Jacobin | Ithaca Productions/Athena Film GmBH
The Southern Gothic series offers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to examining elite abuses of power over several generations. Such long-standing abuses create in many of these narratives an overpowering atmosphere of evil that characters often mistake for something supernatural, or that pushes them toward their own outlandish cruelties, or a morbid and brutal religiosity. Taken together, these films constitute a sensationalistic reckoning with the grim legacy of Southern culture in the United States.