021.
ongoing poverty present in the hollers of the Appalachian mountains. Shelby Lee Adams selfidentifies as an “environmental portrait photographer” and has been photographing Appalachian families in Southeastern Kentucky for decades. His highly contrasted, black and white photos prompt strong reactions from viewers, with many accusing him of exploitation and trafficking in “poverty porn.” In 2002 Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal directed a documentary entitled, “The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia” where she filmed his process and interviewed locals, art critics, and his subjects themselves. Her final product paints a complicated picture of the work Adams is producing. Many of Adams’ subjects find his representations to be beautiful and important. One of his subjects, Corrine Zabala, says “It's just showing how people in Kentucky really live. ‘Cause it's not easy, it's not hard. It's how you make a life. But there’s a lot of people that is having it real hard here. Real hard. But you know it's just like I said...it's just the true meaning of pictures to me.”254 Others however, feel Adams is disingenuous with his intentions. While he was born in Hazard, Kentucky, he grew up significantly more economically privileged than his subjects, and spent much of his time away from the area. From Strangers with Cameras: The Consequences of Appalachian Representation in Pop Culture:
“[...] Shelby Lee Adams’ subject matter is not inherently controversial or exploitative, nor is his position as a pseudo-insider to the Appalachian culture. Rather, and unlike the aforementioned Appalachian writers, it is Adams’s handling of the photographic process which unnecessarily reinforces the exaggerated stereotype of Appalachian culture, thus inhibiting a compassionate response from audiences, prompting instead pity and even at times disgust for the subjects. Adams’s choice of lighting, his photographic mise-enscene, and his use of black and white significantly alters the feel of the resulting work. It is these deliberate, aesthetic choices within his methodology that make his final products and his attempt at cultural representation particularly problematic for Appalachian audiences and critics.255
254 https://www.vox.com/culture/23950767/pain-hustlers-sackler-dopesick-usher-opioid-epidemic 255https://www.statnews.com/2023/10/31/fall-of-the-house-of-usher-netflix-sacklers-oxycontin-opioidcrisis-horror/
https://whitney.org/collection/works/18563
Adams’ large body of work is compiled into five books published between 1993 and 2023, which include several images that remain highly controversial and arguably capitalize on the mountain monster trope. One example can be seen in Melissa and Brice, Johnson’s Fork from 1978, currently owned by The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The image showcases Adams’ distinct style: black and white with deep contrast. He includes his characteristic frame division, in this case accomplished through the edge of the screen door which cuts down the middle of the tableau. Baichwal interviewed Louise Hall for the documentary, whose sister is the figure in the foreground of the photo. Hall takes issue with Adams’ stated intention, telling filmmakers, “I’ve been very poor before, but I’ve worked my way up. And I'm so glad that no one came along and took pictures of me and showed them all over the United States.[...] Shelby says in his articles ‘I would like to bring honor back to Eastern Kentucky,’ but how can you bring honor back to Eastern Kentucky with this? With this?[...] He has disgraced our family”256 In response, Adams argues, “It's a positive picture. The girl’s a beautiful little girl, she’s in beautiful light. It's a classic, triangular composition and we have a smiling man in the background with a clean white wall. That’s how I see it.”257 Of course those familiar with the mountain monster would see, to use Hall’s description, a “sinister” lens to the photograph. The smile Adams identifies from the man standing along the back wall could easily
256 Netflix episode 8 257 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23414952
be mistaken for leering. His squinted eyes and prominent teeth could be interpreted as signs of inbreeding. The girl, leaning forward through a door frame could be viewed as an innocent, unaware victim of his potential depravities. While this assessment wouldn’t be fair to either subject, without proper context such a narrative likely would populate in the minds of some viewers thanks to hillbilly horror’s many pop culture iterations.
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/the-hog-killing
By Francis Bacon (painter) -
http://www.allthingsbeautiful.com/all_things_beautiful/images/unsfinemen_1.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23218265
The Hog Killing from 1990 is another example of Adams’ intentions potentially gone awry. The photograph is a landscape shot of the Napiers, a family that Adams worked with consistently for many years. The subjects are positioned around the carcass of a dead hog, with its head in a bucket near the foreground. The image is controversial for many reasons, foremost being that this hog was bought for the sole purpose of capturing the photograph.258 This is where Adams’ distinction of “environmental portrait photographer” from documentary photographer becomes important. He does not deny that, at least to some degree, he stages his photographs; however curating an entire experience this family would not have had without his intervention raises questions about the perceived authenticity of the images. Those who have seen Baichwal’s documentary would know that this experience was manufactured, but would visitors to New York City’s International Center of Photography? One of the most problematic issues with Adams lies in his style, developed through many years of professional art education and training. In an interview with Appalachian photographer Roger May, Adams writes:
258 Scott, Rebecca R. Journal of Appalachian Studies 16, no. 1/2 (2010): 245–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41446869.
“Everyone assumes I was born a photographer. [...] Artists, not photographers, inspired my beginning search for creative growth. Goya, el Greco, (Francis) Bacon, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Corot, among others – they motivated my artistic pursuits more than photographers.”259 In other words, Adams could be using the setting and subjects of Appalachia to manifest his artistic vision, rather than committing himself to genuine authenticity. One of his stated inspirations is Francis Bacon, and one would find it difficult not to make a comparison between Bacon’s Figure with Meat from 1954 and Adams’ The Hog Killing. Adams takes what Louise Hall sees as a sinister characterization of her family and comments on the “classic triangular composition,” and “an exciting, dramatic lighting event to take advantage of.”260 Adams’ art education training is taking precedence, perhaps even going so far as to motivate certain curatorial decisions. It is possible that Adams’ intention is genuine, just as James Dickey perhaps did care deeply about his environmental manifesto; however viewers who engage with these representations, often shown without proper context, walk away with more confirmation of Appalachia’s homogeneity. The pig head in the bottom of Adams’ photograph brings to mind the Peacock’s homestead. The leering man in the corner might draw viewers back to the cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes, who found the prospect of eating a child delightful. Adams’ work has found significant success in the world of contemporary art. He was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. From his biography at the International Center of Photography: “He is the recipient of a survey grant and photography fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978, 1992), along with an artist support grant four years running from the Polaroid Corporation (1989-92). His photographs are held in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Harvard Fogg Museum in Cambridge, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.”261 As one might suspect, with the exception of his subjects, his pieces have not fared as well regionally. Bill Gorman, the then-mayor of Hazard, Kentucky (Adams’ birthplace) commented in Baichwal’s documentary “I don’t think this is average… I think it’s the kind of thing that sells.”262 Anthropology and Visual Communication professor Jay Ruby expands:
I would also dispute Adams' contention that the people portrayed are part of his ‘heritage’ at all. By his own admission, Adams is middle class, college-educated, and a college professor. Adams did not grow up actively engaged with the poverty he portrays nor the lifestyle that accompanies [...] Adams tends to romanticize when he talks about the work as a way "to renew and relive my childhood" (p. 11) and when he suggests that the culture he portrays ‘resist[s] the modern media culture that surrounds and invades them’ (p. 9). The photographs of men with baseball caps with ads for Budweiser and Mack trucks or young men with Rambo T-shirts suggest more accommodation or
259 WWoWV Dickhouse Productions
260 WWoWV
261 WWoWV
262 Young, Stephen T. 2017. Wild, wonderful, white criminality: Images of "white trash" appalachia. Critical Criminology 25, (1) (03): 103-117, https://go.openathens.net/redirector/uky.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/wildwonderful-white-criminality-images-trash/docview/1867929372/se-2 (accessed June 21, 2025).
adaptation than resistance. One cannot resist something if one is economically excluded from participating in it.”263
Another contemporary example of this pseudo documentary style of exploitation comes from photographer and Youtuber, Mark Laita. Laita was a successful photographer before founding the Youtube channel Soft White Underbelly, which as of 2025 has over 6.5 million subscribers. Laita seeks to take “interviews and portraits of the human condition,” often featuring what he views as marginalized individuals. His website curates a number of gritty black and white thumbnails linking to videos of incest surviors, drug addicted couples, prostitutes, and more. One of Laita’s categories is simply titled “Appalachia.”264 One of his most popular subjects is the Whittaker family from Odd, West Virginia. Laita labels the Whittakers as an “inbred” family, though by his own admission, proof of that is difficult to come by. Despite the lack of context around the family, several members appear to have both physical and intellectual disabilities, with one member unable to communicate verbally at all. The popular podcast channel Appodlachia, which seeks to “help the great region of Appalachia socially distance itself from harmful stereotypes” (2.7k subscribers as of 2025) posted a review of Laita’s exposé on the Whittaker family back in 2020. A small excerpt of the conversation:
Speaker 1: “They have an appearance that is like, stereotypically is associated with incest. We’re not trying to pine one way or another if these people were a product of an incestuous relationship because that’s not really the point.”
Speaker 2: “No, the point is this guy wants them to say it so he can fucking use it as a snippet to get views.”
Speaker 1: “Exactly.”265
The reviewers here point to the underlying issue with Laita’s work–that this real-life family and their respective circumstances should not be offered up as fodder for social media browsing. Aesthetically, Laita curates the Whittakers in a way that would suggest he has at least a passing awareness of the hillbilly horror trope. His title screen offers up an image of three family members, all with clear physical deformities, that look as though they could be stand-ins for the brothers in Wrong Turn or X-Files. In reality, these are real people who, thanks to Laita’s curation, are folded directly into stereotypes of the region.
https://www.softwhiteunderbelly.com/appalachia
263 https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-wild-and-wonderful-whites-of-west-virginia/
264 Young, Stephen T. 2017. Wild, wonderful, white criminality: Images of "white trash" appalachia. Critical Criminology 25, (1) (03): 103-117,
265 WWoWV google reviews
There are countless examples of outsiders, or pseudo-outsiders, coming into Appalachia with the intention of documenting distinct pockets unfamiliar to urban audiences. While the reception to these videos and photographs have the potential to reinforce harmful stereotypes, only the artists themselves can know their true intention. Debates about curatorial decisions often become lost, with only the images remaining. The issue therefore is rarely about one photographer, or one creative vision, but rather an overrepresentation of one type of Appalachia. Despite media evidence indicating otherwise, Appalachia is a diverse region. In an article from 2013, Rachel Ellen Smith writes, “During the past three decades, however, diversity has been increasing throughout the region, particularly in urban areas and university towns. In the 1990s, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for nearly half the region’s population growth, while the Latino population increased by nearly 240 percent.”266 The pockets of poverty are overrepresented in a multitude of ways by photographers like Adams and recent Pulitizer prize winning photographer Stacy Kranitz who, when asked about the difficult nature of her photographs from Appalachia, remarked:
“I’m really interested in the idea of stereotypes. They’re useful for us as humans, right? They help us understand and process what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong. So I began to look at all these different stereotypes that existed in the region. Snake handling churches. I went to a Klan rally, not unique to Appalachia, but certainly a part of rural American, southern life. Then I looked to undo those stereotypes, to look for images that kind of were its opposite. And of course, I found a lot of things.”267
The debate surrounding photography from the Appalachian region is summarized nicely in a case study out of Appalshop, a media depot in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Kentucky native and Guggenheim fellow, Elizabeth Barrett, directed the 2000 documentary film Stranger with a Camera, which follows the murder of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor in 1967 by Appalachian Hobart Ison. The case made national news and was featured in the The New Yorker on April 12, 1969. Calvin Trillin writes, “The poor people being photographed in their squalid shacks cooperated, but the man who owned the property, Hobart Ison, came to chase the filmmakers away. Even though they were leaving, he shot at them, and O'Connor was killed. Eastern Kentucky mountain people have a fierce instinct to protect their property & a distrust of strangers.”268 Barrett does the important job of contextualizing this brutal act, which was little more than reassurance for urban audiences that Appalachians were still feuding, homicidal, “others.” Barrett points to the large influx of photographers at the time who “mined the images the way the companies had mined the coal.”269 She points to the fact that Ison was a landlord and felt a responsibility to the people O’Connor was photographing. While by all accounts, O’Connor did not have malicious intentions, he and his team were a part of a much larger movement of voyeuristic depictions of the area, with little to offer by way of true support or advocacy. This frustration was reflected in the reaction from the region. Trillan writes, “Sympathy for Ison was so great that he had to be tried in nearby Harlan County, where
266 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1396227/reviews/
267 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23414952
268 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1z27j0k.15
269 https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/02/showbiz/tv/inside-buckwild-mtv
sympathy for him was also considerable.”270 Ultimately Ison served a modest jail sentence before being paroled, but the debate around his motivations and whether he was justified in the action he took, is still ongoing.
OPIOIDS AND THE APPALACHIAN GOTHIC
In 2009, Kentucky-born broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer traveled to Appalachia for ABC’s A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains. The opening dialogue rings eerily reminiscent of Kuralt’s Christmas in Appalachia from decades prior, “In the hills of Central Appalachia, up winding mountain roads, is a place where children and families face unthinkable conditions, living without what most Americans take for granted. Isolated pockets in Central Appalachia have three times the national poverty rate, an epidemic of prescription drug abuse, the shortest life span in the nation, toothlessness, cancer, and chronic depression.”271 Sawyer follows four children, all of whom are affected by prescription drug use, whether through their parents or the economic disadvantages present in the region. Appalachian Studies scholar Mary Anglin summarizes the issues present in Sawyer’s representation: “For those of us engaged in Appalachian studies, such approaches—their erasure of social heterogeneity, neglect of political economic context, and disregard for health inequities—have a familiarity and a history dating to the settlement schools and missionizing efforts of the early twentieth century and the media accounts of the century prior.”272 Indeed while Sawyer’s efforts may have been genuine, the documentary did little to effect lasting change in the region and only sensationalized a pervasive issue throughout the region.
Drug addiction has certainly, and perhaps irreparably, become married to contemporary tropes of the Appalachian region. While drunkenness and moonshine always went hand-in-hand with reductive representations, the meteoric rise of opioid prescriptions in the area was a new frontier, beginning in the 1990s with the launch of pain medication Oxycontin. From Art Van Zee’s article in 2008:
Opioid prescribing has had significant geographical variations. In some areas, such as Maine, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and Alabama, from 1998 through 2000, hydrocodone and (non-OxyContin) oxycodone were being prescribed 2.5 to 5.0 times more than the national average. By 2000, these same areas had become high OxyContin-prescribing areas—up to 5 to 6 times higher than the national average in some counties (Table 1).67 These areas, in which OxyContin was highly available, were the first in the nation to witness increasing OxyContin abuse and diversion, which began surfacing in 1999 and 2000.[...] In eastern Kentucky from 1995 to 2001, there was a 500% increase in the number of patients entering methadone maintenance treatment programs, about 75% of whom were OxyContin dependent (Mac Bell, administrator, Narcotics Treatment Programs, Kentucky Division of Substance Abuse, written communication, March 2002). In West Virginia, the first methadone maintenance
270https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2012/12/sen-joe-manchin-asks-mtv-to-reconsider-neww-va-reality-show
271https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/04/02/176055748/buckwild-star-died-of-accidentalcarbon-monoxide-poisoning
272 https://parlorofhorror.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/knockemstiff-book-review/
treatment program opened in August 2000, largely in response to the increasing number of people with OxyContin dependence. By October 2003, West Virginia had 7 methadone maintenance treatment clinics with 3040 patients in treatment (M. Moore, Office of Behavioral Health Services, Office of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, West Virginia, written communication, March 16, 2004).273
Thanks to the work of authors, journalists, researchers, and community members, there is a growing awareness of pharmaceutical companies using misleading, or in some cases outright false, assurances to persuade patients to take the drug, and healthcare providers to prescribe it.274 As Zee points out, opioids were targeted specifically to Appalachia, where physically demanding jobs often leave communities with chronic pain. When asked about the Hulu adaptation of her book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America author Beth Macy told The Harvard Gazette, “Purdue Pharma targeted Appalachia because that region had higher-than-average workplace injuries due to coal mining, logging, and farming. I wanted to show that they weren’t just ‘pillbillies,’ because that’s the stereotype.”275 In case there was any doubt about the harmful effects of Appalachian stereotypes, one need only look at the evidence presented at trial when West Virginia worked to hold big pharma accountable for the immense damage they caused within mountain communities. “One email in 2011 included a rhyme built around ‘a poor mountaineer’ named Jed who ‘barely kept his habit fed’.276 “Author Chris McGeal goes on: “Another rhyme described Kentucky as ‘OxyContinville’ because of the high use of the drug in the poor rural east of the state. When Kentucky introduced new regulations to curb opioid dispensing, an AmerisourceBergen executive wrote in a widely circulated email: ‘One of the hillbilly’s [sic] must have learned how to read :-)”’277 With thousands of vulnerable people dying, Appalachia was still playing the part of hillbilly fool to egotistical, power hungry executives, who felt they were above accountability.278
Unsurprisingly, the drug epidemic has begun to make its way into pop culture media. There have been several documentaries addressing various aspects of the crisis including Apple TV’s Do No Harm, HBO’s The Crime of the Century, and 2013’s Oxyana. In 2013 Netflix premiered Orange is the New Black featuring a character called “Pennsatucky” (a nod to her hometown in the Pennsylvania/Kentucky area of Appalachia). “Pennsatucky struggled with an addiction to crack and had lost custody of her child. In the show, she is serving time for shooting a nurse at an abortion clinic in Fishersville, Virginia, who made disparaging comments about the number of abortions she had.”279 She has rotted teeth, a propensity for homophobia, and despite some development in the later seasons, remains a character mostly used to invoke a slice of horror for the well-to-do Piper, a wealthy woman serving an unexpected sentence in
273 https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Miles2-t.html
274 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/movies/the-devil-all-the-time-review.html
275 https://www.jstor.org/stable/45373155
276 https://www.gq.com/story/devil-all-the-time-accents
277 https://may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com/2010/03/knockemstiff-donald-ray-pollock-and.html
278 Aldana, Reyes, Xavier. Body Gothic : Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru / University of Wales Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kentucky-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1889173. Created from kentucky-ebooks on 2025-06-22 12:27:02.
279 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464237
federal prison. From Jessica Scott’s article, “Hillbilly Horror and the New Racism: Rural and Racial Politics in Orange Is the New Black,” “Class may be overdetermined in Pennsatucky’s character, but what it reveals is her ‘not quite’ whiteness, in the same way that controlling images rely on and perpetuate the historical and continued racialization of the populations of color they locate outside of whiteness.”280
In 2020 Ron Howard directed a film adaptation of Vice President JD Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which paints him as a wunderkin who rises above his abysmal circumstances despite his mother’s ongoing struggles with addiction. As Vox writer Alissa Wilkinson points out however, the opioid crisis is a complicated story that has had more difficulty finding traction than one might expect:
“Trying to fit the opioid crisis into a genre arc is especially hard, I think, because Hollywood’s tendency is to point a finger at a single villain and make everyone else victims, and that doesn’t quite work here. It would be heinously wrong to call Purdue, OxyContin, and especially the Sacklers ‘scapegoats’ for the crisis; they are in fact largely responsible for it, thanks to incredible disregard for the lives of others, and should be treated accordingly. Yet the half-million dead and their grieving families across America aren’t suffering purely because some isolated rich people decided to take advantage of them.281
Of course the “villain” Wilkinson identifies is quite often an Appalachian who, in this case, is actually the victim, which may be lending to the cognitive dissonance around media portrayals. One surprising intersection between the opioid crisis and the horror genre came with Mike Flanagan’s American gothic miniseries Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix. Inspired by the gothic writing of Edgar Allen Poe’s from the early 19th century, Flanagan uses the author’s motifs to bring contemporary gruesome and horrifying fates to each member of the Ushers, a family who earned their fortune pedaling highly addictive opioids to unsuspecting patients and healthcare providers. The family is based on the Sackler family of Oxycontin fame and Flanagan did not hold back in his comparisons. A 2023 article entitled, “I Lost My Son to OxyContin: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is my Sackler Revenge Fantasy” Ed Bisch writes: “The most direct reference to the lies of Purdue Pharma salesforce was the Usher family’s company pitching the fictitious drug Ligadone as non-addictive despite ample evidence to the contrary. This was followed by a subtle and masterful analogy.
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” is a well-known saying. But Roderick Usher — the family patriarch and the lead villain whom I saw as Richard Sackler — goes on a two-minute diatribe about how to totally change the public perception of lemons with a well-funded and coordinated influence campaign. It called to mind Purdue’s launch of OxyContin and the way the company managed to convince the medical establishment to upend their doctrine and freely prescribe opioids for moderate pain.”282
Throughout eight episodes, individual members of the family die in spectacularly horror-worthy ways including getting trapped under acid-filled sprinklers, being cut apart by swinging sheet
280 https://oyezreview.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/an-interview-with-jack-ketchum/ 281 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13516125-the-mountain 282 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13516125-the-mountain
metal, and ingesting cyanide. In the final episode, the family patriarch, Roderick, is staring out of the window of his lavish office tower at a rainy, dark, cityscape when bodies begin to fall from the sky en masse, piling atop rooftops, roads, and sidewalks. The shape-shifting Verna character, seeing Roderick’s horrified reaction, calmly says, “Take a look. Those are your bodies. They'd each be alive today if it weren't for you. New one every five minutes. Just in the States, but... open it up to the world. [...] One last look at your great tower. Your pyramid. That's your true monument, Roderick. Out there. It's a wonder of the world. And it's eternal. That's your legacy.”283 Similar to Silence of the Lambs, Flanagan subverts the long-standing practice of victim blaming and, through horror, exposes the true monster.
https://fusefx.com/our-work/filmography/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher/
Author Donald Ray Pollock’s (1954-) work is another contemporary contribution to the American gothic genre. Pollock’s stories are frequently based in Appalachia and have involved incest between siblings, grotesque violence, and a number of other societal taboos; however he also departs from formulaic stereotypes in interesting ways. Rather than pit mountain monsters against unsuspecting urbanites, Pollock often reflects his characters’ own demons back onto them. In this way his work is considerably more psychological than slasher, yet this doesn’t mean his body of work has been “good” for the region. His first collection of short stories, Knockemstiff from 2008 showcases many hallmarks of an updated Gothic where, similar to Usher, the macabre style of writers like Poe is used as a metaphor for capitalism and urban greed. In the case of Knockemstiff, the grim setting comes from the neglect of small town life, forever excluded from economic opportunity. The popular review site “Parlor of Horror” writes, “It’s real hardcore stuff: drug addiction, alcoholism, bullies and big mouths, dreamers and thieves, mentally disturbed and smart people, all succumb to the pit that is Knockemstiff. It’s a miserable place where born losers die hard and all who try and escape are entangled in the spider’s web. It’s an excellent read for those strong enough to experience the gritty underbelly of
283https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6905941-depraved? ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GwIxDF0hoJ&rank=1
America.”284 New York Times reviewer Jonathan Miles agrees, writing “Rome has fallen, and it’s a Dark Ages free-for-all. Nothing to do now but huff some Bactine and head to the Crispie Creme at 3 a.m. to watch the cross-eyed waitress doze behind the display case of day-old doughnuts.”285 Leaning into the opioid epidemic, Pollock creates less homicidal and more zombie-like monsters. When satiated, many of his characters are hollow and ghoul-like; however, frenetic horror appears alongside the appetite for drugs, alcohol, or violence. While some appreciate the borderline “splatterpunk” take on the southern gothic, others are not as impressed. From reviewer Charles May, “The problem is, too many readers, especially those who remember Deliverance, will assume that everyone in the Appalachian mountains are like the no-accounts in Knockemstiff. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. Mountain folk are the last cultural minority who must suffer simplistic stereotypes.”286
Pollock’s 2011 novel, Devil All the Time, was later adapted into a film for Netflix starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson. New York Times Manohla Dargis writes: “No one is up to any good in “Devil,” a leisurely wallow in the kind of flamboyant evil that some filmmakers just can’t quit, won’t quit. The preacher, Rev. Preston Teagardin, is the least of this story’s ills. By the time he does his worst, knuckles have been bloodied, bullets fired, a dog sacrificed and a man tortured, to list just some of this potboiler’s horrors, which also include a pair of industrious serial killers. Here, in a swath of Appalachia that stretches from Ohio to West Virginia — a land of green woods, white people and Gothic clichés — little rises but everything must converge.287 The book, and subsequent film is indeed full of religious fanaticism and depraved serial killers, yet it didn’t spark an outcry from the region in the same way Deliverance or Wrong Turn have. It's possible the key element keeping his hillbilly “gothic” horror from inspiring the ire of Appalachian communities are Pollock’s heroes (or perhaps anti-heroes is more fitting). In his review essay for The Appalachian Journal, Kevin W. Young writes, “Beneath all the profanity and violence, The Devil All the Time is a type of morality play, replete with a comparatively happy ending in which the wicked are punished and Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) survives to fight again another day.288
284https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6905941-depraved?
ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GwIxDF0hoJ&rank=1
285https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6905941-depraved?
ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GwIxDF0hoJ&rank=1
286https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223500876-swine-mountain? from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=J6bNhPHsH5&rank=1
287 https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-22/cannibal-and-serial-killer-jeffrey-dahmer-is-caught
288https://www.salon.com/2015/07/05/
we_still_dont_know_how_to_talk_about_pennsatucky_the_reality_of_rural_sexual_assault_and_how_cla ss_plays_out_in_orange_is_the_new_black/
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/the-devil-all-the-time-tom-holland-and-robertpattinson-lead-a-star-studded-mess
Arvin is himself an Appalachian, up against some of the worst luck imaginable. Not unlike Jennifer Lawrence’s Ozark’s character in Winter’s Bone, or perhaps even Timothy Oliphant in Justified, there is appreciation in seeing Appalachian characters vanquish the undeniably evil threats countered against them. Rather than a “final girl” standing victorious amid a foreign land with rural predatory monsters, it is the rural “us” left standing. Furthermore, unlike many hillbilly horror films, there was great care shown from the actors in representing the region. Accents in particular were carefully practiced, as most of Devil’s lead characters weren’t American. Holland and Pattinson’s accents, in particular, received high marks from dialect experts.289 Like much of the southern Gothic genre, Pollock’s story is set in the past decades. A distinction between contemporary Appalachia and the Appalachia represented in his gritty portrayal is easier to come by when the characters are sixty years or more behind present-day.
WILD WHITES OF WEST VIRGINIA
A year after Diane Sawyer’s controversial Hidden America, Dickhouse productions released the notorious documentary, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. The film followed the White family of Boone County, West Virginia, and while this was a standalone production, it shared much in common with the meteoric rise of the reality TV genre. Rebecca Scott writes:
“[...]possibly reflecting the influence of executive producers Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine, of Jackass, the film seems more like reality TV than cinema vérité. A lot of the standard devices of reality television are deployed here - natural action sequences interspersed by individual commentary, a request to stop filming in a particularly emotionally painful scene. There is the occasional suspicion that some of this outrageous behavior might actually be incited by the presence of a camera, as well as
289 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jappastud.20.2.0234
the inevitable descent into caricature in the effort to portray a morally coherent self on screen.”290
Described as the “true rebels of the south,” the White family paints a complex picture.291 Interviews with local leaders acknowledge the family’s lack of formal education but caution against underestimating them, describing them as “clever” and “crafty.”292 One of the earliest scenes shows the White matriarch’s 85th birthday party, which devolves into a seemingly endless parade of drug use. Clearly uncomfortable, Bertie Mae sits on the couch with her shirt pulled over her mouth and nose until her children and grandchildren pause long enough to present her with a cake. One interviewee exclaims, “There are so many decent people in this county. There’s a kid down here from very humble upbringing, was admitted to MIT. MIT! I mean, why isn’t someone following him around with a camera?”293
https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-wild-and-wonderful-whites-of-west-virginia/ umc.cmc.6fj3jx69or1o4fsuz8rvf1ucy
A particularly telling scene shows Kirk White at the hospital, having just given birth to a baby girl. In a moment of quiet reflection she says, “When my baby gets older, I’d like for her life to go in a totally different direction than what mine did. You know, finish school, do the right things, stay away from the wrong people. You know, have her own dreams and work hard toward them. You know but, stay in Boone County and I don’t care how many dreams you’ve got, it's not gonna happen.” Moments later, she crushes a pill on the bedside table and snorts it, while her newborn sleeps only a few feet away. Despite the upbeat music, the scene is tragic, and ultimately Child Protective Services takes the child. Additional scenes show members of the White family demonstrating gun tricks in the house with a toddler walking around and
290 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jappastud.20.2.0234
291 https://tv.apple.com/us/show/hillbilly-blood/umc.cmc.69f2k7zzkfypxfqbs6s7qp2z4
292 https://tv.apple.com/us/show/hillbilly-blood/umc.cmc.69f2k7zzkfypxfqbs6s7qp2z4
293 https://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/hillbilly-blood/1000571397/
coordinating homemade tattoos. Stephen Young writes, “This representation is an unfair one. Like many media portrayals, the depicted actions of the caricature that Jesco has become do not represent West Virginia or Appalachia. Here in lies the problem. Many of the public take these depictions of such a caricature as true representations of an entire population and culture.”294 There is some attempt on the part of filmmakers to explain the recklessness of the White family. At one point the film points toward the hazardous work in the coal mines, where one’s physical body was so often in pain that there was no choice but to adopt a survivor, hustler attitude. From Nich Schager, “No doubt such analysis holds a bit of water, but it nonetheless falls far short of affording an exculpatory explanation. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to feel empathy for, or remain amused by, the Whites—living on the dole thanks to D. Ray’s shrewd decision to have them all classified as legally insane—and the destructive, entitled irresponsibility which they proudly pass down to their kids. A mixture of pity and disgust, however, is elicited just fine.”295
While the Whites aren’t painted as horror figures per se, they do share characteristics with the mountain monster trope, swapping moonshine for drugs, and machetes for rifles. Stephen Young writes:
Understanding how documentaries perpetuate the public’s perception of rural Appalachian culture as being synonymous with the ‘’white trash criminal’, warrants further attention. In particular, research represents a lack of understanding of these processes based in a long-standing urban bias in criminological research and more specifically a bias present within critical criminology (see Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014). Moreover, the majority of research focusing on the creation of these rural criminal inhabitants draws on the analysis of horror films (see DeKeseredy et al. 2014). While this research is important in understanding the depictions of rural inhabitants within films, it is also important for research to consider films of the non-fictional variety.”296 One reviewer from 2024 wrote, “This is interesting much like you would find a new insect or maybe a [sic] unknown virus. Repulsive yet there is a wondering what will happen in the next minute. I suggest watching it and when you're done just be aware that these creatures do live in this world and stay clear if you see any.”297 Another viewer titled their review “Like an argument for euthanasia.”298 Sadly, the documentary prompted an interest for reality TV based in Appalachia. Many audiences were left thirsty for more, and networks were more than happy to oblige.
THE REALITY TV BOOM
In 1992 MTV premiered a pioneering concept: a show in which several attractive, young adults live and share a space in New York City while cameras follow their every move. For
294https://www.hcpress.com/front-page/canton-man-goes-from-small-town-middle-school-teacher-to-cohost-of-new-reality-televsion-series.htmlhttps://www.hcpress.com/front-page/canton-man-goes-fromsmall-town-middle-school-teacher-to-co-host-of-new-reality-televsion-series.html
295https://www.themountaineagle.com/articles/reality-show-featuring-mayking-family-to-begin-airing-thisweek/
296 https://abcnews.go.com/US/pentecostal-pastors-argue-snake-handling-religious/story?id=20971576
297 https://www.jstor.org/stable/29781901
298 https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/crime/article44484465.html
viewers of The Real World, and thanks to creative editing, even the mundane became fodder for audiences. There were no “characters”, or scripts, only “seven strangers, picked to live in a house, and have their lives taped.”299 This was seen in many ways as the first real launch of the reality TV boom, and would inspire countless others in the decades to follow including Survivor, The Bachelor, and Big Brother. How can one account for the massive popularity of reality TV? Similar to horror, much of the genre is relatively cheap to produce. Producers don’t have to coordinate actor’s schedules or blockbuster budgets. There is no need for expensive special effects or complex movie sets. Additionally, much of the public loves it. From Neal Saye, “What is so entertaining about watching ‘real’ people go about their lives? The voyeuristic instinct may indeed partially account for the shows' popularity. Conrad Kottak, chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Michigan, explains, "I think it's inherently interesting to see people deliver intimate details of their private lives. It provides a way for us to say, 'Aren't we superior to them?'" (qtd. in Kellman 17).300 Voyeurism and urban reassurance were much of the rationale behind the popularity of rural media, therefore it makes sense that reality TV found a muse in the region.
Following the success of White family and the wildly popular Jersey Shore, MTV premiered a new reality show called Buckwild in 2013, which followed nine individuals from the Charleston, West Virginia area over twelve episodes. The show, according to scholar Carol Mason, illustrates “reckless young partiers who disavow modern amenities like the internet and cell phones and revel in forms of entertainment more rustic than urban clubbing, such as riding all-terrain vehicles in the mud and tubing on the river.”301 The was a slightly watered down version of the same antics viewers saw and loved from the White family. From CNN, “Critics may have been divided over the MTV reality show ‘Buckwild’ when it premiered last year, but fans weren’t. According to the site TV By The Numbers, it ranked as the top-rated original cable series on Thursday nights among viewers 12 to 34, and pulled in an average of 3 million total viewers per episode since its premiere in January.302 West Virginia senator Joe Manchin pleaded with the network from pull the plug on the harmful representation writing: “Instead of showcasing the beauty of our people and our state, you preyed on young people, coaxed them into displaying shameful behavior and now you are profiting from it."303 The show was actually cancelled after one season, but not because of poor viewership. Tragically, one of its young stars, Shain Gandee, died at only 21 along with his uncle and another acquaintance. Their Bronco became trapped in mud during an off-roading excursion, leading to fatal carbon monoxide poisoning. As one of the more popular personalities on the reality show, the network decided to pull Buckwild rather than forge ahead without Shain.304
299 https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/31/opinions/bourdain-west-virginia-mccarroll
300 https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/26/1675248/-Coal-is-dead-but-Appalachia-isn-t
301https://www.si.edu/spotlight/the-father-of-the-video-game-the-ralph-baer-prototypes-and-electronicgames/video-game-history
302https://prodmartbd.medium.com/what-is-the-difference-between-playing-video-games-and-watchingtv-247a66ae16cf
303https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-realities-of-refugee-screening/202502/the-effects-ofgaming-on-kids-aggression-and
304https://go.openathens.net/redirector/uky.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/hot-videogame-redneck-rampage/docview/220154862/se-2?accountid=11836
https://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/buckwild/1000580556/
Even the History Channel decided to capitalize off of the rough and tumble perception of reality in West Virginia, premiering a new reality TV series, Appalachian Outlaws in 2014. The show features several locations across the state, following the wild ginseng harvesters throughout the fall. From reviewer Mary Hufford:
Each episode tracks the wildly fluctuating fortunes of cast members: diggers get shot at by marijuana growers, caught in landowner Mike Ross’s ‘Venus fly trap,’ lost in subterranean caverns linked in memory to the Civil War, and betrayed by partners and buyers. They are hunted down, ambushed, and vandalized by rivals. Tires are flattened, windshields smashed, trucks exploded, and buildings reduced to ashes. But nobody is killed or even seriously injured, and by the end of the season, at the onset of winter
(which the narrator calls ‘a new enemy’), tempers have cooled along with the temperatures.305
The show has admitted to being at least partially scripted, playing up elements like feuding and violence, while purposely obfuscating other important contextual influences including the exploitation of the coal companies and other extractive industries.306 While one might assume such erasures come with a reality TV territory, this particular show was spearheaded by the History channel whose goal, one might assume, would be to showcase history. Beyond the newfound awareness that wild ginseng grows in Appalachia, viewers are left with much of the same fodder as Buckwild.
Superfine Films, who produce content for networks like Discovery and A&E, launched their version of “redneck reality TV” in 2011 with Hillbilly Blood.307 The streaming platform Apple TV describes the show: “Follow two mountain men who demonstrate backwoods ingenuity deep in the mountains of Appalachia.”308 While the idea of Appalachians resourcefully “MacGyver-ing” their way towards ingenious engineering solutions sounds like a fresh, new perspective for audiences, some of the content was frustrating for locals. The first two episodes feature moonshining and snake handling. A viewer’s comment from the official Facebook page reads, “You two are NOT hillbillies at all! You are fake!”Another reads, “I am beyond offended at this. Is it possible to make us look more backwards?”309 Still, the co-host of the show, Spencer Bolejack of North Carolina, brings an interesting dimension that fragments the mountain monster motif. He is a former teacher, a professional musician, and a second degree black belt in Ninjutsu– a far cry from a bloodthirsty cannibal.310 2012 reality TV returned viewers to Kentucky (Letcher County) to follow snake handler Verlin Short and his family. The show was spearheaded by executive producer Dan Sexton. FromThe Mountain Eagle, “Sexton met Verlin Short in 2002 while producing a documentary about snake handling for the Travel Channel. Sexton decided there is public interest in the religious ritual and wanted to further explore the topic as well as introduce the Short family to the world.”311 Snake handling as a religious practice is a form of fundamentalism most often seen in Pentecostal churches. The inspiration comes from a passage from the Book of Mark:
Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up
305https://go.openathens.net/redirector/uky.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/redneckrampage/docview/196780658/se-2?accountid=11836
306 RNR 1997
307 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43798886
308 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/yourmoney/20shelf.html
309 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/yourmoney/20shelf.html
310 https://screenrant.com/silent-hill-series-scariest-monsters-enemies-pt-lisa/
311https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/01/technology/game-theory-fighting-off-zombies-and-insults-fromtv-hosts.html
serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.1
MARK 16: 15-312
While snake handling occurs throughout the Appalachian region, exact numbers are difficult to determine and it is undoubtedly overrepresented in media. Shelby Lee Adams photographed a snake handling congregation, and others, like Sexton, continue to showcase the practice as though it's commonplace. The rough numbers are estimated at about 125 total churches across the southern region in 2013.313 For context, as of 2002 the region had 15 churches per every 10,000 residents. Shortly after the premiere of the Snake Man, Vernin Short was arrested during a county drug bust and charged with trafficking in a controlled substance.314 The show was not renewed for a second season.
Not all reality TV played into harmful regional stereotypes. Season eleven of “Parts Unknown” hosted by celebrity chef and personality Anthony Bourdain. traveled to West Virginia in April 2018. In an article for CNN, Appalachian scholar Meredith McCaroll writes, “Throughout the show, we cut from a football locker room to a heritage farm to a strip club and a strip mine. In the first three minutes of the episode, Bourdain showed more diversity in West Virginia than many viewers would expect. Before he arrived, somebody on his team did a lot of digging and contacted some of the most active and engaged hillbillies out there. And once he is sitting in front of them, he has the good sense to ask the simple question: What should people know about this place?”315 Bourdain attended football games, broke bread with local families, and seemed to make a genuine attempt to lend a platform to those who are rarely given one. TV host Kamau Bell visited Appalachia twice for his show Shades of America. Bell did some rock climbing, chatted with local leaders, and ventured into a coal mine to listen to the experience of those who are doing backbreaking work to power America. One reviewer, Caleb Fultz, writes “The episode really changed my perspective on coal country and the people in it. The vast majority of these people aren’t uneducated hicks that are backward and racist. We probably also thought they were just invested in coal and didn’t believe in climate change. These are stereotypes that most of us probably held. And I can’t blame you because this is the picture we get of Appalachia most of the time while the good is mostly ignored.”316 While much of the good is ignored throughout reality TV, thanks to the accessibility of media, there are now case studies that are working to fragment these reductive stereotypes and build a more robust view of “reality” in Appalachia.
312https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/jan/27/what-pokemon-can-teach-us-about-storytellingnintendo-games
313 https://spokus.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/MANZINALI_2021-Lavender-Town-Syndrome.pdf
314 https://www.jstor.org/stable/45409275
315 https://www.jstor.org/stable/45409275
316 https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/bloody-benders
