The Criterion Channel’s “Southern Gothic” series opens, in Eileen Jones’s telling, on Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956): lurid horns vamping like a strip-show score, then a dilapidated Mississippi plantation house with grimy pillars — a Gone with the Wind facade gone to seed. That single image is the subgenre. The Gothic has always been about the past returning; the Southern Gothic version returns to something recent and monstrous.

  • The form dates to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe, and carried through Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Poe, and James. Its enduring subject is entrenched power: aristocracies, generational wealth, and the people they punish.
  • The Southern variation maps that onto antebellum plantations worked by enslaved people, with clergy citing chapter and verse to defend the “peculiar institution.”
  • Faulkner supplies the epigraph: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
  • Baby Doll: a nineteen-year-old “child bride” sleeping in a crib, ogled through a peephole by her bankrupt, racist husband; a cotton-gin arson; a Sicilian outsider with his own vigilante traditions; and an “old boys” network of ruined gin owners who are plainly the Klan.
  • The Beguiled (1971): a wounded Union soldier sheltered by a girls’ school, seducing his way through it, amputated in revenge, with the headmistress’s incestuous plantation past surfacing behind the war.
  • The Night of the Hunter (1955): Robert Mitchum’s self-appointed preacher — “the religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us” — modeled on a real serial killer hanged in 1932, hunting a widow and her children for stolen money.
  • Wise Blood (1979), from Flannery O’Connor’s novel, is the series’ most unsettling and least known: Hazel Motes preaching a “Church of Truth Without Christ,” blinding himself with quicklime, wrapping barbed wire under his shirt — then trapped in a dingy room by a landlady who will not let him die a martyr.
  • Wildcat (2023), Ethan Hawke’s O’Connor biopic with Maya Hawke in the lead, is thinner — but it carries O’Connor’s answer to a New York literary type who calls the Eucharist a “beautiful symbol”: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”

Jones’s point is that the subgenre is a reckoning: long-running elite abuses of power produce an atmosphere of evil that characters mistake for the supernatural, or answer with their own cruelties and brutal religiosity. Poor white Southerners, ruined by the war, identified upward with the planter class rather than across the color line — and the films keep circling that self-deception.

The same machinery shows up in the culture-war fights over how the South is taught today: a romantic narrative built to salve a defeat, still doing work a century and a half on.