Southern Gothic

Big Cypress Bayou, Caddo Lake, Texas

There's something in the water in the Deep South. Maybe it's moonshine, maybe it's poverty (how, exactly, poverty gets in the water is a question that would fall beneath the purviews of your conundrums of philosophy). Maybe it's both of those, plus the heat and the constant sense that the goddamn Yankees are still keeping the Confederacy down; maybe it's some wild romantic streak inherited from the Cavaliers who settled the place two hundred years ago; but there's SOMETHING going on that makes the imagination as fertile as the plantation sod, growing something dark and twisted and bitter...

Louisiana is especially good for it, its neighbouring Mississippi nearly as rich. Horror grows like kudzu, a lush bayou setting for monsters or magic or the deeper and subtler horror of simple humans. It's a hint of the macabre, with a hint of humour that makes it all that much more terrible. It can be vampires, zombies, voodoo, murder, racism, the hell of other people in small towns where public opinion is better currency and harder-won than pure gold; something great and Lovecraftian crawling out of the Spanish moss or something quiet and insidious creeping through the neighbours' hearts.

It's been put in writing by William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Preston & Child, and dozens more. It's spawned murder ballads by the score. And for art you have only to look to the setting itself: aging brick and wrought-iron in Louisiana cities that saw their best years before the Civil War, dilapidated mansions being reclaimed by the swampland, old men sitting on the side of the road in broke-down hats, historic markers for the death sites of Depression-era outlaws.

Even a transplanted Northerner can't help but feel it, sinking into the soul with the weight of the humid air.

Charlie Robison - Magnolia (website)
The Builders and the Butchers - Bottom of the Lake (myspace)
Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue - Where the Wild Roses Grow (website)
Murder By Death - Shiola (website)