Mysterious Glow

I recently watched the film Wrong Turn 2. It’s a tasteless and ugly movie about murderous inbred cannibalistic hillbillies. It is so gross, that it almost put me off my dinner. Wrong Turn 2 is a sequel – obviously– to a film I haven’t seen. But I wasn’t lost in its complexities. There a lot of movies like this.

Ya’ll listen up now. This here is some real homespun cultural anthropology and film criticism. I think movies like The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the recent Scottish film, Doomsday, are explorations of long held xenophobia and fear of the Other. Country people’s ways and habits are demonized into something grotesque. Cannibalism and incest are worldwide taboos, but horror films would have us believe that rural people are just this close to reverting to a primitive atavistic existence.

A similar demonization of the Other can be seen in the various blood libels that people accuse each other of participating in. It was common to accuse Jews, different denominations of Christianity, gypsies, American Indians, et al. of cannibalism and using the blood of children for mysterious rites. In the 1980s, the United States went through the so-called Satanic Panic, and these weird stories of infanticide and cannibalism crept up again. Thank goodness that human beings don’t do these kind of things.

The first story I can think of that is about rural, inbred savages, is the myth of Scottish murderer Sawney Bean, who with his murderous family, kidnapped and ate travelers. This legend inspired Wes Craven to write an American version, The Hills Have Eyes. His inbred hillbillies got that way from atomic testing. I think Sawney Bean got that way from being Scottish.

Deliverance and the very brutal Belgian film, Calvaire, – which is about Belgium hillbillies if you can believe such a thing – are not about incest, but other sexual taboos. These films are a demonization of rural life, which is depicted as nasty and crude, as opposed to civilization, which is clean and warm.

I think the Jerry Springer show plays on society’s fears of rural white people. It is a form of this Hick Horror. A lot of the participants on that show are out-and-out frauds, but nevertheless Jerry Springer will parade some redneck type out and ask him why he is here. “Well Jerry, it’s like this. For the past couple of months, I’ve been sleeping with my sister.” The crowd erupts in jeers, and the redneck guy, who will lose his shirt by the end of the show, will get up and scream back, “Ya’ll don’t know me!”

Fear of the Other is not just limited to country areas. The evil actions in the H.P. Lovecraft short story, The Horror at Red Hook, are caused entirely by immigrants and their strange culture. Lovecraft, who was a frail, tweedy intellectual, describes Italian and other immigrants in frightening tones, he must have been clearly afraid of them in life. China Miéville, who is a brilliant writer, talks briefly about Lovecraft’s “fever dream of prejudice” in this small clip. Note: Are you reading China Miéville? If not, then what the hell is wrong with you?

William Faulkner’s Southern family, The Snopes, are terrible people, but they never started eating people. It is time for horror and suspense writers of movies and books, to stop using “inbred cannibalistic hillbillies” as a trope. I quite like rural people and if these writers would take the time to talk to these Others, they wouldn’t seem so scary.