Welcome to season 2 of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell and you have made it to season 2 with me. If you have listened to all of season 1, I just wanted to say thank you for listening.
It’s really important to me and I’m really thankful for all of you who have taken the time to listen to what I have put out there for you. And if you have not actually listened to the podcast of season 1, I encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes and catch up to where we are now. So this is season 2 and I thought I would start off season 2 with something I found pretty interesting.
I’m in my podcast game as I go about my life. I came across, I was looking at different rural related podcasts to listen to and I came across one from Rural Remix and what really got my attention about this one is they were doing a five-part series on the rural horror picture show instead of the rocky horror picture show. And it’s talking about how rural areas are often depicted in horror movies.
So I thought it was a really interesting take on different parts of the depiction of rural people and places in horror movies and how urban fears about the country and rural fear and what rural fears about the city. So interesting take on it and so I thought I would go through this as part of season 2. Some of my takeaways from this particular series on the rural horror picture show. One of the things that I have noticed throughout the years is that there is a definite bias of urban people who think that rural people are dumb and out of touch.
And that we are expected as rural people to have to show up and be extra impressive to supposedly be on the same playing field. And I think we’re often depicted as you know hillbillies and those type of things. But if you think about it, when we go to a city we are expected to know how to use the subway in New York City.
We’re expected to know how to use an Uber. We’re expected to know how to hail a cab or get a hotel room on the internet. You know all of the things that are normal everyday things.
If we go to a city we’re expected as a rural person to be able to figure those things out or we’re expected to already know how to do those things. But on the contrary our urban people expected to do the same things. So if an urban person comes out to a rural area, can we expect them to know how to corral a cow? Can we expect them to know how to drive a tractor? All of those things that we don’t have that equal understanding of urban people having to do those things in rural.
But the rural people are expected to know how to do those things in urban. So I’ve always thought that’s an interesting take on life and how urban has all these expectations for us as a rural person. But we don’t call them hillbillies that come from an urban area.
You know we don’t have a real name for that I guess in terms of them not being able to translate their skills to here. So I wanted to go through this episode, the first episode of the rural horror picture show, and take some of the takeaways from that. Where do horror movies happen? Small towns, dark forests, cornfields, and farmhouses have each been the locations for iconic scary films.
But why are rural settings so popular and how do these choices affect the areas represented? The rural horror picture show is a five-part series that explores the often flawed but always interesting depiction of rural people and places in horror movies. Today we are thinking about who the instigators of terror are in horror movies and why it matters whether they’re from urban or rural areas. Urbanoia.
You may think that urbanoia is a fear of the urban as that’s what the linguistics might say but it’s actually kind of the opposite which is that there’s folks who are from the city. Often they are teenagers or young people in a lot of these movies and they go into a rural space whether that’s into the woods, maybe a small town, or just sort of the countryside. And what happens is they begin to be kind of hunted down or stalked or tormented by these homicidal locals.
So it’s this urban fear of the country but honestly more a fear of the people who live there. And there was a quote in an article that we both read that said, if these films are to be believed we fear not just the hills but the hillbillies. And that’s kind of this trope that is in just so many of these movies and we you know instantly noticed this and found it over and over again.
Yeah like what’s your relationship with this concept of urbanoia in movies? Yeah I mean I think that it’s interesting that you pointed it out as sort of one of the the main tropes because since I admittedly didn’t know a ton about horror movies before we got started I feel like that was the thing that I did know. And actually I mean I hate to tell you all this the name of our podcast is a little bit of false advertising because we’re really not going to be talking about the Rocky Horror Picture Show but instead the rural horror pictures and then this is a show about it. But here we can have one chance to bring it up and that you know that is a movie that is just tropes on tropes on tropes with a little bit of queer wackiness all around also.
And that movie right borrows that trope that we’re all using all the time which is here comes the young couple they’re trying to get from point A to point B but somewhere in between they have a breakdown and then they get they have to go into the scary castle and then things happen right. And that is that same premise. I thought this was interesting and I always say there is a little bit about rural parts of the country that remind me a little bit of inner-city issues.
So there’s a lot of things that are different yes I get that but there’s a lot of things that are the same. So we both have housing problems for instance and inner-city housing when I hear people talk about that and the issues around that I see a lot of rural issues in those problems as well some some parallels from the rural and the urban centers. And on the surface it looks like we’re very different and but when you look at it from a standpoint of what our issues are we have a lot of the same issues.
Lack of resources is another one that I see that is a parallel between inner-city urban and rural areas. And you know I think that’s I think it’s all about once you know people when you get to know people it’s different it’s you understand them at a bigger level and I and you fear them a lot less. So I see a lot of those parallels in some of this urbanoia this things from the rural horror picture show series.
Horror movies you know there’s the constant the joke is like you’re telling the characters no don’t don’t go in there don’t go into the basement don’t open that door. But now as we watch these movies I’m like oh the thing is don’t go on a road trip don’t travel don’t exist and like stay where you are yeah which is a wild thing to be telling people to be afraid of which is like don’t expand your horizons to new parts of the country. Because anybody or anything could happen once you get there yeah I’d say that that’s a little problematic if you’d agree.
I would agree definitely. So I mean this trope and this experience of urbanoia is the most common thing in the movies we watched and kind of throughout the genre. But what I actually wanted to focus on for today’s episode is the reverse which is way less common but I think super interesting.
Which is when these urban dwellers as we described before they are the ones bringing the spook. They are causing the problems and often it’s that they are bringing some sort of evil to a rural area. And like I said there’s not tons of examples but I do think the ones that there are are really interesting and can give us a lot of insight into into the pervasiveness of a rural stereotype in horror movies.
It’s sort of like the exception that defines the rule and so you know the more that you’re saying oh this is what I’m seeing all the time somewhere else how is this one different. That lets you actually say okay no actually it’s pretty messed up that you know this this group of people or this part of the country is always villainized and that we’re actually surprised when there’s somebody else who is. When that’s not the standard or when it’s not expected.
Yeah and as I think we will you know quickly get into it’s not that these movies are perfect and beautiful representations of rural areas. They have absolutely their own issues but in kind of a different way. So the first movie I want to talk about I think was both one of our favorites that we watch.
We’ve both seen it before and that’s Jennifer’s body. The original script says you know we want to play to our fans even the ones that live in rural areas. And so rural was upgraded to shitty for the movie.
Yeah that is I mean I think just that change alone you can be like and that’s the podcast everyone like look at how they made this change for the script to movie. But yeah I mean the plot twist of it all is that Nikolai this band leader is not actually from Brooklyn. He we find out he’s lying about this that he is just another small-town kid.
He reveals to his bandmates that he’s from a town like Devil’s Kettle. The next thing that happens in this scene with Jennifer and maybe going to watch the band play is that a fire breaks out. Now this fire I think it’s one of the sort of intentionally ambiguous parts of the movie which is we don’t know what or who started the fire but we do see the band especially Khalid’s singer act very undisturbed by the fire that breaks out.
And throughout the movie as we’re dealing with the demonic possession of Jennifer that ends up happening we’re also dealing with the aftermath of this fire because it it’s just a town tragedy. It kills so many people. It’s a small town where everyone knows everyone kind of amplifying the tragedy of how many people were lost in this fire.
But the response to it is fascinating examination of the influence of the city band. So one thing Jennifer uses the unfortunate language of calling the bar fire a white trash pig roast. Oh my god.
Yep. Needy then reflects on the country’s quote tragedy boner for the deadly fire. The town really is reeling from this tragedy but who’s profiting off of it is the band’s low shoulder.
They get fame and success by expressing a remorse for the town that we know isn’t true. We’ve seen them talk to us on their reaction. Yeah.
We saw them not care about the fire. Yeah. What do you think about this fire and the aftermath of it? Yeah.
I mean I think you know on a couple levels it’s really interesting.
The rest of the movie sort of sets the scene of this collective mourning that all of these stuff you know all of Jennifer’s victims are sort of piled onto this already really high pile of corpses that you know for a small town to have lost so many people in one tragedy and then to have you know additional tragedies on top of that I mean there’s sort of this collective trauma which I think the movie does a pretty good job of showing even while Jennifer is being horribly callous about it all and you as the audience are sort of shocked and upset by it by that and I think you know if we want to step out into the real world for a second some communities are only given the time of day by the rest of the country if something truly awful happens.
So rural communities are only given the time of day if something truly horrible happens.
I thought that was a really interesting takeaway. So I’m thinking of the Greensburg tornado in Greensburg Kansas back 20 years ago when basically the entire town was wiped off the map by a tornado and it definitely got national attention but most people had never heard of Greensburg before that. I think of In Cold Blood that Truman Capote wrote a book on and then there were some movies about that.
That was based in a rural Kansas community and the whole family was basically wiped out by some people who had come in and they thought that they had a safe and some money and all of these things and they didn’t end up having those but they ended up killing the entire family. So the rural communities are only given the time of day if something truly horrible happens and that we need to be making we need to be telling our own story and making the news sometimes for things that are not just terrific horrible things. I thought that was just really interesting how they talked about that.
Whether that’s a natural disaster or a serial killer or whatever it is and they have their time in the national spotlight and then everybody else moves on and they’re sort of still stuck with this tragedy and that we could be talking about any number of communities that fit that description. Yeah I think that’s a great point and it definitely just sort of shows who is benefiting from this like this event and their reaction to it made it on the band’s Wikipedia is one of the things that a character said showing you know it put them on the map but it’s just a horrible tragedy for Devil’s Kettle that probably it’s not that the the town was able to to really recover thrive after this horrible thing happened. So as I spoke about we fear what we don’t know.
I believe the more exposure urban can have to rule the better and the same way around the more exposure rule can have for urban the better. Ethnic groups things you know different components like that are scary if you’ve never been around them. If you’ve never been around somebody from a different culture if you’ve never been around somebody that is different from you you fear them more.
That can go both ways as we talked about urban Noya with the city people coming out to the country and they’re being stalked and being killed in these movies. Same thing with rural versus urban to going to urban. Another thing I wanted to talk about was Megan Phelps Ropers.
So a couple of years ago somebody had brought to my attention a documentary by Steven Spielberg called Why We Hate and I thought it was a really interesting documentary you know talking about the primal things that make us differentiate ourselves from others but also where we’ve come to this day with hating other groups. One of the takeaways that I took from the documentary was from Megan Phelps Roper. She was part of the Phelps family Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas and I use church kind of lightly.
It really bothers me as a Christian to be associated with the hate groups because really it’s more of a hate group than the church. But she had said on this documentary that the more people screamed at her and told her that if she was wrong the more it ingrained in her that she was right. And I thought that was very interesting.
How can somebody telling you that you’re wrong ingrain more that you’re right than telling you that you’re wrong. And she talked about it only changed her mind when she got to know others and others responded that were different from her. Others that were different from her and others responded with compassion and love.
That was when she changed her mind about her views not when somebody was screaming at her that she was wrong. I was a blue-eyed chubby cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan.
I’d stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity surrounded by a few dozen relatives with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn’t read yet. Gays are worthy of death. This was the beginning.
Our protest soon became a daily occurrence and an international phenomenon and as a member of Westboro Baptist Church I became a fixture on picket lines across the country. The end of my anti-gay picketing career and life as I knew it came 20 years later triggered in part by strangers on Twitter who showed me the power of engaging the other. So here in these clips she talks about how people on Twitter changed her mind and how the same things that she learned about her background at the Westboro Baptist Church and the protests that she did and what people believe and how we interact now and the ability to agree to disagree has really gone out the window.
I liked her take on some of these things. So again the more you know people the more you know people that are different from you the more you understand and the more you can form your views in a way that is informed and I really liked what she had to say so listen in on this. In my home life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil.
The good was my church and its members and the evil was everyone else. My church’s antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world and that reinforced our otherness on a daily basis. Make a difference between the unclean and the clean the verse says and so we did.
From baseball games to military funerals we trekked across the country with neon protest signs in hand to tell others exactly how unclean they were and exactly why they were headed for damnation. This was the focus of our whole lives. This was the only way for me to do good in a world that sits in Satan’s lap and like the rest of my 10 siblings I believed what I was taught with all my heart and I pursued Westbro’s agenda with a special sort of zeal.
In 2009 that zeal brought me to Twitter. Initially the people I encountered on the platform were just as hostile as I expected. They were the digital version of the screaming hordes I’d been seeing at protests since I was a kid but in the midst of that digital brawl a strange pattern developed.
Someone would arrive at my profile with the usual rage and scorn. I would respond with a custom mix of bible verses, pop culture references and smiley faces. They would be understandably confused and caught off guard but then a conversation would ensue and it was civil full of genuine curiosity on both sides.
How had the other come to such outrageous conclusions about the world? Sometimes the conversation even bled into real life. People I’d sparred with on Twitter would come out to the picket line to see me when I protested in their city. A man named David was one such person.
He ran a blog called Jewlicious and after several months of heated but friendly arguments online he came out to see me at a picket in New Orleans. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem where he lives and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a God hates Jews sign. There was no confusion about our positions but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred.
We’d started to see each other as human beings and it changed the way we spoke to one another. It took time but eventually these conversations planted seeds of doubt in me. My friends on Twitter took the time to understand Westboro’s doctrines and in doing so they were able to find inconsistencies I’d missed my entire life.
Why did we advocate the death penalty for gays when Jesus said let he who is without sin cast the first stone? How could we claim to love our neighbor while at the same time praying for God to destroy them? The truth is that the care shown to me by these strangers on the internet was itself a contradiction. It was growing evidence that people on the other side were not the demons I’d been led to believe. These realizations were life-altering.
Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings I couldn’t pretend otherwise. I couldn’t justify our actions especially our cruel practice of protesting funerals and celebrating human tragedy. These shifts in my perspective contributed to a larger erosion of trust in my church and eventually it made it impossible for me to stay.
In spite of overwhelming grief and terror I left Westboro in 2012. In those days just after I left the instinct to hide was almost paralyzing. I wanted to hide from the judgment of my family who I knew would never speak to me again.
People whose thoughts and opinions had meant everything to me and I wanted to hide from the world I’d rejected for so long. People who had no reason at all to give me a second chance. I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it.
All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity but most of them didn’t and given my history it was more than I could have hoped for. Forgiveness and the benefit of doubt it still amazes me.
I spent my first year away from home adrift with my younger sister who had chosen to leave with me. We walked into an abyss but we were shocked to find light and a way forward in the same communities we targeted for so long. David my Jewish friend from Twitter invited us to spend time among a Jewish community in Los Angeles.
We slept on couches in the home of a Hasidic rabbi and his wife and their four kids. The same rabbi that I protested three years earlier with a sign that said your rabbi is a whore. We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism and life while we washed dishes in their kosher kitchen and chopped vegetables for dinner.
They treated us like family. They held nothing against us and again I was astonished. That period was full of turmoil but one part I’ve returned to often is a surprising realization I had during that time.
That it was a relief and a privilege to let go of the harsh judgments that instinctively ran through my mind about nearly every person. I realized that now I needed to learn. I needed to listen.
This has been at the front of my mind lately because I can’t help but see in our public discourse so many of the same destructive impulses that ruled my former church. We celebrate tolerance and diversity more than at any other time in memory and still we grow more and more divided. We want good things.
Justice, equality, freedom, dignity, prosperity. But the path we’ve chosen looks so much like the one I walked away from four years ago. We’ve broken the world into us and them only emerging from our bunkers long enough to lob rhetorical grenades at the other camp.
We write off half the country as out of touch liberal elites or racist misogynist bullies. No nuance, no complexity, no humanity. Even when someone does call for empathy and understanding for the other side the conversation nearly always devolves into a debate about who deserves more empathy.
And just as I learned to do, we routinely refuse to acknowledge the flaws in our positions or the merits in our opponents. Thank you again for listening to Less People. I am your host Jenny Russell and again thank you for season one and we look forward to continuing to bring you episodes here in season two.
Please give our episode a like, follow us on Spotify, go subscribe to us on Spotify or YouTube, and share it with your friends. We hope that we will hear from you if you need help or consulting or a speaker at your next event about any rural topics we would love to hear from you. So again this is Less People, I am Jenny Russell and we will talk to you on the next episode of Less People.