In Episode One, Season One of HBO's True Detective, under a southern sky thick with gathering storm clouds, detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart exit a coroner's office on the outskirts of Erath, Louisiana. Situated in a strip mall in an area edged by swamps and oil refineries, the coroner's office seems the only functioning business in the deserted mall where shuttered storefronts and a near deserted car park evoke the ruin and desolation of a permanently forsaken South. Structured by a Gothicity that imagines Erath as a counterpart to Ambrose Bierce's fictional Carcosa with its “hint of evil,” and “dismal landscape” over which “lead-coloured clouds” hang like a “visible curse” (Bierce 2003), the strip mall is heavy with a sense of doom that is never alleviated by any peripheral signs of life. “This place is like somebody's memory of a town, and the memory's fading,” Rust observes. And in Rust's evocation of a fading South, the Southern Gothic is perhaps most perfectly elucidated.

This book set out to explore the Southern Gothic on screen. Through an emphasis on genre, or rather, through an attempt to interrogate the Southern Gothic as a screen genre, this book has focused on the cohesiveness of a certain group of film and television texts in which Gothicity is the dominant mechanism through which the South is rendered Other. The othering of the South is a phenomenon that traverses historical, cultural, political, and representational terrain. Importantly, the construct of the othered South cannot be understood simply as a one-way assignation that positions the South in opposition to the North due to the South's perceived backwardness and inferiority in the broader national context.