In many of the films, they’re just driving down the road, usually a two-lane highway. Whether it’s a carload of college students on a road trip or a family of five on vacation, they have for some reason left the interstate and taken backroads. Maybe the place where they want to camp or kayak requires this route, maybe Dad claims to know a shortcut, maybe the wild one in the group appeals to their collective desire for adventure. No matter the reason, this small, packed-in group has made the decision to traverse the rural backcountry – often of the South, but not always – and that decision puts them in the path of a killer . . . or killers . . . or a monster . . . something that is going to terrify them, and us. It often begins with car trouble. 

So why would the rural South be a terrifying place? Because for more than two centuries, Southerners have given Americans, and people worldwide, reasons to be afraid. In the 1800s, the atrocities committed against African-descended slaves were followed for decades after the Civil War by the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan. Once photography was an established technology, the horror of lynchings was documented, even celebrated on what are now called lynching postcards. The effects of Southern violence could be seen by all, for instance, in the now-infamous image of the shirtless black man whose back is covered in terrible scarring. Then, film became a popular art form, and Southerners’ capacity for violence and iniquity was put on the screen in live-action features. An early cinematic example is the 1930s adaptation I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, which showed the injustice of the Southern prison labor system. Later, the Civil Rights movement gave the news media, especially television, plenty of horrible imagery to display, including the mangled corpse of Emmett Till lying in a casket and the car of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner being pulled from the murky water. These things were not happening in the Southern cities, but in the Southern countryside.

Thus, the sub-genre of horror films based in the rural South was made from an easy but potent mixture of well-known ingredients. Perhaps the best example from this sub-genre is 1973’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This cult classic laid out the elements: a van full of young people, a two-lane road in the middle of nowhere, a creepy gas station, arguments about prudent decision-making, and ultimately, an encounter with murderous psychos. Of course, Leatherface and his family are weird enough to be fantastical, but being trapped in an isolated location with no one to turn to for help— that’s a very real fear. 

And even if there was someone to call out to, would anyone want that “help” to come? Thinking about the movies of that time, the myths and narrative about the South were not flattering or friendly. In 1972, American audiences watched, in Deliverance, as two north-Georgia hillbillies appear at the riverside, accost two boaters, rape one of them, and attempt to rape the other. After the manly man among the boaters arrives and kills the hillbillies, he insists that they can’t call the law because there is no justice in this isolated place. Then in 1973, the same year as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, audiences were watching White Lightning, set in north Florida, and Walking Tall, set in rural Tennessee. Both of these films feature local lawmen whose notions of justice are rooted not in due process but in violence. I doubt if many people would call Deliverance, White Lightning, or Walking Tall horror films, but the element of horror in their stories is palpable. The myth we hear in each is: Southerners are extremely violent people, and an outsider won’t be treated fairly or with compassion, not even by law enforcement.

In the early 1970s, the idea of using the South as a scary place has already been in the works. The region’s distinct characteristics provide the backdrop for 1955’s Night of the Hunter, in which two fleeing children amble along with nowhere to turn for help. In 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, a bitter mother in New Orleans wants to have her niece lobotomized to cover up her dead son’s homosexuality. In 1962’s Cape Fear, an ex-convict in North Carolina seeks revenge on a lawyer by terrorizing him and his family. Then, after the success of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968, the horror genre blew up, and the frightening aspects of the South inured possibility.

But even before Night of the Living Dead, though, the most grotesque and extreme version of what some Americans believed about rural Southerners took form in the 1964 film Two Thousand Maniacs! Less well-known today than Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the film was made amid the 1963 Birmingham church bombings and released during 1964’s Freedom Summer. It features a small Southern town that forms a conspiracy to lead wayward Northerners off their vacation route and into certain death. The first thing that they do is separate their victims from their car and each other. One by one, the townspeople murder the motorists in gruesome ways as they cheer and jeer the victims. The whole scheme is meant avenge the South’s loss in the Civil War, and in the end, we find out that the small-town Southerners who torture and kill these unsuspecting travelers are actually ghosts, who plan to come back and do it again. The director Herschell Gordon Lewis was known for these wild “grindhouse” films, which had only a niche audience in the 1960s. I would say that there was not a popular audience for these kinds of films yet— Yet.

Then came the 1970s, a decade that most critics regard as an early heyday of horror films. This was the era not only of Texas Chainsaw Massacre but of The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, and Halloween. And the South added its own contributions. 1972’s The Legend of Boggy Creek and 1976’s The Town that Dreaded Sundown were quasi-documentaries that sensationalized a vague threat lurking in the dark. The bizarre Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural from 1973 was set in 1930s Georgia, and its opening scenes leave our main character stranded when the bus she is riding breaks down on a backroad and the driver is killed by creatures who live in the woods. In the low-budget Eaten Alive from 1976, our killer manages a small hotel on an East Texas backroad; there, he kills people then feeds his victims to a giant alligator that lives in an adjacent pond. Beyond those, one has to think about 1975’s Poor Pretty Eddie, which is one of the more disturbing and horrifying films ever made. And what is its plot built on? Car trouble in the rural South. 

By the 1980s, the horror genre had taken off, and the South was hanging in there as a setting for those scary stories. New Orleans specifically and Louisiana more generally had become a favorite place for its spooky connotations, in films like 1981’s Macabre and 1982’s remake of Cat People, but the decade’s most infamous Louisiana-based film is probably Angel Heart from 1987. Early in the decade, 1981’s Southern Comfort has us following a group of National Guardsmen on drill; they are fleeing for their lives after they’ve pissed off the people who live in the bayou. This one employs the fear of being watched and pursued by those unseen. Later, the 1930s Georgia chain gang story was remade as the more brutal The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains in 1987, and though it may not technically be a horror movie, 1989’s Trapper County War reminded us that the rural South is not friendly to outsiders. In the latter film, two young guys heading for California pass through the mountainous wilds of the Carolinas and make the mistake of eating at a local cafe and hitting on a waitress there. 

The 1990s were not yet offering the array of Southern slasher films that are now available, but it did give us one of the more popular mainstream Southern horror films. Interview with a Vampire latched on to the scary New Orleans thing and, in 1994, gave moviegoers a two-hour version of Anne Rice’s popular Lestat novels. Once again, in this decade, the horror was not necessarily cut-and-dried to fit the genre in stereotypical ways, as it would be in coming decades. In the 1990s, we had the sadistic Paris Trout, which features an insanely eccentric small-town store owner who brutalizes his wife and anyone else he can. In 1997 alone, audiences could watch the violent (true) story of racism in Rosewood, a tale of voodoo and extramarital affairs in Eve’s Bayou, and another story of corrupt lawmen in a remake of Macon County Jail.

By the 2000s, then, these myths and narratives had hardened into an easily recognizable formula. 2000’s St. Francisville Experiment has us watching a group of young people get killed off in an abandoned Louisiana mental hospital. The seminal paint-by-numbers horror movie that is set in the South might be 2003’s Wrong Turn, which incorporates the car-crash plot point to land our characters among a family of deformed Appalachian hillbillies who collect their victims’ camping gear and body parts. 2005’s Skeleton Key and 2006’s Hatchet both takes us back to rural Louisiana, but in very different ways— the first employs isolation and family drama to create fear, while the latter is a slasher film that strands a boatload of tourists near a crazed killer’s backwater cabin. 

Though these films – and more – are dissimilar in many ways, they do utilize one common element: a fear of the rural South. This fear is rooted in the narrative that rural Southerners are – or at least can be – senselessly violent, devoid of compassion, and bent on exercising the power that isolation gives. The message from these films is clear. An outsider, even one who is harmlessly passing through, should understand that the locals know the land and each other, and that anyone can be accosted, subdued, kidnapped, killed, and buried in a vast woodland. Moreover, the South’s longstanding respect for individual freedom and property rights will keep the law from searching for missing persons or victims’ bodies. Of course, all of these films are not set in the South – Children of the Corn and Jeepers Creepers exploit the vastness of the Midwest – but it is the history and imagery of the South that adds another element: the real fear of a people who have shown themselves to be violent. These films tell moviegoing audiences that Southern hospitality is a ruse. In truth, it is safer to stay on the interstate and in the cities, to stop and eat at Cracker Barrel or McDonald’s, to buy gas and snacks at a brightly lit convenience store, to stick to the familiar and get where you’re going— and don’t get any ideas about shortcuts . . . because some Southerners are crazy, and the rest of us will stand by idly while the bad things happen.

Read more from the editor’s blog Groundwork.