WATCHobscureAxe
1974 · USA
68 minutes, shot in nine days, and oddly melancholy for something on a banned list.
1972 onward · 23 films
Backwoods / Hillbilly
City people take a wrong turn. The countryside has been waiting.
Backwoods horror is about class, and it is almost always told from the side of the people who drove in.
The setup
A group with money and education leaves the city for a weekend. The locals are poor, inbred and hostile. The car breaks down or the map is wrong. The film then punishes the visitors, and the audience is invited to find the rural population frightening in themselves, which is the part that has aged worst.
Deliverance
Deliverance (1972) is not a horror film and is the founding text of this one. Its assault scene entered the culture so completely that the banjo tune is now shorthand for the entire subgenre. Everything after it is working with what it established.
Hooper and Craven
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) came from an oil crisis, a slaughterhouse and Ed Gein. Hooper shot it in Texas heat with a small crew who came to hate each other; the exhaustion on screen is real. It has almost no blood and is more upsetting than most films with a great deal.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977) makes the subtext text: a nuclear family versus a family mutated by nuclear testing, and by the end the difference in method between them has closed.
The 2000s revival
Wrong Turn (2003) and the Texas Chainsaw and Hills remakes brought it back with better cameras and none of the grain. They are competent and interchangeable.
The good inversion
The Descent (2005) takes the same structure underground and removes the class politics entirely, which frees it to be simply the most frightening British horror film of its decade.
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The whole shelf
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