Let’s Trace the Genre Roots of Hicksploitation All the Way Back to Swamp Water (1941)

If you’ve read this newsletter before, or you’ve chatted with me about movies, you’ve probably heard me speak fondly of the hicksploitation subgenre (most recently regarding The Hills Have Eyes). And you’ve probably rolled your eyes over how often I use this niche term, which is fair.

However! For those of you who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, allow me to use Swamp Water, one of the earliest examples of hicksploitation, as a catalyst for understanding this genre a bit more clearly.

I’ve always been interested in Southern culture,* but this specific curiosity of mine dates back to the 2019 Chattanooga Film Festival, which I attended on behalf of Modern Horrors. The opening night keynote of that festival featured legendary horror host Joe Bob Briggs doing his touring lecture “How Rednecks Saved Hollywood,” which I described as “135 minutes of cinematic scholarship stretching all the way back to the Scots-Irish origins of the term ‘redneck’ and cataloging every bit of hicksploitation that Hollywood has leaned into ever since.”

And for this cinema hound, it was fascinating. I learned about how the major movie studios saw Southernness as exotic and sought to capitalize on it thusly; some took a horror approach (“I’m stuck in a small Southern town and it sure is scary!”), some took an action/adventure approach (“Boy those rednecks sure know how to have a good time!”), and some took a romance approach (“I sure would love to find a gal from a foreign land that also happens to be part of my own country!”). My taste typically gravitates toward the first two, but if we’re talking about the deepest root of this subgenre, I think it’s that third thing.

The Letterboxd list that I use as a reference for this sort of thing lists a 1936 film called Banjo On My Knee as the oldest example of hicksploitation, and sure enough, the tagline promises “laughing, fighting, singing…and loving!” But alas, it’s not available anywhere, so I didn’t watch that one.** The second-oldest film on that list, 1938’s Child Bride, is apparently as gross as you might think it is, so I will not be watching Child Bride at this time, thank you very much.

That brings us to Swamp Water, which piqued my interest when it was recently added to the Criterion Channel.*** This wasn’t just a cash-in on a growing trend; folks, this was the first American film by Jean Renoir, one of the hottest directors in the industry at the time and one of the first to be considered an auteur.

What did he see in this story of crime and passion and forgiveness in the Georgia swamps? I couldn’t tell you, but apparently he saw much more in it than the studio did. As Dave Kehr wrote in 2012 for the New York Times, “Renoir’s European habits—his commitment to filming as much as possible on location, his indulgent attitude toward his actors, who were allowed a large number of takes to find their performances—didn’t mesh well with studio standards of efficiency.” He might not’ve been efficient, but he did give us some beautiful Southern Gothic imagery, right down to the stellar opening image of a crude wooden cross staked into the swamp bed and topped with a human skull. Aside from some forced dialect that was dropped onto the page for obvious non-Southerners**** to read—words like “losted” and “argufying” that play up the tropes a bit too much—it does feel like Renoir did his best to rein in the exploitation and shine a positive (or at least neutral) light on the South.*****

I think this is evidence enough that hicksploitation began more as an object of fascination rather than fear. But somewhere along the way, these two tangled roots started growing in opposite directions. There are plenty of hicksploitation horrors and thrillers in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and on into the 21st century, while the romance genre mostly avoids “redneck” tropes these days. (Perhaps this is partly due to the industry’s realization that most Southerners aren’t Reese Witherspoon or Josh Lucas.)

But we’ll always have films like Swamp Water, which I think we can go ahead and crown as the founding father of hicksploitation. (Can somebody ask Joe Bob if he agrees?)

*If you’re also interested in Southern culture, my editor, John, also writes a terrific weekly newsletter called The Conversation, part of the Reckon network. He said he’ll give me 50 cents for every new subscription so help me out.

**Okay, yes, it’s actually available for free on YouTube, but I feel weird steering y’all toward a potentially illegal upload like that.

***Today’s newsletter is for the pretentious crowd. I see you.

****Dana Andrews, the star of the film, is the clear exception here. He grew up on a Mississippi farmstead with 12 siblings and a Baptist minister father. His credentials are irrevocable.

*****He would go on to direct The Southerner four years later, though that film doesn’t appear on the hicksploitation list. I may have to investigate it.

Swamp Water is available on the Criterion Channel.