Old Gods of Appalachia Creates An All-American Horror

Growing up in South Carolina, I didn’t see my home state reflected in many shows or movies. At best, stories would be set in “The South,” which was just a cultural mishmash of generalized twangy accents and over-the-top jokes about hicks. Too often, the South is treated as a broad cultural monolith, the region of America that was on the losing side of all that messy business in the Civil War, and now happens to house 100% of all America’s bigots, with the northern and western states somehow completely free of regressive ideology.

Being from the South is strange for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that, depending on where you live, you might leave your house and feel like a time traveler who’s stumbled right back into the 1950s. Being from the south is a constant reckoning act between the present and the past, and the history of the southern states is indeed rife with inhumanity and strangeness, but crucially, the strangeness that we contend with is so rarely what the rest of the country believes it to be. Old Gods of Appalachia, the horror anthology podcast written by Cam Collins and Steve Shell, knows its history, and uses both old folk tales specific to the Appalachian region and the real, cruel, and inhuman history of the region to tell its ghost stories with a greater degree of specificity that makes the horror feel more distinct to those outside of the area, and lets the stories hit home for those who know Appalachia firsthand.

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Across its two current seasons, Old Gods of Appalachia has told stories about witches living deep in the woods (only outsiders call it ‘the forest’), paranormal forces lurking at the bottom of coal mines, and unknowable beings of unimaginable shape and form that dwell within the ancient land itself — all the blood that’s been shed in Appalachia, either in battlefields, labor disputes, or down in the mines across the day-to-day grind, has awakened more than a few ancient things that should have been left to sleep. These scares aren’t just built around established tropes with a novelty ‘old-timey’ filter draped over them, but instead come from distinct, specific aspects of Appalachian culture and history.

In telling these stories about human insignificance with an eye for details about human prejudice and inherited hate, Collins and Shell are treading similar ground to other works re-appraising cosmic horror from beyond the xenophobic Lovecraft shadow, such as the novel and TV series Lovecraft Country and Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom. While all of these works are attempting to take a look at concepts of cosmic, madness-inducing horror through the lens of American racism and the institutions that uphold it, Collins and Shell’s anthology series finds its own identity by looking specifically at the region of America in its title, Appalachia.

Collins’ and Shell’s scripts are always full of local slang and folksy aphorisms that speak to an unbroken chain of inherited language and insulated community, all delivered in Shell’s own caramel-smooth drawl.

After all, it’s not Old Gods of The South, or Old Gods Below the Mason-Dixon Line, but Old Gods of Appalachia. The Appalachia region, which stretches from the southern tier of New York into all of West Virginia and covers parts of Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Tennessee, but is most often used to refer to West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. Appalachia isn’t all of the South (some parts of it aren’t even southern), but Appalachia is Appalachian — mountain ranges, abundant natural resources like lumber and coal, and widespread economic hardships. Old Gods of Appalachia has a tight focus, bound by geography to this one region, and specifically to the parts of it that have been most caught between the abject forces of strange old magic, and the equally abject (and perhaps more dangerous) forces of modernity.

So what makes these stories American, beyond their location on the map? For one, there’s the language: Collins’ and Shell’s scripts are always full of local slang and folksy aphorisms that speak to an unbroken chain of inherited language and insulated community, all delivered in Shell’s own caramel-smooth drawl. It’s clear that to the creators, telling the story about these people in what he calls “an alternative Appalachia” requires one to speak the correct language. 

Beyond these formal touches, the stories in Old Gods are acutely aware of American history and disasters — ongoing bigotry, the genocide of indigenous people and the theft of land, the ways women and minorities have been living through horror stories of their own for generations. The show’s anthology format means that, while there are recurring characters and events that carry over from story to story, Old Gods never has to limit itself to a single lead. Strange things are abound all throughout this Appalachia, and this freedom of focus lets the show tackle any thematic or historic content they want.

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In the prologue episode, Shell’s narrator says, “…there are whole graveyards full of what we’ve learned about outsiders, and before you judge us as backwood hillbillies or opioid-addicted rednecks, take a minute to understand how we got here.” That “how we got here” has a number of answers, both geographic and causal. How did America get into the South? By stealing the land and murdering those that lived there already. How did America get to the south as it is today? By exploiting the people that live there and stoking the flames of bigotry and inequality that have existed since the region got rich off of slave labor, freed the slaves, but left their former owners and their closed-mindedness intact the stew and ferment for generations.

There’s no safety in cozying up to racism, just as there’s no safety in trying to believe capitalism will save you either.

Season 2 features a plot line involving a character called “The Man From The Railroad,” voiced by Yuri Lowenthal, a supernatural entity who preys on workers in service of the his own ends. The Man From The Railroad is a supernatural carpet bagger, a well put together and “civilized” emissary from somewhere “out of town,” and all of his polite menace will be extremely familiar to anyone with a southern accent whose been condescended to by someone without one. He’s also an example of Old Gods’ interest in labor issues and the way the people of Appalachia have had their labor exploited for decades, going on centuries. Railroads, mines and lumber companies aren’t just scrapping the earth itself for parts with reckless abandon, they’re also strip-mining human lives — and, in Old Gods of Appalachia, human spirits.

These stories are well-written and atmospheric, but more importantly they’re intentional, direct with their themes, and all-encompassing how they address something as thorny and complex as Appalachia. Old Gods never tries to play ‘Both Sides’-ism or call for centrist peace between its forces. There’s no safety in cozying up to racism, just as there’s no safety in trying to believe capitalism will save you either. Like all good revisionist cosmic horror, the show knows that the true unknowable terror is within human systems, and faceless entities like Cthulhu don’t hold a candle to the way people have treated each other, and allowed others to be treated, ever since America was founded.

Old Gods of Appalachia finds nuance in its adapted ghost stories, and mines (to use a loaded word) extra meaning and pathos from how closely it studies its history. While the horrible truths in our real world might be stranger than fiction, Old Gods of Appalachia succeeds in getting as close to truth as it can. Just because a ghost story isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

(Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to accurately reflect both creators.)