Hicksploitation

Hicksploitation is 1970s and early-80s American drive-in cinema set in the rural South and its backwoods, in two strands sharing a setting and almost nothing else.

The cheerful one

Southern car-and-moonshine comedies: White Lightning, Moonrunners, drive-in staples that eventually turned into Smokey and the Bandit, then The Dukes of Hazzard, then nothing resembling exploitation at all.

The other one

Backwoods horror, where urban outsiders enter rural America and are destroyed by it. Deliverance (1972) is the respectable ancestor. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) are the cycle proper.

Worth noticing

Poverty itself is the monster in most of these, and they were made largely by outsiders for audiences outside the region. That sits uncomfortably in films which are, in several cases, very well made.