We're all alone out here: Backwoods, Goodoleboys, and (just a hint of) the Southern Gothic Tradition.

Hi friends and readers alike, here comes the initial preamble. 

It's been a hot minute since I shared anything here. Between completing, editing, and starting pre-order promotion for my next novel (SOMA, available from October 2nd, just in case you didn't get the memo), I've been quite the busy fella recently. With that in mind, I figured that I'd try to keep my toes in the water so to speak. As a result, the following blog post might be a bit longer than usual, as I try to make up for lost time.

When I relaunched this blog (I've been fairly shit when it comes to blog consistency in the past, so sue me), it was always my intention to use it primarily as a means of relaying some of my thoughts on the horror genre and all things dark in general, leaning pretty heavily towards those people and things that have inspired me, along with the sort of aesthetics that light my own creative spark. I've previously looked at body horror, along with the use and prevalence of sex in the genre among other things. This time around, I want to try and take a look at a particular subgenre that, although at times more horror-adjacent, still has its place; something that I'm going to refer to here as Backwoods horror. I'm going to use the term Backwoods as an alternative to Southern Gothic for a couple of reasons, the first being that it gives a broader picture of some of the themes I'm going to select. In my opinion, Southern Gothic sounds perhaps a bit too stereotypical, something that at times almost demonises a particular region or demographic, and this is a thing that I would rather actively avoid. Most of the examples I'm going to use do happen to pertain to that specific geographical region, but there are obvious reasons for this, or at least reasons that I hope will become obvious. The American south is an area steeped in tradition, with its own baggage and - sometimes harsh - stereotypes; a long history of isolation, religious zealotry, a dose of resentment, and yes, slavery. If you look deep enough into the history of any place, you'll find something of which its people probably aren't proud, but those more negative aspects of the south have frequently been on show more than most, allowed to percolate into the collective consciousness, as well as often exploited as a basis for horror. But still, at the end of the day, nothing screams HORROR like a deserted cabin in the woods where no one can hear you begging for your life, a hulking backwards degenerate wielding an oversized kitchen utensil or power tool, or a fifth generation family of twisted religious zealots who are really, really averse to being disturbed by outsiders. A brief disclaimer: I’ve never made any claim to being any sort of cultural analyst, sociologist, or anyone with any deep and meaningful insight into socio-politics, so the rambling that is likely to follow will mainly be based upon my own opinions and insights. Also, the subgenre that I’m going to refer to as Backwoods horror moving forward has a rich and sprawling history all of its own and, with that in mind, I’m going to limit any discussion to a few selected examples with which I’m particularly familiar or that hold a special place in my heart for whatever reason. I'm writing a blog essay here, not a goddamn textbook. I have no doubt that there are probably plenty of more scholarly texts on the subjects I’m going to chat shit about. Fuck it, I’m a fiction author, not a college lecturer. That all said, ready? Okay, strap yourself in, get that hog leg (are you sure it's hog?) roasting on the fire real nice and we'll begin...

Welcome to Texas. The opening scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

PART I: WE'RE ALL ALONE OUT HERE! 

Isolation almost always breeds fear. No matter how introverted a person usually claims to be (and I can sympathise, being a mahoosive introvert myself), most of us are social creatures at heart. Oh, of course everyone likes a bit of peace and quiet every now and then, or sometimes quietly wishes that they had more time to themselves, but I’m betting on the fact that most of us couldn’t really last without some sort of actual contact from time to time, the total absence of which would likely drive most folk completely batshit doolally. Christ, just look at Tom Hanks in Castaway – he resorted to striking up conversations with a motherfucking basketball in an effort to hold onto his marbles. Or conversely, think back to that fine actor Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone episode, Time Enough at Last, in which his character, a nebbish bookworm, emerges into a world obliterated by nuclear holocaust. Initially overjoyed that he finally has all the time in the world to indulge his passion for reading, his elation soon turns to anguish when he breaks his only pair of reading glasses. The question is, what is he really more upset about; the fact that he can’t read, or that there’s no one else for him to bitch about it to? I sometimes wonder.

Backwoods horror has a massive dependency upon most humans’ innate fear of isolation, of being lost and alone, safe only in the knowledge that, whatever bad thing is about to happen, no one is coming to the rescue. That, coupled with the usual scenario that the only folk around don’t have your best interests at heart, makes for the purest nightmare fuel. Think back to the first time you watched Sam Raimi’s classic The Evil Dead (1981), and if you haven't seen it yet, then shame on you. Would it have been made any scarier if the rickety old cabin was replaced by a condo in the middle of downtown Manhattan? Right from the outset, the cabin becomes almost a main character, a dilapidated shell stranded in the middle of nowhere, the situation exacerbated when the whole surrounding forest itself seems to conspire against Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, and company, working to cut them off even further from civilisation, separating them from any chance of safety, from where sanity and normality still exist, instead of those things summoned by someone either naive or stupid enough to mess with the ever-pesky FORCES THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND. This is a mood that I’ve frequently tried to convey in my own fiction, describing my own recurring fictional sprawling metropolis in such a way that it becomes a character in its own right, a towering, oppressive thing reminiscent of a time when long-forgotten industry still had some foothold. Of course, it’s an aesthetic that I’ve transposed from a different environment, but this isn’t a phenomenon limited purely to Backwoods horror after all; Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) makes similar use of the same conceit, whereby The Nostromo, a space freighter doubling as a titanic, deserted haunted house is effectively shifted into deep space…and almost immediately invaded by an extra-terrestrial presence with anything but altruistic purposes. Yet, Backwoods horror is still probably where this particular trope probably fits best, when something that should be cosy, peaceful and familiar (I’ll talk more about that shortly) turns out to be anything but. In space, no one can hear you scream, but the same goes for any isolated territory right here on earth, too. The world is a big place, and it has plenty of wide open empty spaces ready to be strayed into and just raring to be overlooked.

We're all alone out here... Cajun swampland in Southern Comfort (1981)

For my own novel, Penance, I took the step of moving outside of my own little comfort zone. I set the story primarily in a fictional US backwater town, with an even more off-the-grid neighbour. Into it, I planted a down-on-his-luck author with plenty of problems of his own, looking for inspiration for his next novel. When he makes the acquaintance of some of the more hostile locals, what follows is my very own sole (to date) excursion into Backwoods territory, along with a dash of Lovecraftian horror thrown into the mix. To make things a bit easier on myself, I set the novel in a definite time frame - the mid-80s - to ensure that no modern conveniences, such as the Internet or cellphones, could interfere with the progression of the tale. I still hope I managed to pull it off, and I like to think I just about did. 

With The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Deliverance (1972), Southern Comfort (1981), to name but a few. It seems almost as if the subgenre pretty much invented the concept of being stranded in the middle of nowhere. In John Boorman’s Deliverance, based upon the James Dickey novel of the same name, four fairly affluent city boys foolish enough to want to get back to nature find themselves straying into a territory inhabited by inbred rednecks who play only by their own rules. Meanwhile, Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort similarly takes a bunch of military guardsmen and drops them squarely into a remote Cajun region where they learn the hard way that it’s best not to fuck with the locals. It turns out that even in jest, firing blank rounds at men who don't even speak the same language as you really ain't a smart move. 

Although pre-dated by Deliverance, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is possibly the archetypal Backwoods horror movie. Filmed on a shoestring budget and with mainly (at the time) unknown actors, the film has a grimy, gritty aesthetic that lends it an almost documentary feel, an air almost of reality that is further compounded by the opening narration (courtesy of John Larroquette, who accepted payment in weed as the story goes). The gore is minimal, the violence is mostly implied, save for the relentless psychological torment of OG final girl Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) in the dinner table scene, where she becomes party to the movie's warped distortion of patriarchal structure and family values. Despite this lack of overt grue, Chain Saw ran seriously foul of the British Board of Film Censors, with then-chairman James Ferman having some notoriously strong words to say against any possible artistic merits. The trope of the movie is something simple and familiar, indeed something that has been done to death many times over since; a group of stoner teenagers in their camper van stray into a desolate part of Texas that has been blighted by a string of unsolved murders and grave robbings, only to encounter a family with a taste for meat…and a lumbering brute (Gunnar Hansen) with a dead skin mask, a butcher’s apron and a chainsaw ready and waiting to carve up everything in sight. Ensuing (offscreen) violence notwithstanding, Hooper captures a genuine aesthetic of isolation from the very outset, somehow managing to make even the largest of scrub and dust-strewn landscapes feel somehow claustrophobic. Following on from the title sequence and the opening slow reveal of a decaying human monument, the opening is a wide angle shot of an armadillo, dead and upturned in the middle of the road, every bit as isolated and exposed as our hapless characters will find themselves soon enough. Within those first five minutes of the movie, we just know that something very bad is going to happen, and that no one is coming to help.

PART II: UNCANNY VALLEY AND THE FEAR OF THE UNFAMILIAR 

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto..." 

Make no mistake, one of the scariest things imaginable is unfamiliarity. If there’s any truth in the phrase that familiarity breeds contempt, then its counterpart breeds confusion and uncertainty, two things that are guaranteed to set most people on edge. Everyone enjoys a day out in the countryside, getting back to nature, right? Whether the scene is open grassland, desert, or cityscape, all conjure up images of something that should be familiar, to picture with fondness. There’s an inherent skill in taking something so commonplace and subverting it subtly into something uncanny, something not quite right, and this is something upon which Backwoods horror in particular depends. A peaceful country retreat becomes somewhere any sin can be hidden and overlooked, a sprawling dustbowl becomes nothing more than a graveyard, a place where the bodies can be buried, or better still, left to rot undiscovered.

From an early age, hell, from birth itself, we’re pretty much raised to believe that family is everything. We’re told that our family are the first people that we should trust, who we should turn to when in times of trouble. Blood is thicker than water, and all that. Of course, that’s not always how things work out (trust me, I know, but that’s a whole other story, etc.), but for the most part, the family unit is usually held up as representing something solid, something dependable and familiar. So it’s perhaps all the more jarring when the visage of that family unit is corrupted or distorted in some way. Once again, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre does so, by portraying the main antagonists as possessing some warped familial connection. The Hitchhiker, The Cook, Leatherface the Butcher, all act seemingly in thrall to Grampa, little more than a desiccated husk, propped up at the family dinner table, waiting for his next sacrifice. A lot of the time in Backwoods horror, the characters perpetuating the violence are portrayed as related somehow, albeit usually in some inbred way. Think again of the Cajuns of Southern Comfort, or the mutant brothers of the Wrong Turn series of movies. Adjacent to this are the Voorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise. In the original Sean Cunningham movie, Pamela Voorhees goes on a killing spree in the deranged belief that she’s avenging the death of her disabled son, who - surprise, surprise - died as a result of two teenagers doing the obvious thing and sneaking off for a bit of jiggery-pokery when they should have been caring for him. In later movies of course, the script is flipped, with a hockey mask-wearing Jason being the one to rise up (repeatedly, ad nauseum) and avenge the death of his mother, by offing an ever-increasing number of vacuous teenagers in ever more inventive ways. This again shows how the horror genre cross-pollinates, with similar themes and tropes utilised in a slightly different form. But again, the concept of family ties, be they normal or otherwise, are a frequent staple of Backwoods horror.

A non-movie example is that of the comic series, Preacher. Published by DC’s Vertigo imprint between 1995 and 2000, written and illustrated by the creative team of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon respectively, Preacher is often hailed as one of the best examples of adult-orientated comics ever. I for one would definitely recommend its fusion of horror, pitch-dark humour, religious critique and plentiful profanity. The Preacher of the title is Jesse Custer, a southern minister questioning his faith and on the verge of quitting the church, when he is imbued with the spirit of Genesis; the spiritual offspring resulting from an angel and a demon fucking each others’ brains out, to use Jesse’s own quaint description. From there, Custer, who now possesses the ability to force anyone to do his bidding by speaking to them, hooks up with old girlfriend Tulip, and Cassidy, an Irish vampire (Belfast native Ennis just had to fit that in somewhere), setting off on a cross-country mission to find God in order to make Him pay for abandoning his creation. What follows is by turns horrifying, repulsive, uproariously funny, and scabrous in its religious critique, as all manner of increasingly depraved characters are encountered. A turning point occurs some third of the way into the series, when we are finally introduced to Jesse’s family; the bully-boy older cousin, his wretched, poultry-fucking brother, and Grandma, the haggard matriarch of the Custer clan. Once again, the family unit is warped into some hyper-realised version of something that should be relatable but somehow isn’t quite. The family isn’t a source of protection, but something to be vilified and feared. I’ll come back to Preacher in due course, but if you’ve never read it or any of its spin-offs, you need to fix that. Likewise, if you’ve got no real interest in comic books, check your attitude at the door and give it a go. You won’t regret it.

The Word of God. When Jesse Custer talks, you listen (Preacher, 1995 - 2000)

It's a recurring theme in Backwoods horror that is almost a staple; those Southern folk don't much care for outsiders and certainly don't appreciate them snooping around with their high-falutin’ ways. Every example I've cited so far has the same basic theme, that of antagonists reacting with violent retribution towards anyone foolhardy enough to stray too far into their territory. Rarely has this been any more explicit than in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1964 splatter fest, 2000 Maniacs. Starting out with cheap nudie flicks, Lewis soon realised that there was money aplenty to be made from grossing out drive-in audiences, hence the existence of early gore fests like Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red, and the appropriately-titled The Wizard of Gore. Credited with kick-starting the splatter subgenre, Lewis’ 2000 Maniacs is regarded as hicksploitation, ramping up preconceptions of the social attitudes between north and south. Loosely based on the 1947 musical Brigadoon, the story follows a group of northern tourists who happen upon a Confederate centennial celebration, and are rewarded by being dispatched in ever bloodthirsty ways by a bunch of ghostly rednecks. If your tastes run to dismemberment, death by pressing, or by playing roly-poly in a barrel lined with nails, you might want to take a look. The good it does for rural southern tourism however is debatable. Chain Saw, Deliverance, Southern Comfort, the Wrong Turn series, and Adam Green’s Hatchet movies all teach basically the same lesson: Stay the hell away if you know what's good for you. 

PART III: JESUS LOVES ME, BUT YOU’RE DAMNED TA HELL - QUASI-RELIGIOUS ZEALOTRY

Look at the news, especially on social media, and it won’t take you long to realise just how much of a stranglehold fundamentalist religion still has upon a substantial proportion of the American public, especially in the so-called Bible Belt areas of the lower Midwest and Southern states. Remember, I’m talking about the country that gifted us such luminaries as Jimmy Swaggart, for Christ’s sake. How often in times of tragedy have you seen some media post from some person who should know better (they're usually Republican, so perhaps…), trotting out the same generic line; thoughts and prayers? Try it, it shouldn’t take too long to find an example.

For a country that prides itself on being the land of the free, the USA, or at least certain regions of it, are still considerably in the grip of religious fundamentalism. A place that gifted us the joy of televangelism (seriously, check out the over the top earnestness of things like the GOD Channel on television, best viewed whilst drunk and, yes, I just know I'm probably going to Hell for saying it), few other places have such a strong dichotomy of freedom contrasted with religious fervour. The image of some fire-and-brimstone preacher threatening eternal damnation on all those unbelievers who won't part with their cash is probably a pretty familiar one, and is often strongly associated with Backwoods horror, perpetuating the partly-true stereotype that in those places where civilisation hasn't quite caught up, religion holds sway. I toyed with the theme myself in my novel Penance, as well as more explicitly in the prequel short story, Saviours, which ruminates on the - gasp! - hypocrisy of religion, and the consequences when it is forcibly imposed on those who don't want it. Religion, more specifically fundamental religion, is often more strongly associated with the southern states of the previously-mentioned Bible Belt and, as such, has an intrinsic place in the subgenre. The image of some wild-eyed makeshift prophet, threatening all manner of godly retribution on those who don't atone for their wickedness is a striking one. God and family are paramount. 

Being a godless heretic myself, I'm suddenly self-conscious that I'm about to start rambling on a tangent. Time to pause for a quick breath. 

Dinner for four. Sally's eye-view of the family from Hell (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).

Ah, that's better. 

Anyway, where was I? Anyone familiar with the crimes of Ed Gein should have an understanding of the pairing of religion and Backwoods horror. Only ever actually convicted of two murders in 1957, Wisconsin native Gein has provided ample fodder for many a genre tale. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Robert Bloch’s Psycho and the Hitchcock dramatisation, Robert Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs are just a few of the myriad books and movies that owe a dubious debt to Gein, his penchant for grave robbing and taste in interior decor and fashion design. In a previous blog post, I discussed Ryan Murphy’s 2025 fictionalisation of the Ed Gein story. I stress the word fictionalisation here, because it's no secret that Murphy plays fast and loose with the truth in order to concoct a fever dream melding of fantasy and fiction. The meat and potatoes of the story are still there though. Religion was a crucial aspect of Gein’s development, a devoted mother's boy, raised by a matriarch who insisted that his father was the devil incarnate, all women were whores, and Ed would probably be damned to Hell regardless. This is the quasi-religious stereotype to which I'm referring; a cruel bastardisation of religious belief, whereby if you don't believe and repent, you'll be punished for all eternity…and that repentance will be beaten into you if necessary, or the process will be helped along by removing one more sinner from the world by violent means. And for me, a self-confessed misotheist, that's saying something. 

Again, something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can be looked at from the point of view of religion, with its warped perspective of family values and the iconography of God replaced by that of a petrol Stihl saw. 

In Ennis and Dillon’s Preacher, the religious aspect really couldn't be more explicit, the clue is in the title for fuck’s sake. Ennis, a self-confessed atheist, filters the tale through a cynical lens, with a parade of increasingly bizarre characters and situations, most of them ridiculing religious extremity in a way that is as thought provoking as it is deliberately outrageous. He places the religious ideals of the south front and centre again and again, with zealotry used as a cover for all manner of depraved violence. In many ways, Preacher can be first and foremost viewed as a hyper-violent neo-Western, Ennis permeating the story with his obvious love of the genre - at times Jesse Custer is visited by the ghost of John Wayne, who inspires him to get himself out of several nasty situations when his own self-belief is flagging. It touches on themes of love, friendship, resilience and strength, making the final story far greater than the sum of its parts. The religious imagery on display throughout takes centre stage though.

Frailty (2001), directed by and starring the late Bill Paxton, along with Matthew McConaughey and Powers (Southern Comfort) Boothe, is a slow burn psychological horror in which Paxton plays Dad Meiks, a father who believes that he has been ordered by God Himself to kill demons walking the earth disguised as people. Low-key and by turns creepy and sad, Frailty is another example of how a distorted, hyper-realised view of religion sits at the core of the Backwoods and, in particular, Southern Gothic traditions. 

PART IV: OUT HERE YOU AIN'T SHIT, BOY!

Over the years, a lot of criticism has been levelled against the horror genre in general for its stereotypical victimisation of women. There are probably some grounds for such an accusation, certainly not helped by quotes such as that from Italian Giallo and horror director, Dario Argento:

"I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.” 

So that's that. 

Indeed, most of Argento’s best-known work makes good on this promise (if that's the appropriate term). Movies such as Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebrae/Unsane, and The Stendhal Syndrome, the latter of which stars the director's own daughter, Asia Argento, in a jarring display of familial nastiness, frequently feature heavily stylised, conventionally beautiful women as victims of the most grisly of deaths. Most of the women in question die dressed in pale or neutral colors, just to make the blood stand out that little bit more. It's a callous concept, one that is certainly outdated now, to the extent that Argento’s most recent conclusion to his Three Mothers trilogy, The Third Mother, was pilloried by many critics and viewers alike and is regarded as hardly anywhere near his best work. Modern audiences are more likely to be offended by such a conceit. 

It's true that, more often than not, women get a pretty raw deal in horror movies. Often, they make for all too easy cannon fodder, an orderly queue of victims lined up for the killer du jour, especially during the slasher boom of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Like I said earlier, I'm no expert on sociology, but I would argue that there's a counterpoint here: that of the final girl trope. A common phenomenon whereby the last person standing turns out to be female. Examples include Laurie Strode (Halloween), Ellen Ripley (Alien), and more recently, Sidney Prescott (Scream) or Erin (You're Next). Not to forget the original Sally Hardesty (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), possibly one of the first examples. To give a pro-feminist slant on things, women are often portrayed as tougher than their appearance first suggests. They've got what it takes to survive, they just need to go through an extra level of Hell to get there. A while ago, I responded to an open call for an anthology where the requirement was to take a familiar horror trope and subvert it in some way. The anthology never came to fruition (it’s a long story), but my tale, The Final Girl, made it into Little Wounds and Other Dark Tales, my second collection of short fiction. 

Yeah, I had some fun with that.

That all said, let's talk about masculinity. I'll be honest, it's a pretty touchy subject sometimes, especially in the social media age of chinless, toxic embarrassments like Andrew Tate, along with a whole slew of dickless mummy's boy influencers who will spew out any old misogynistic bollocks if it means they get likes and follows from impressionable boys. Let's be blunt here, the phenomenon of toxic masculinity is pretty fucking demoralising, to a point where it's hard to figure out which is worse; that someone would wilfully dribble hateful words like their mouth has morphed into a second diarrhoeal arsehole, or that anyone, regardless of their own insecurities, would even give the time of day to it. The concept of toxic masculinity has made it so much more difficult to navigate what it means to be a man. 

Backwoods horror knows what it means to be a man. More to the point, it knows how to strip away that masculinity, to leave behind a quivering, gelatinous core. 

I'm talking about the concept of emasculation, the removal of manhood or, at worst, the very dehumanisation of characters. If women are brutalised and elevated, then men are dropped from their lofty perch and brought down more than a peg or two. 

Yup, something mighty bad is about to happen. Jon Voight (centre) in Deliverance (1972)

 

It used to be said, in fact it used to be a given, that every story needed a hero. Right up until the 1960s, it was all too commonplace for said hero to be some tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed manly man, replete with swooning lady on his arm. Think back to a whole load of science fiction movies from the ‘50s or ‘60s, where the person to save the day wasn't some bespectacled lab boffin or Average Joe; no, the saviour of the world was almost always tall and clean-shaven, neat of haircut and with a chin that looked like it could be used to draw right angles. The bad guys were always vanquished, the girl was always won, and the world was always saved at the last minute by the REAL MAN. 

Then, in 1968, came a no-budget horror movie that re-wrote the rules. It's a movie I've discussed here before in a previous post, and it's my all-time favourite movie. In George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the men spend most of the 96 minutes of the movie squabbling over what to do for the best, the main female character is reduced to a catatonic state not too far removed from the encroaching ghouls outside, and the final man, no Kenneth Tovey, but the lanky, everyman-looking Duane Jones, resorts to retreating into the very cellar that he's spent most of the movie telling everyone else to avoid. He survives the night…and is promptly rewarded with a bullet through his skull for doing so. I'm not going to go into any more detail about NotLD here, like I said already, it's my favourite movie and I have discussed it previously, along with some of Romero’s other outstanding work. My point is that, for me, the film marks a point at which the definition of a male hero changed. It hit viewers with the realisation that men couldn't always be gods, that people don't always pull together when needed, that there isn't always a happy ending. 

A big theme explored in Backwoods horror is that concept of masculinity, how the traditional, i.e., square-jawed stereotype, can be subverted in the cruellest way possible. What better way to achieve this than by stripping away the layers of masculinity itself, by removing the very thing upon which a man is supposed to depend in times of trouble? The traditional, perhaps outdated image of a man is that of the provider, the person who can be relied upon when the going gets tough. Men are supposed to be resilient, hardworking, dependable, and stoic. These are all stereotypes that can easily be upturned to devastating effect. 

In Southern Comfort, Walter Hill takes a US National Guard squadron and drops them into the middle of Cajun territory for a training exercise. When one of them fires his gun in jest at a local, they soon realise that wasn't the smartest of moves, especially when the locals’ guns are loaded. It being a training exercise, the soldiers’ are carrying blanks, thereby stripping away the very thing that so many American men rely upon to assert their authority. Isolated, helpless, and with a language barrier that makes it impossible to reason (not that many folk would be happy with the excuse that they were shot at as a joke), they're soon reduced to crawling through swamp and shit, having to rely upon something other than sheer macho brawn to survive. 

Nowhere is the theme of demasculation more explicit than in Deliverance. In what is probably the movie's most talked about scene, Jon Voight and Ned Beatty (in his movie debut) are separated from rugged crossbow-wielding Burt Reynolds and Ronny Cox, only to run foul of two locals who are offended when it's suggested that they're running an illegal whiskey still in the isolated woods. Powerless and facing a loaded rifle in a place where no amount of posturing or fast talking will help, Voight is tied to a tree while Beatty is forced to strip to his underwear and made to squeal like a pig, before being violently sexually assaulted. The film shifts from man versus nature to man versus man and back again, as our purty-mouthed city dwellers find themselves further out of their depth than they could ever have imagined. Once the token macho Reynolds becomes incapacitated, it's left to the needy, almost wimpish Voight to navigate the survivors to safety by whatever means possible. Yet again, there's nothing more frightening than being stranded out of your depth, with your only certainty being that no one is coming to the rescue. 

WRAPPING UP

Okay, but why the Backwoods? Why the south? 

Over the years, the region has been unfairly maligned, with massively harmful and negative stereotypes perpetuated. The seemingly vindictive portrayal of a place where everyone is backward, violent and some sort of inbred mutant has garnered - rightfully - pushback over time, as recognition has set in that it's surely something much akin to racism; a particular demographic being slighted and demonised purely because of their geographical location. The fact that the imagery has continued to exist even now speaks of underlying themes. It speaks of resentment and distrust, of mutual misunderstanding as fallout from a civil war that might have ended a long time ago, but has never been forgotten. It lays bare conflicting attitudes about the place of religion, family, sexuality and the ideas of femininity and masculinity. It suggests that America might well be the land of the free, but there is still a lot of confusion about its actual identity. Freedom is a given, until you happen to stray somewhere you aren't wanted; territory is everything. 

The ideas and examples that I've covered in this essay are probably woefully limited and narrow in scope. Like I said right at the start, I'm no expert on the subject, I'm just a fiction author trying to get his thoughts out. I would argue that the themes I've talked about aren't just limited to Backwoods horror, and are actually universal, suitable for application across any subgenre. I mentioned previously that, in a lot of my own work as an author, I've tried to apply them, transposing themes of isolation, helplessness into my own little sandbox, a nameless city that could be anywhere, where industry is long-forgotten and the concrete, soot and dirt give the place a character, almost making it into a living, breathing thing in its own right. The Backwoods are scary, they're isolated, filled with things that should be comforting, familiar and safe…but aren't quite somehow. 

But so is everywhere, including your own city, town, or street. The world is a big, scary place. 

I get that I've probably run my mouth off for much longer than usual (man, my fingers are getting tired!), but I've had fun writing this. I just hope it makes some sense. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading, and I'll catch up with you again soon. 

Love and thanks as always, 

- L

STUFF TO WATCH AND READ

Okay, I lied, I'm not quite done. It'd be remiss of me to leave without a few viewing and reading suggestions. This is a pretty limited list, but here goes:

MOVIES

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper. 1974)

Deliverance (dir. John Boorman. 1972)

Southern Comfort (dir. Walter Hill. 1981)

Alien (dir. Ridley Scott.1979)

Scream (dir. Wes Craven. 1996)

Wrong Turn ( dir. Rob Schmidt. 2003)

You’re Next (dir. Adam Wingard. 2011)

Tucker and Dale Vs Evil (dir. Eli Craig. 2010)

The Evil Dead (dir. Sam Raimi. 1981)

Evil Dead II (dir. Sam Raimi. 1987)

READING

Deliverance (James Hickey. Houghton Miffin 1970)

Penance (Lee Glenwright. Dark Corner Press 2024)

Nightmare Movies (Kim Newman. Proteus Books. 1985, re: 1988, 1989, 2011)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion (Stefan Jaworzyn. Titan Books. 2003)

Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho (Harold Schecter. Pocket Books. 1998)

Preacher (Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon. DC Vertigo/Titan Books. 1995 - 2000)

Gone to See the River Man (Kristopher Triana. Bad Dream Books. 2024)

Right, that's yer lot for now. Time to get that banjo re-strung. Laters!