Bernice Murphy's The Rural Gothic is a timely and welcome contribution at a moment of intensive popular cultural production centering on backwoods settings. Since the year 2000, at least two hundred horror films have featured the dangers that befall people who dare to enter rural American places where they do not belong. The Rural Gothic comprises a “detailed analysis of literary and filmic texts” informed by “consideration of specific historical, cultural, political, and ecological contexts” (3). Murphy tracks backwoods horror tropes back to the initial European settlement of North America, beginning with captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson's. Subsequent chapters trace the errand in the wilderness (including Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland), notions of “going native” (for example in The Shining), themes of cannibalism (as in Two Thousand Maniacs!), and the apocalyptic revolt of nature (The Happening). Like the horror genre more generally, fear of the wilderness arises, according to Murphy, from the uneasiness caused by the ultimate “uncertainty” of the boundaries between human and nonhuman, natural and supernatural (following William Cronon). The Rural Gothic explores “three distinct but closely related kinds of environments: the ‘wilderness,’ the ‘backwoods,’ and the ‘rural’ setting” (6). Murphy insightfully observes that “the central conflict in the Rural Gothic” is that “those who stay in one place are threatened by those that don't, and vice versa” (10).

Murphy situates backwoods horror not only within the horror tradition but also within the longer tradition of the Gothic. Citing David Punter, Murphy examines the Gothic as a literary form that represents “excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and uncivilized” (3). She outlines four features “indigenous” to American Gothic in particular, according to Allan Lloyd Smith: “the frontier, the Puritan legacy, race, and the consequences of political utopianism” (4). She argues that the legacy of European settlement gave “rise to the Rural Gothic tradition” and “continue[s] to influence American horror” (3). Both “American horror and Gothic narratives frequently return to the forests that confronted European settlers and explorers in the early colonial period”; “something keeps drawing writers and film-makers back to this point of initial contact” (2) and “the nation's ‘buried’ racial past” (1). Whereas the American “suburban Gothic” genre, which Murphy analyzed in a previous book, “arose out of a specific set of historical and cultural circumstances” and only applies to texts released between 1948 and 2008, Murphy argues that the Rural Gothic is not bound by a limited time frame (5).

The chapter “The Rural Poor as Monstrous Other” offers a comprehensive taxonomy of the backwoods horror film, providing an overview of common elements, such as “the reason for the road trip,” “last chance for gas,” deformity, trespass, cannibalism, the car graveyard. Murphy argues for identifying two varieties of backwoods horror. Type 1 is descended largely from Deliverance (1972); “the antagonists are resentful working-class men” dueling with urban masculinity and deserving some degree of audience sympathy. In Type 2, descended from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), “the antagonists are degenerate, savage, and often cannibalistic family groups” preying on a mixed-sex group of college kids (147–50).

My one misgiving about The Rural Gothic is its seeming confidence in Americans’ long-term cultural memory. Murphy may be correct that (white) Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries continued to feel haunted by the genocide and peril that accompanied European settlement of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and by the fate met by the Donner party in 1846–47. But I wonder if that doesn't give too much credit to the state of history education in the United States. It seems more likely that the popularity of the backwoods trope must have its sources in the anxieties and desires of audiences particular to each historical moment in which the form resurges. We are certainly witnessing one such moment today, and Murphy's gift to us is the charting of the deep history of the genre's perennial popularity as well as the contours of its contemporary manifestations.