Deliverance derivations: Counter constructions of white trash in 1970s horror cinema

Through the multiple and often overlapping terms of ‘hicksploitation’, ‘hixploitation’ ‘crackersploitation’, as well as the more general tag of ‘white trash’, American cinema has developed an established set of themes and visual tropes to represent its rural poor across a variety of genres and historical timeframes. Although the longstanding myth of the rural hick has inspired a wide variety of cinematic cycles during the 1950s and 1960s, the most prolific era of white trash cinema remains the 1970s. Here, images of debased rurality circulated most prominently within the horror genre. Across a wide range of narratives 1970s horror cinema popularised the American South as a foreboding terrain whose dwellers exact retribution for their social and political marginality against unwitting urban ‘outsiders’.

This explosion of American rural themed horror during the decade has been subject to a wide range of critical interpretations. For instance, Robin Wood (1984) linked its key examples to his ‘return of the repressed’ hypothesis, viewing these productions as a crucial reflection of the social, sexual and psychological elements marginalised by mainstream American culture. Additionally, writers such as Annaelee Newitz (1997), John Hartigan Jnr (2005) and Matt Wray (2006) have traced these representations back to the pseudo-scientific eugenic studies of the 1920s. Here, they have identified a series of myths surrounding disenfranchised rural inhabitants and their physiological constructions, presumed criminal proclivities and gender traits that have travelled from early ethnographic studies to later exploitation film traditions.

In their accounts, Newitz, Hartigan Jnr, Wray and more recent scholars such as McCarroll (2018) have all used John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) as a master-text to consider how rural communities become represented as monstrous on the basis of their marginalised class, physiological and racial characteristics. My chapter applies these innovative accounts to a range of untheorized productions that were often created by regional filmmakers following the release of Boorman’s narrative. As a result, ‘Deliverance Derivations: Counter Constructions of White Trash Horror in 1970s Horror Cinema’ considers the work of directors such as S.F.Brownrigg, whose 1976 production Scum of the Earth (AKA Poor White Trash II) offers a corrective to dominant white trash horror tropes by detailing a marginal rural family as subject to violence from countercultural youth members. These counter constructions will be further explored through an analysis of related titles such as William Grefé’s 1977 film Whiskey Mountain, which charts the deceptive nature of urban criminals masquerading behind disaffected rural communities. The chapter concludes by considering how 1970s films such as Jackson County Jail (Michael Miller, 1976) and Nightmare in Badham County (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1976) extended existing horror tropes into examinations of gender and racial injustice within rural penitentiary systems.