Deliverance Featured Sinister Hillbillies (1976)
While the hillbillies of television are generally shown to be wise, simple people, backwoodsy but pure of heart, the hillbilly stereotype turned scary with the movie Deliverance in 1972. Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight starred as urban campers hunted by a roughneck group of hillbillies. Disgruntled locals were upset with urbanites were about to destroy their land and river to build an electric dam. But the campers added fuel to the fire with their insults and condescension. Ned Beatty’s Bobby summed it up when, after his friends warned him not to insult the local people, he scoffs, “People? What people?” Dueling Banjos and the phrase, “Squeal like a pig!” has had a lasting cultural trauma. The film hit on internal fears and wariness of rural, remote places and the people who live there. The inbred, morally bankrupt hillbilly caricatures who brutalize the campers turned the hillbilly label into something scary.