Louisiana Has a Place in Horror

Louisiana Horror Films

Our homestate has a history of hosting the uncanniest of stories

By Chris Turner-Neal

As we have taken pains to inform you in these pages, Louisiana is like nowhere else in the world. This uniqueness makes it han interesting place to live and buoys our crucial tourism economy—and also renders the state a great setting for horror fiction. Noël Carroll, a philosopher of horror, argues that horror emerges when something breaks or defies the categories we use to organize the world. We might be scared of a dog or a strange man, but they make sense; a dog that is a man when it’s not a full moon or a man who dresses as his mother and stabs hotel guests should not be.

Courtesy of MPA

Louisiana is consistently uncategorizable. Much of the land is only kind of land, and what looks like a reasonable foothold in the swamp might give way under your weight. Creoles and free people of color, prominent in the state’s history, were categories outside the established American racial classification. Still widely religious in a secularizing world, Louisiana is home to many Catholics, outliers in the Deep South, and to practitioners of Voodou, a religion born from boundary-blurring that frequently (if unfairly) disturbs outsiders. The state’s grand plantation houses underpin the tourism economy and serve as the setting for plentiful stories of hauntings—which, depending on the particular tale, may or may not address the real-life horrors of the state’s bygone slavery-based riches. Louisiana is composed of juxtapositions and often simply weird, and all it takes is a dimming of the lights and a creaky floorboard for that to get scary. And in most of the big trends in horror in the last sixty years, there’s been at least one entry that is distinctly Louisiana.

Call it hag horror, psychobiddy, or grande dame guignol— once the big-shouldered broads of the golden age of cinema reached a certain age, they started making horror movies. Joan Crawford with an axe. Shelley Winters as the deranged Auntie Roo. Bette Davis had the best run, making Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte; the under-celebrated Dead Ringer; and Wicked Stepmother, in which Davis was replaced partway through with a cat puppet that smoked cigarettes.

Her turn in 1964’s deliciously insane, Ascension Parish-set Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte works best for audiences that see Louisiana as exotic. Olivia de Havilland’s character comes from up north to “help” Bette Davis save her condemned plantation house (Houmas House). Her chic appearance contrasts with Davis’s creepy younger-woman dresses and Agnes Moorehead’s tattered clothes. De Havilland is “the real world,” the rational character, who throws into relief how bizarrely Davis’s shotgun-wielding faded belle behaves. Local audiences may find Davis’s character more sympathetic—of course you resist an eminent domain claim with gunfire—but she (and her hallucinations) can’t claim to represent the established order.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Italian horror creators like Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Lucio Fulci, and Mario Bava created giallo movies; gory, gorgeous films full of suspense and bizarre violence. (Giallo, Italian for “yellow,” connects them to cheap crime paperbacks published in Italy with yellow covers.) The forerunners of modern slasher movies, the best of them capture a particular camp glamor—it’s almost worth being crushed under a modernist statue to get to spend time in the elegant Roman settings. Most stayed in Italy, but Fulci’s 1981 The Beyond gives the Southern Gothic the spaghetti Western treatment. Weak on narrative but heavy on creepiness, the dreamy-nightmarish film sees a woman inherit a hotel in New Orleans that—drat the luck—has a gateway to Hell in the basement. (“But is there off-street parking?”) Ghouls pester her and winnow down the cast before one of the most depressing endings in horror. The setting doesn’t strictly matter to the story—the inherited hotel could have been in Venice or Sicily or Transylvania—but the Spanish moss and distinctive architecture of the city do some of Fulci’s work for him. He, and his audience, know that if there is a gateway to hell, it’s probably in a place like New Orleans.

A couple of decades later, after The Blair Witch Project upended expectations of what a horror movie could be, directors raced to create “the next Blair Witch Project.” The winner for speed if not quality, The St. Francisville Experiment (2000), is not, by most standards, a good movie, but it’s important as one of the first found-footage horror films to be released. The plot argues that Madame LaLaurie, after the discovery of her cabinet of horrors, fled not to Paris but to the Florida Parishes. 170 years later, some twenty-somethings turn up with a camera and encounter the impatient dead. The genre that would dominate multiplexes during the aughts was still defining itself, and if this Feliciana-set haunted house caper doesn’t follow the “rules,” that’s partly because it predates them. The relevant point here is that when filmmakers sought to follow where Blair Witch led, the answer to the question “where might some goobers with a camera encounter a supernatural force they can neither understand nor control” was immediately “Louisiana!”

The found footage genre returned to the state in 2010’s The Last Exorcism, in which a scamster exorcist comes across a case of possession that doesn’t respond to his placebos. Along with 2007’s The Reaping, in which a small town is beset with the plagues of Exodus, The Last Exorcism depends on the state’s reputation for religiosity for effect. For tension between characters to work effectively, some of them need to take possessions and prophecies at face value—otherwise, these would be short movies about taking a teenage girl to a psychiatrist and testing soil samples for anthrax. There are people of faith all over the world and creators can and do make films with religious characters set in other places, but again, setting can support the director’s goals: a sign that reads “What Are You Waiting for? The Lord Don’t Have All Day” tells the audience we’re in a place where the burden of proof is on science, not on the faith that’s part of the landscape. (Plus, The Reaping offers a chance to see a young Idris Elba pelted with dead frogs.)

Louisiana even has its own slow-moving, tool-wielding, never-dying big bad guy in the Freddy and Jason vein. The Hatchet series of films focus on Victor Crowley, a tool-wielding denizen of the Honey Island Swamp who occasionally disrupts swamp tours with colossal violence. (By no means does he limit himself to the titular hatchet.) The first movie was released in 2006, and so there’s a lot of winking in between the blood spray—the killer is even played by Kane Hodder, an alum of the Friday the 13 th series. If it’s sillier than its inspirations—torsos don’t really fly apart that easily, or you could learn surgery in a night class—the MPAA that assigns film ratings remained unamused, threatening an NC-17 rating and demanding cuts. Audiences liked them better, with director Adam Green promising a fifth film and star Danielle Harris teasing a sixth.

Movie still for the 2020 film Antebellum which amplifies the horror of American slavery through a modern character.

As public history has become more open about the real-life horrors of slavery, fiction addressing similar issues has found a broader audience. The horror in 2020’s Antebellum comes from a modern look at what parts of Louisiana used to be. The viewers share the point of view of a present-day Black woman transported onto a pre-emancipation plantation, who experiences the horror both as an African American and as a person from a time when slavery is no longer considered part of the natural order. The horror works because slavery horrifies modern audiences as well as the character—we understand her dislocation. If Antebellum is more interested in making a point than some other horror movies—and according to some reviewers, more interested in a point than making the best creative choices—that just makes it part of the contemporary movie-making landscape. Escapism will always have a following, but today it competes with entertainment with a message.

Courtesy of MPA

In fairness, I should also say: there’s a vibrant film industry here, which has helped make the state a horror haven. The 1988 remake of The Blob dressed Abbeville up (unconvincingly) as a California ski town, but more recent films haven’t bothered. Late in 10 Cloverfield Lane, a highway mileage sign appears to place the events somewhere between Lafayette and Lake Charles. Happy Death Day and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U don’t need to take place in New Orleans, but it’s also fine for a hapless co-ed to attend a recognizable Loyola University.

(The killer’s mask, reminiscent of the short-lived Baby Cakes mascot, led to a lawsuit from the designer of that grim moment in baseball history.) As long as the film industry continues to fulfill audiences’ dark desires for the creepy and macabre, and as long as Louisiana stays uncategorizable enough to set the scene, we’ll continue to see our state on the screen—and to watch through our fingers.

Through mid-November, visit the Movie Poster Archives store in Gretna for an exhibition on Louisiana horror films.