Welcome back to another episode of Less People. I’m your hostess Jenny Russell. So last episode we talked about Fear the Hillbillies and what that means from the Urbanoia perspective and the Rural Remix podcast called the Rural Horror Picture Show.
This time we’re going to delve further into the Rural Horror Picture Show from Rural Remix and we’re going to talk about the origins of the word hillbilly and why those origins and those meanings for hillbilly started to take place and started to have the meaning that we know today. Yeah, well today as I sort of hinted at last week and as the name of the episode might imply is the Killer Hillbillies or the Killbillies episode. So yeah, we’ll just introduce the movies that we’re going to talk about primarily really fast.
All three of them are sort of classic Urbanoia movies. They’re all from the 70s and those are Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Hills Have Eyes. But before we do I kind of want to have a quick conversation about the term hillbilly which we’ve already used a couple of times and which is going to be sort of used throughout.
I think it’s super important to note that the term hillbilly is in a lot of ways a slur but also there’s some effort to reclaim it. In this episode we’re really only going to ever use it to describe characters and stereotypes that are in the movies. We’d never apply this term to actual people but sort of the movie term for these characters they are caricatures of this sort of iconic figure and that figure is the hillbilly as you know in other movies it’s the monster and things like that.
So that’s what we’re going to use. And so that being said, I do want to talk a little bit about sort of the history of that term and the meaning of the term. There is a really great documentary that came out in 2018 that’s called Hillbilly and it sort of traces the evolution of the hillbilly stereotype in American culture and also I think makes this really interesting link to the corporate exploitation of Appalachia’s natural resources which is something that we’re going to talk about more later.
The stereotype historically has often been played for comedy right like you’ll see lots of SNL skits using it you know back in the day South Park right like there’s a hillbilly character in The Simpsons. There’s always a comedic element to it but it can also be scary as we’ve seen in the movies we’ve watched. Here’s a bite of the documentary.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War the local color writing presented Appalachia as a sort of quirky and quaint peoples. But as industrialists become interested in the region for minerals, for lumber, for coal, the people that were living there could also be seen as a kind of potential threat or at least a interference with their economic plans. And so a new conception emerges of them as a dangerous and threatening people who might threaten civilization itself.
So that was Anthony Harkins who is a history professor at Western Kentucky University and he has written a cultural history of the of the figure of the hillbilly. There are two points that I want to make before we get back to the movies about the term hillbilly. The first is that even though it sort of originates talking about Appalachian people it’s not geographically specific.
It’s a term that’s used much more broadly than that and sort of indicates anyone who’s living on the rugged end of society. And you can sort of see that that even though these three movies take place in northern Georgia, Texas, and the Nevada desert, all three of the sort of villainous groups are clearly identified as sort of within that hillbilly trope. And then the other thing that I think is really interesting to talk about is that it’s sort of ambiguous and this is something that Anthony Harkins, who’s that same professor we just heard from, talks about in his book.
He points out that there are certain qualities that define the stereotype of a hillbilly and that those qualities can be read positively as well as negative. So a few examples is that a pioneering spirit is something that we think of as being positive but that can also be read negatively as social and economic backwardness. Similarly strong family networks and values is something that is positively like that.
But if you take the negative twist of that, it can be interpreted as incest, domestic violence, bloody family feuds, right, which are all things negatively associated with the hillbilly character. And sort of another third one just to drive the point home is that living close to the land is something that we like. There’s something nice about that for a lot of people, something that people think that is missing in the city and there’s a common sense wisdom that’s necessary for that.
But on the negative sides, living close to the land can be thought of as savagery and common sense wisdom can instead be considered ignorance. So I spoke about this on the last podcast about pioneering spirit and how that shapes who rural people are. When people came out to these areas they had to be resilient, they had to be resourceful, and they definitely had the pioneering spirit.
And I don’t think that that’s bad that we still do have the pioneering spirit. Family values are strong. If I guess if that makes me a hillbilly, I’m okay with that.
Because family values are very important. And living here next to family, being able to use them as a resource to help with children and different things throughout life, being able to share your life and experience that, that’s really important too. Right.
So there’s these positives and these negatives that go together in the stereotype. Yeah. I hadn’t really ever thought about how these things could be flipped in both ways and hearing you like lay out these examples.
I’m like, oh, I’ve seen that so many times, which is, I think especially the last one of living close to the land is something that so often we know we want that connection with something we support and promote, but then so quickly it’s turned into, yeah, savagery, like you said, that it’s something bad. And it just, it’s really interesting to think about how quickly it can be turned against someone.
It made me think a lot about what we were talking about last episode about the ambiguous space of rural America, because one thing we talked about last time when we were discussing Urbanoia and the reverse of Urbanoia was that it wasn’t that reverse Urbanoia was doing something incredibly positive in depicting rural America because both of these situations in movies, having the city bring the horror or the rural bring the horror, we’re relying on a perception that the rural and the urban were separate, that rural America was inherently different.
And it was this sort of inherent perceived lack of progress, lack of modernity, but the difference was which is more scary, the lack of it or is modernity scary, but it was still doing something negative and saying, oh, progress doesn’t exist in rural America. And then progress doesn’t exist. Progress is always happening.
Your town is always changing, no matter how small or how big, something’s always changing and there’s no reality that can change that one. And this is doing the same thing, which is you can take the hillbilly stereotype as positive or negative, but it’s still othering in the sense, which is a problem in general. Yes.
Yeah, I’d agree. So yeah, that was super helpful to understand the history of hillbilly and understanding what the stereotype means and does. This is a stereotype that shows up in all three of the movies we’re going to talk about.
What’s going on with these movies, these 70s movies? Can you tell us about these films? Yeah, for sure. So I will just try to do a brief overview. Again, spoilers are incoming, but since it’s been literally 50 years since these movies came out, I don’t feel too bad about it.
You shouldn’t. So let’s start with Deliverance. Deliverance, pretty simply, is for suburban friends who are going canoeing on a river in northern Georgia.
The reason that they’re going canoeing on this river is because it’s about to be dammed to create a hydroelectric dam, specifically to provide power for Atlanta, which is a growing city at that point. Which is where they’re from. Which is where they’re from, yes.
They’re from suburban Atlanta. They’re going on this trip, having a nice little manly adventure, and two of the men go ashore in a boat and are attacked by these two men who are clearly locals. They are then rescued by their two friends who are in the second canoe.
One of the friends shoots the attacker through the chest with an arrow and kills him. The other attacker runs away. So after much discussion, the suburbanites bury the body of the first man and get back on the river, and a pursuit ensues on the river with the second attacker.
Next, chronologically, is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which sounds exactly like what it is. A group of teens are taking a bit of a road trip through Texas, and they end up in this slaughterhouse town. They encounter a hitchhiker.
The hitchhiker is super weird and into slaughtering stuff. Yeah, it’s very scary. Yeah, it’s a really intense scene.
Also, not a seatbelt in sight. This is 1974. The whole lesson of the movie is wear your seatbelt.
Yeah, I think it would help. Sure, sure. It’s just these things that I fixate on.
Yeah, so they end up exploring this area and one by one end up trespassing, basically, and enter into this other house, which is where the villainous family lives. They’re a family of displaced meat workers who have now turned to killing and eating humans, and they encounter Leatherface, who is an iconic horror villain. He is an iconic horror villain.
He’s got a little skin mask, and he wears an apron, and he’s essentially a butcher, and he proceeds to kill and butcher them one by one. And then the third movie is The Hills Have Eyes. Once again, suburban family, this time from Cleveland, is on a road trip.
They’re on their way to Los Angeles. They sort of get off the main road. Their car breaks down.
It actually ends up breaking down in this air base and missile range. It’s a nuclear testing site, and there they are attacked by, who else, a family of mutant cannibals, who are also sort of hillbillies. And one by one, they’re attacked and killed.
The remaining three end up sort of fighting back and defeating the hillbillies, so they get away. But yeah, that’s sort of the basic rundown of the movies. They all came out pretty close to each other.
So Anya, I’ve got to ask, is it a coincidence? Is it connected? What’s going on with these strange movies in the 70s? Yeah, that is a really good question. So, you know, in that span of time, while these movies are coming out, there is a lot of political instability in the United States. The Vietnam War is a big factor.
Watergate happens, you know, that scandals around 72 to 74. So sort of right when the first two movies are coming out. There’s also a new environmental consciousness that we’re going to talk about later that’s sort of important, but the first Earth Day is celebrated.
The EPA is established. There also is a lot of economic mess that’s actually pretty reminiscent to what we’ve been going through in the last couple of years. Oil prices skyrocket because there is sort of instability with negotiations with OPEC.
There is horrible inflation, a really big recession from around 1973, 1975. So yeah, the 70s is a hot mess, basically. We maybe shouldn’t be shocked necessarily that some of these movies came out.
And I think also importantly, this is sort of in the decade following Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, which really did a lot to put Appalachia sort of in the broader consciousness of the rest of the United States and is where a lot of imagery, especially that we see in Deliverance, sort of comes from a straight from that playbook of the camera sort of descending on these Appalachian towns and showing, you know, what was sort of described the rest of the country as this abject poverty that was sort of internal. All of these things have to do with the era that they were Yeah. I’m pretty interested by what you’re saying about the environmental elements, because I feel like the environment and the landscapes are a character in each of these movies.
And so I’m curious what the connection between environmental movements of the 70s, environmental crisis of the 70s, and these three movies might be. Yes. Great question.
I actually had a chance to talk to Carter Soles, who is a professor at SUNY Brockport, and he sort of does this eco-horror based analysis. And so, yeah, there is a lot going on here with the environment, like you said. Carol J. Clover, who is somebody who we mentioned in the previous episode, is a film scholar.
And she has this line where she writes that in these urbanoia films, the city always comes to the country guilty. And that’s because there’s sort of an acknowledgment in these movies that the environmental destruction and economic struggles that are happening in the countryside are for the benefit of the city and therefore for the benefit of the urban or suburban interlopers. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the family is a group of displaced meat workers, right? The hitchhiker says in his sort of introductory scene that people get put out of work because of the new sort of air gun that’s being used to slaughter cattle as opposed to the old sledgehammer.
And then in The Hills Have Eyes, there’s something similar going on where we know that there’s resource extraction in the area because there used to be a silver mine that’s dried up. But there’s also this narrative, which doesn’t entirely work if you actually look closely at the film’s timeline, but they make it clear that this is an army missile site and a nuclear testing site. The movie definitely wants you to think, oh, this is a nuclear testing site and maybe some of the mutant degeneracy that we’re seeing in this family is related to that, right? And that’s a great example of science being super scary.
Yeah. Even if the timeline of when Papa Juke was born doesn’t line up, it’s not a coincidence that this movie was made at the end of the Vietnam War when people were thinking about what is the damage of war? What can it do to humanity? Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking about the guilt element that you brought up that the city people are coming in with a guilt and that clip you played from Deliverance, I think shows that really well, sets them up as, you know, they’re just like you.
The interesting thing is they do set up as being like, we have this guilt about the river, about the land that the area we’re living in is exploiting and extracting and destroying. But then they needed to do something to allow us to sort of root for them and that he had to put the moral weight of murder on the suburbanites. It’s just interesting that it starts with a guilt and then they’re like, okay, quick, we can’t have that be too intense because as the theatrical trailer says, they’re just like you.
And so we can’t have our audience feeling too upset. Let’s flip it and let’s show something scary about the rural area so you don’t feel too bad, which I just think is really interesting way this movie is set up. It starts one way and quickly flips to the other.
Yeah, totally. And that’s, I think, gets at the heart of one of the most interesting sort of comparisons between these three movies where you sort of have Deliverance on one side, Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the other, and then maybe Hilltop is sort of in the middle. So all three of these movies have the killer, Hillbilly, either sort of as a pair or in family form as the villain.
There is much more effort to sort of show this family sort of in their environment, but also explain to a degree why they’re doing what they’re doing. We know that they’ve been displaced, they’ve been left out of work. Horror movies can be read by how empathetically they treat the monster.
Every horror movie has a monster. That monster has to threaten normality in some way. But how we feel about that monster and also sort of how we feel about normality can be read differently depending on how they’re treated.
So in Deliverance, the normal men are the suburbanites. We are immediately aligned with them in the voiceover, like you said. And once they’ve been assaulted, you’re totally on their side.
They can do whatever they want, right? Because the people that are there are weird and scary anyways, right? There’s no identification. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’re in it with the family, you understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. And there are these shots of Leatherface, which where Leatherface seems sort of fretting.
All of these people are coming into his house. They just walk right in, these teenagers, they walk right into his house and he kills them and puts them in the meat freezer or whatever as a reaction. But he’s not going out hunting them.
They’re literally walking into his home and he’s killing sort of almost in defense, right? Yeah. And also there’s a family element of Leatherface and his family that as you were talking about in our original understanding of the hillbilly stereotype is that close family ties is something we view as positive in some ways. And the Leatherface family, there’s a grandfather, they’re taking care of their family, they’re feeding and supporting their family.
They’re doing it through murder and cannibalism. But there’s that element of sympathy because you’re like, look, they’re providing for each other. They’re respecting their elders.
Right. Even grandma’s corpse is preserved in the attic. True.
So sort of in the middle, we have The Hills Have Eyes where we actually get a lot of visual shots from the point of view of the sort of Papa Jupiter clan, which is something that depending on how your level of film bro-iness, you may care about more than others. But I mean, physically, we’re identifying with the camera who’s looking at them from the point of view of these people. Yes.
And it is clear that this family is starving, right? And nobody goes down those roads anymore. The natural resources have already been plundered. It’s been sort of taken over by the military industrial complex to do dangerous things with.
And they don’t have any other resources, nor do they really have a chance of fitting in with mainstream society. And there’s an argument that can be made that the killer hillbillies proximity to the land can make them sort of a stand in for the non-human element of eco horror. Right.
Which, of course, is, you know, like we said, something to think about and be challenged. Right. We don’t like saying that people are not actually people, of course.
But through this lens, it can be thought about that way. And in that sense, the killer hillbilly can almost act as an agent getting revenge on the urban or suburban family almost on behalf of Mother Earth. You know, we’ve sort of already established that deliverance is the least sympathetic, at least, you know, as far as these as far as depicting killer hillbillies can be sympathetic.
But it had a huge lasting impact on people’s perceptions of Appalachia and rural America, which we’ll get into later. But I mean, I was this summer telling somebody that I was working on this podcast and that deliverance was one of the movies we were going to talk about. And she had moved nearly 30 years ago to sort of southern Kentucky.
And she was like, I legitimately thought it was going to be like deliverance when I moved down there. Wow. And this is, you know, a highly educated woman.
I really, really like her. And she that was the impression she had, because that was what was in the media. Right.
And so, you know, it is so much fun and so interesting, at least for me, to go deep and think about all of these different implications about, you know, what the politics of these movies actually may be. But that doesn’t mean that the larger takeaway for a lot of people is not going to be scary hillbillies. That’s a great point.
And I really appreciate you leading us through this kind of conversation, because it is so fascinating. And I think putting movies in the context of the time that they’re in and really thinking about why was this made? What does it mean is awesome. But it is important to understand that you have to you have to look at a movie without all the context and without the layer of intellectualizing and think about what is just the stereotype on screen or what’s just the image, even if you’ve never seen the movie, especially a movie like Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
It’s in the popular opinion as just sort of a thing you reference without even seeing it. And so, therefore, you have to understand that some people are going to be like this person you were talking to. Think of the whole area based off of a general concept of a movie they’ve heard of or have seen.
But it’s really pervasive and that can be harmful. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode of Less People and the origins of the word hillbilly and how we got to calling people that over the years and what that means for us today. I’m your hostess, Jenny Russell, and we will see you on the next episode of Less People.