Queering the South: Class, Race and Religion in the Postmillennial Horror Film

Abstract

There is widespread agreement among Southern studies scholars such as Leigh Ann Duck, Jennifer Rae Greeson and Tara McPherson that the Southern imaginary functions as ‘internal Other’ in American culture. Building upon this research, I examine the relationship of the Southern imaginary’s to Julia Kristeva’s figuration of the abject, and explore the potential for Judith Butler’s conception of the reclaimed abject queer to be utilised as a model for a reclamation of the South. This reclamation is best modelled by the recent cinematic horror genre because of the way that it enacts narratological and literal violence and thus can also be seen to have the potential to queer the dominant culture. Using Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s classification of the ‘postmodern’ horror genre from approximately the 1970s onwards as a basis, I argue that the genre has further evolved into a ‘postmillennial’ form from approximately 2000 onwards. Both of these subgenres are characterised by their glorification of the monster and their exploration of various abject categories such as class and race as well as or instead of gender, which is most frequently invoked in horror scholarship, but this is truer of postmillennial horror cinema, especially due to its frequent lack of a surviving ‘Final Girl’ figure. I further examine the role of class in postmodern and postmillennial Southern horror cinema by examining the history of class division in the South and linking it to the depictions of Southern horror film monsters. I also explore the separation between poverty and relative lack of education, which I term low socio-economic class, and ‘inappropriate’ behaviour and taste, which I term low action-based class, and consider the ways in which ‘white trash’ practitioners of the latter might be reclaimed through a queer interpretation that privileges camp in horror film. To this end, I present a reading of Rob Zombie’s debut feature film, House of 1000 Corpses (2003), as queer white trash horror. Finally, expanding upon Sharon Patricia Holland’s work on the queerly undead black subject, I examine the way that racial issues may still be evoked in the Southern horror genre despite the relative dearth of non-white characters by validating alternate, theocentric worldviews through the genre’s depiction of voodoo/hoodoo, undead entities and charismatic Christianity. In this way, Southern horror privileges African-American and remote and underprivileged white Southern cultures in a manner that has the potential to reject traditionally white, ascetic Protestant cultural imperialism. Thus, the queerness of the South in the modern horror genre challenges not only the division of the United States into idealised North and aberrant South, but also the privileged position of the Western rationalist worldview in modern society that underpins the assumptions about race and religion in the South that support this demarcation in the first place.