Southern Gothic - Television Tropes & Idioms

The creepy, gothic version of the rural Southeast United States. Scenes show dying vegetation, decaying plantations, rusty farm implements, forbidding swamps with something lurking within, and frighteningly expressionless folk standing around doing...nothing, except staring at the protagonists.

See also Deep South, which is portrayed as more morally than materially decrepit. Compare Lovecraft Country and The Savage South.

Examples:

Film

Deliverance
Easy Rider
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Rob Zombie's films House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects
The Skeleton Key
Squirm
Eve's Bayou

Literature

Tobacco Road
Various novels by William Faulkner.
Nearly everything Flannery O'Connor ever wrote.
To Kill A Mocking Bird has elements of this, as well as being set in the Deep South.
The Other by Thomas Tryon
Anne Rice's Blackwood Farm has more mausoleums than people, not to mention an entire house sunk to the second story in a swamp.
The early novels of Cormac McCarthy.