Tag Archives: Southern Gothic

When I heard that Kristi DeMeester’s first novel Beneath had Southern Gothic leanings and a damnation of religion, I knew I had to read it. In the book, reporter Cora Mayburn is handed a brow-raising assignment: coverage of a fundamentalist ...

Quite early in his career, Tobe Hooper became a formidable director with the success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974. There are some folks who dislike this film for whatever reason, but it has been championed by enough ...

Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (L’aldilà, 1981) is a masterpiece. It was not always recognized as such and even now there are certainly those who argue the point, but it is. It’s a gory, Grand Guignol guided tour through Hell. A ...

In parts one and two of my exploration of Southern Gothic films, I examined this murky subgenre from its origins in the Pre-Code films of the ‘30s to its explosion in the ‘40s and ‘50s with adaptations of the work ...

In the first part of my series on Southern Gothic cinema, I examined the origins of the Southern Gothic subgenre in literature, explored its cinematic emergence in the Pre-Code films of the ‘30s, and discussed subsequent influences like Bette Davis’s ...

Hailing from the Sunshine state The Bloody Jug Band have been described as Florida Swamp Noir. Sounding like an insane collision between alt-country, Clear Spot era Beefheart and classic Creedence with a good dose of acid fried Roky Erikson their ...

In the December 1, 1940 issue of Vogue, published just as the United States teetered on the brink of world war, novelist Carson McCullers wrote, “All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the ...

“The trouble with the world was that nobody stopped or took any care.” -Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Fear of the unknown comes in multiple stripes with one of the most common and intrinsically human being ...