It's the road less traveled for a reason...
Works where the horror lurks in the realm of rural areas where modern man doesn't belong. Expect inbreds, deranged killers and especially
Cannibal Clans.
Don't Go in the Woods (usually in the
Deep/
Savage South) is the most common flavor, though other locales such as a
swamps,
deserts,
abandoned towns,
deserted islands, endless stretches of highway,
beneath the bustling city streets, and even
snowscapes have seen use.
Wikipedia refers to this as "
Hixploitation
".
Film
Literature
- Apeshit
- Close to every novel and short story Edward Lee has ever written, which he calls "redneck horror".
- In The Lurking Fear by H. P. Lovecraft it turns out the "monsters" are the cannibalistic descendants of a single family, and are so heavily inbred they have become goblin-like.
Live-Action TV
- The Criminal Minds episodes "Open Season" and "To Hell and Back".
- The Friday The13th The Series episode "The Long Road Home".
- Parodied on a Saturday Night Live sketch from Season 26, Episode 14. A man is in a car accident, and when he wakes up, asks where he is. He's told, "You're tied to a bed in a shack. We're weird hillbilly cannibals and we're gonna stick things in your butt." After he freaks out, he's told he's actually in a hospital; the hillbilly cannibal thing is "an old hospital joke".
- The Supernatural episode "The Benders".
- The Torchwood episode "Countrycide".
- The X-Files episode "Home".
- The Last Reality Show features a gang of hillbilly-marauders.
Tabletop Games
- Pathfinder features the ogres, which can really only be described as demented hillbilly rapists, at best.
- Vampire: The Requiem offers two bloodlines who are twists on this, both of which (unsurprisingly enough) are Gangrel: the Oberlochs, an inbred family descended from cruel mine owners who cling to the backwoods and readily recruit; and the Mabrys, who bring the prey to them by running backroad watering holes and road houses.
Video Games
