Bad Blood and Good Births: The Influence of Eugenics
The eugenics movement originated in England, and was founded by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Hereditarians such as Galton and his American counterpart Lothrop Stoddard were advocates of the belief that genetics determined intelligence and disposition. Eugenics quickly became an academic discipline in Britain, with a Eugenics Laboratory at the University of London established in 1904, and organisations were formed in an attempt to win public support for eugenic values, such as the British Eugenics Education Society in 1907. Eugenics gained popularity in upper-class circles in Britain, with public supporters of eugenics including women’s rights campaigner Marie Stopes, [1] who advocated sterilisation of those people she believed were unfit for parenthood. To her thinking, this included “the inferior, the depraved, and the feebleminded… who are thriftless and unmanageable yet appallingly prolific.” [2]
 
At the heart of the eugenics movement in Britain was a belief that the poor and feebleminded bred at an alarmingly high rate when compared to the higher classes. The aim of British eugenics was to redress this imbalance in breeding rates, as it was thought that natural selection, which would have normally slowed reproduction of the lower classes, had been suspended because of sanitary reform, charitable organisations and medical science, allowing the lower classes to grow unchecked.  Eugenics in Britain was separated into positive eugenics, which aimed to increase reproduction in the fitter classes and negative eugenics, which sought to discourage reproduction in lower classes. Acts of Parliament such as the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act proposed mass segregation of the feebleminded from the rest of society and, although sterilisation programmes were never legalised in Britain, those in support of eugenics lobbied for voluntary sterilisation. [3] Here we can see the beginnings of the boundaries that echo in rural horror, most clearly in Eden Lake, where literal boundaries by way of fences are to be erected around the executive homes that are being built in a rural area of England, to protect the middle-class inhabitants from the prolific breeding and negative influence of the poor whites in the community.
 
The primary concern of eugenicists, both British and American, was with what eugenicists perceived as their duty to improve the overall quality of the human race, often with direct comparisons made between lower classes and insects such as maggots. [4] In addition to explicit references to hereditarian concepts, Francis Galton asserted that:

As it is easy… to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses… it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations. [5]

This demonstrates a clear Us vs. Them mentality that has filtered into both American and British rural horror cinema, as the lower class are coded as poor not just by their clothes, but also by their speech, etiquette and physicality.
 
This is not to suggest that eugenics solely focused on lower class whites. In British eugenics, there was a strict hierarchy which “encompassed fears of miscegenation and hybridity” with the white European at the top, and the black African at the bottom. [6] As the eugenics movement grew in popularity in America, there was also growing reference to issues of race. Charles B. Davenport, a prominent American eugenicist and biologist, believed for example that the American race was essentially being ‘polluted’ by immigrants. In addressing what he terms the “negro problem”, Davenport notes that “persons with darker skin” should be “kept in happiness but kept from reproducing their kind.” [7] Eugenics was used therefore not only as scientific validation for classism, but also racism. The consequences of this validation can be seen in the class-driven and government-approved sterilisation of the poor, such as that resulting from the Buck v. Bell case of 1927, [8] and the racist Jim Crow Laws of the late 19th century, which enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.
 
The idea of being white trash “raised a host of unsettling anxieties about the stability and content of racial identities.” [9] People deemed to be white trash were often seen as victims of circumstance to be rescued by well-to-do whites, as shown in John Abbot’s call for the liberation of poor whites, specifically “the thousands of poor ignorant, degraded white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starvation.” [10] Abbot described this situation in explicitly racial terms however, by continuing that the poor whites must work against a system that “drags the whites with the blacks down into the gulf of ignorance and penury.” [11] This intersection of race and class is pertinent to the final section of this article, in which I examine hoodie horror. However, it is important to note that I focus on the representations of the poor white character in American and British horror cinema and as such examine only one strand of racial representation in national horror cinemas.  
 
Founded by Charles Davenport, [12] who built upon the basis of eugenics set by Galton, the Eugenics Records Office (ERO) of America was established in 1910 and carried out several studies on underclass families such as The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics (1912), [13] to try to determine by way of a biometric approach any common family traits that were likely to be inherited by future generations. Continuing the influence of zoological concepts on British eugenicists, pedigree charts akin to those used in dog breeding were produced for the families that were studied by the ERO. [14] These studies were intent on demonstrating and proving the dangers of what they termed ‘bad’ births. The overarching message of the studies was influenced by cacogenics, meaning the deterioration of genetic stock over time, and warned against sexual relations with degenerates which, to the ERO’s way of thinking, included the poor, the criminal and the so-called feeble minded. Eugenicists instead promoted ‘good’ births, meaning the breeding of physically and mentally fit individuals, and went as far as in 1914 to establish a model for intervention which proposed to sterilise those who were deemed socially inadequate, specifically those who Harry Laughlin noted were supported wholly or in part by public expense. [15]
 
Ideals conceptualised by the eugenics movement were being used by sterilisation campaigns as recently as the 1970s in America and would eventually be adopted by the German National Socialist Party in pursuit of their ‘final solution’. Although Galton himself did not motion towards forced sterilisation, it is clear that he intended eugenics to be practiced. In a later essay he notes that “eugenics cooperates with the working of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.” [16]
 
One of the more widely known family studies carried out by the ERO was Henry Goddard’s study The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912). This account discerned two lineages stemming from the same man, Martin Kallikak. The first strand is from a sexual liaison with a tavern maid and produces a long and over-populated line of criminals and degenerates. The other line from a marriage to a Quaker woman produces six prosperous, socially mobile and virtuous individuals, what the ERO would have seen as good breeding stock. The connotations of pollution contained in this study are clear: not only do degenerates out-breed the other line at an alarming rate, allowing the possibility of upstanding people becoming endangered or extinct, but whatever made a person a degenerate – or simply poor – was deep in their blood. It was believed that poor people gave birth to poor children, perpetuating a cycle that the eugenicists feared would cause a tidal wave of moral weakness. This idea of polluted blood was further supported by August Weismann’s concept of “Germplasm”. [17]
 
Weismann’s Germplasm was a substance that is transmitted in the blood, down through generations, holding within it the degenerative genes. Eugenicists disseminated the family studies of the ERO, along with the idea of a tangible Germplasm as evidence that the poor rural white was a contaminating influence, and to quote Lothrop Stoddard, “spreading like cancerous growths […] infecting the blood of whole communities.” [18] It is clear that eugenics was based around a fear of pollution, specifically the ‘bad blood’ of degenerates, and preoccupied with boundaries that could be instated to protect against their contamination and possible transmogrification into the poor white. This ideology of pollution, contaminated identities and class-based fear runs through much rural horror. The Southern rural landscape is presented as an almost alien territory, a dirty, defeated, and entirely Other land. In terms of their filmic representations, Gael Sweeney notes that “Hollywood’s depictions of White Trash [is] as either idiot savants extraordinaire or amoral criminals. But always as products of an inherited inferiority.” [19] The American South, and by extension the poor rural body, is presented as both geographically and intellectually removed from Northern civility.
 
‘These Freakos got a Utensil for every Pea on the Plate!’ [20] The White Trash Monster and Etiquette
Carol Clover states that in rural horror “[a]s with hygiene, so are manners. Country people snort when they breathe, snore when they sleep, talk with their mouths full, drool when they eat.” [21] The underlying threat is that such signs of incivility are symptomatic of a larger degeneration. Films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972), I Spit on Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) or the later Wrong Turn films (2003-2014), show the underclass body as a representation of a community that the protagonists, usually coded as being from a higher class by way of their clothing, speech or etiquette, do not comprehend. Although the two groups look similar, the rules are different in the antagonist’s territory. This is seen in the films in terms of both morality -  for example the antagonist’s willingness to commit incest, to rape, and to steal - and in terms of civility, such as cleanliness and correctly using cutlery. In these films, the protagonists struggle to find the upper hand, and the lack of stability the protagonists suffer is reminiscent of eugenicists’ fear of losing status and privilege while the poor white emerged from “hotbeds where human maggots are spawned.” [22] The protagonists in rural horror films are often isolated in a strange landscape where civil rules no longer apply, such as the abandoned quarry in Eden Lake, where the threatening teenage gang indulge in brutality in a space uninhabited by adults, and have an advantage over Jenn and Steve through their familiarity with the area. It is often only when protagonists eschew civility and engage with the antagonists on their own ‘savage’ level as primitive counterparts that they are able to defeat them.

Jenn awaits her fate at the hands of the "chav" gang in Eden Lake

The construct of civility is often exposed within these narratives as being superficial and flimsy, based around technology and more often than not, around etiquette. The concept of etiquette is mobilised to show the differences between the protagonists and the poor rural body, with their lack of etiquette marking them as those people. But, as J.W. Williamson succinctly notes, “we in our suburbs are not so safely immune from our natures… our secret dread is that the dark, drunken hillbilly is no Other, but us." [23] Concepts of dirt and pollution police etiquette and, with this in mind, the work of Mary Douglas can be applied to the poor white body.  

​Douglas argues that social behaviour hinges on the ability to adopt a scheme of classification. Douglas outlines that once we define what is dirty, we can define what is clean and that our concept of dirt or pollution stands in for “expressing a general view of the social order.” [24] It is a system of Othering, inspired by the social Othering of the eugenics movement and ratified by the pollution ideologies outlined by Mary Douglas, that inform the archetypal themes and tropes of the classed characterisations in rural horror. As Douglas states:

They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable… Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state not the next, it is indefinable […] There is a power in the forms and other power in the inarticulate area, margins, confused lines, and beyond the external boundaries. [25]

Protagonists in these films, perhaps grasping for an alternative boundary line when presented with monsters who are visually similar to themselves, will often situate the white trash body in the primitive past. By doing this, the protagonist codes the white trash character as being a relic of this different way of life, and as such, removed from the ‘progressive’ qualities of modern living. The white trash monster inhabits the margins of classification and is coded in rural horror as a temporal discrepancy, part of a long forgotten primitive past, where rules of etiquette did not apply. This can be observed in several American rural horror films, for example, the Jupiter family in The Hills Have Eyes eat with their fingers, and the Sawyers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are slaughterhouse workers made redundant by burgeoning mechanisation. Annalee Newitz notes that there is a thought process that “in spite of white middle-class education and cultural hegemony, whites are only a few steps away from becoming amoral, rural savages who kill each other with their hands.” [26] This underlines the idea of white trash bodies being a realistic threat, and it is this fear of the precariousness of our privileged position and our sameness to the monster that informs both American rural horror and British hoodie horror.
 
The idea of sameness is another key aspect to understanding the white trash monster. John Hartigan Jr.’s work is of particular relevance here, as it is his idea of “sameness” that informs ideas of etiquette and boundaries in American rural horror, and that can be discerned in British hoodie horror. Hartigan’s concept of sameness also relates back to Douglas’s thoughts on ambiguity. Hartigan argues that whites from the American South are a source of anxiety for people from the North when he states that “the whiteness of his kith and kin in the South represented a confusing mix of sameness and difference, making for an unstable cultural figure.” [27] The poor white body in American rural horror is therefore both like and unlike the protagonists. It is both in the present and yet representative of a primitive past. It inhabits the margins of classification, displaying its sameness and difference to the protagonists, and as such, is presented as something to fear. An interesting point therefore, is a change present in post-millennial rural horror in relation to the physical appearance of the rural white monster from visually similar to visually different from the protagonists. [28] For example, the antagonists of Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (O’Brien, 2011), the Hilliker Brothers, who have brutally self-mutilated their outward appearance, with Three Finger having chewed off his digits, One Eye sticking a fork in his eye and then eating it, and Sawtooth having sharpened his teeth to points. Through this mutilation, the Hilliker Brothers actively mark themselves out as visually different to the other whites in the film and have begun to building their own boundaries, to keep out the middle class and to redefine their territory on their own terms.
 
Broken Britain and Hoodie Horror
Similar to American rural horror, the chav or hoodie types that reside in British horror takes the worst depictions of the white underclass and emphasises them. I discussed earlier the eugenics movement, their Othering process of lower-class whites, and their understanding of this group as being distinctly different from normative whiteness. The British historian David Starkey echoes this sentiment, arguing that the fault of the London Riots of 2011 could be attributed to the idea that “whites have become black.” [29] In this statement, Starkey equates blackness with savagery and again marks those whites out as belonging to a category of whiteness that is not normative or that is less than white in some way. Starkey’s comments are reminiscent of the eugenicist’s warnings of race pollution by way of multiculturalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that I highlighted earlier.  
 
The reason I have touched upon the London Riots is that the wider concept of ‘Broken Britain’ has influenced the subgenre of Hoodie Horror made during this period, which is where we see the character of the chav. This phrase became something of a buzzword in contemporary British culture through popular usage in the tabloid press and popular media discourse. The phrase Broken Britain refers in the main to the societal fear that Britain has become overrun with feral youths, teenage pregnancy and Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). Arguably more recently displaced onto debated about immigration and the European Union, there is a lingering anxiety or resentment present in British society. The dread is summed up on The Guardian website’s comments section on an article about Broken Britain, [30] where a poster named Taxpayer2go writes:

See the crowds of feral youth bullying elderly people to death… and an ever-growing army of shallow minded single mothers all living on a lifetimes (sic) benefits and retering (sic) on a pension they haven’t earned.

This mix fear and resentment in some British public discourse is reminiscent of the studies carried out by Cynthia Duncan, where a resident of Blackwell, Appalachia states that:

There’s people who don’t want to work at all, never have and never will. We call them first of the monthers because they come out of the mountains on the first of the month with about ten kids and don’t wash. When I worked at the grocery store, you could smell them coming. [31]

Duncan’s interviews found that the local community regarded the poor with a range of negative connotations, from contempt to anger. The most constant theme that emerges in Duncan’s work however is that her interviewees saw the poor as responsible for their own poverty through laziness or stupidity. This sentiment can be seen clearly in the way that the lower classes in British society were, and are, often depicted in popular culture, from the character of Vicky Pollard, a chav character on British comedy show Little Britain (2003-2007) who is characterised as a grotesque teenager on state benefits, to the more threatening and violent characters in films such as Kidulthood (Huda, 2006). Although they are addressing different countries, both Taxpayer2go’s comment and the above quote from Cynthia Duncan’s interviews refer to the white underclass, with an underlying assumption that these people do not want to work and are perfectly happy living off money given to them by charities and local governments. This recall the type of language Harry Laughlin uses regarding those poor whites in America that are supported by the state.
 
During the same time-frame, there was also repeated use of the word “feral” in news stories about hoodie gangs and violent youth culture. [32] Films such as Harry Brown (Barber, 2009) and Outlaw (Love, 2007) featured representations of feral youth, the term itself conjuring up images of werewolf-like children dwelling in underpasses. This is also reflected in Heartless (Ridley, 2009) where a witness to a brutal hoodie stabbing states that “these kids were like wild animals.” The conflation of the British underclass with animals also mirrors the eugenicists’ Othering of the poor in America, which, as Jim Goad notes of the redneck stereotype, “are presumed to be creatures of instinct, swamp animals who bite if you come too close. Another breed entirely.” [33] Again, this demonstrates that the rural white is a different species entirely and in the case of David Starkey’s comments, a species that is ‘contaminated’ by multiculturalism. The fact that these terms invoke images of an animalistic, brutal poor make it an apt character-type for the horror genre.
 
An interesting point of difference between the American rural white and the British chav is that whereas the poor white in American rural horror is seen as part of a distant and barely remembered past, the underclass in British hoodie horror is seen as representative of a barbaric and unknowable future, with this fear stemming from the belief that Britain’s youth are becoming uncontrollable and brutally savage.
 
‘Who you Lookin’ at? You Little Rich Boy!' [34] The White Trash Monster in British Horror
In Eden Lake, British youth reaches a new level of animalistic sadism, and on the Internet Movie Database, myriad user comments consider the portrayal of the chav antagonists. Acoustic Joe notes that people can “read any paper and see how much power feral scum have in this country” and another comment poster state that “there are enclaves of generations old lower socio-economic classes with the kind of mentality on display here, plenty in Britain… Frightening.” Alex Hess, writing for The Guardian about the film, reports that:

The obvious way to frame the film is as a Daily Mail reader’s nightmare incarnate – the onslaught of murderous, feral kids being the logical conclusion of the underclass’s dereliction of duty. Broken Britain wielding a shard of broken glass… the instinctive fear provoked by its track-suited executioners. [35]

As these comments show, from when we first see the antagonists in Eden Lake, there is almost a visual checklist, a pedigree chart similar to those used by eugenicists: the Rottweiler dog, the loud music, the carrying of knives, and the tracksuits. We are visually informed that we are dealing with the Great British underclass.
 
Eden Lake follows a young couple, Jenn and Steve, as they arrive at a disused and flooded quarry for a romantic getaway. Jenn and Steve are as clearly visually coded as not being part of the underclass as the youths are coded as emphatically belonging to it. The couple arrive in an expensive 4x4, replete with a customised satellite navigation system, and are listening to radio reports about government prescribed parenting contracts and Antisocial Behaviour Orders.
 
The construct of etiquette is used in this film in a similar way to American rural horror, with the etiquette, or lack thereof, of white trash being emphasised. When Jenn and Steve stop off at a Bed and Breakfast on the way to the quarry, Jenn is visibly shocked when a mother slaps her child. The couple later laugh inside their room at the revellers outside, and Steve does an impression of their Northern working-class accents, ending only when Jenn calls Steve a “Pikey oaf.” This is not the last time that language and its connection to etiquette, education and social standing is highlighted. For example, when Steve accidentally kills the dog of the gang’s leader, Brett, Brett repeatedly says “She’s fucking die” instead of “She’s fucking dead.”
 
Whenever the audience meet a character from the gang or the surrounding small rural town, we are reminded both visually and audibly that they are different from Jenn and Steve. The gang spit into the quarry, stomp on another boy’s caterpillar, torture animals, and carry knives. Their lack of social etiquette is made clear for example when Jenn, at one point, is ushered into a bathroom where a couple are having sex at a family party. Brett, his family, and his friends are repeatedly coded as those whites much in the same way as the poor underclass in rural American horror.

Steve suffers after Cooper, a member of the chav gang, is forced by the ringleader Brett to attack Steve's mouth with a box-cutting knife.

Just as the Hilliker brothers of the Wrong Turn films began to redefine the boundary lines originally placed to prevent infection from the underclass, Eden Lake similarly presents the rural underclass as being as ferociously protective of the boundaries as the eugenicists once were, marking their territory against intruders. As Jenn and Steve arrive at the entrance to the quarry, they read a large sign proclaiming the construction of fifty executive homes being built within a gated community. Jenn scoffs at this, asking “Gated community? What are they so afraid of?” As the couple drive on, the audience are privy to something the couple are not, the crudely spray-painted warning on the back of the sign, reading “Fuck off, yuppie cunts.”
 
Greg Philo of Glasgow University traces the contemporary fear of the chav back to a middle-class fear of “those who might undermine their security,” [36] and this claustrophobic fear of infection from the underclass is writ large in Eden Lake, from the grabbing hands closing in on Jenn and Steve’s car to the murky woods muffling the war cries of the group of hoodies pursuing Jenn. The comparisons that eugenicists made between the underclass and animals and the idea of “feral youth” are also apparent with moments like the pack-like pursuit of the couple and Brett telling his gang that all they have to do is “follow the blood” to find Steve.
 
As was true of poor rural whites singled out for persecution from the Eugenics Records Office, it is clear in these films that an older generation is at fault, a generation who have birthed and moulded the attitudes of the young chavs who have degenerated into animals. There is a tendency for the mothers in these films to absolve their children from any blame. When Steve asks a waitress in a local café if she knows the youths who slashed his tyres, her entire demeanour changes as she coldly replies, “no, not my kids”. This absolving of responsibility and of criminality being kept within the family is never clearer than in the closing scene of the film. Jenn, thinking she has found salvation in a house, realises that she is in the home of one of the teenagers, and his family will now kill her to protect him. The characterisation of the chav family echoes the eugenicists’ concept of hereditary criminality, a sub-human class of animalistic beings, pre-destined to immoral and criminal behaviour.

Jenny is held captive by the families of the chav gang, highlighting the assumed hereditary degradation that eugenicists claimed of the lower classes.

In both American rural horror and Eden Lake, it is only when the protagonists put aside or lose their civilised trappings and become more rural and savage that they are able to defeat their tormentors. Jenn and Steve have only to lose their mobile phones, satellite navigation, and car to become completely isolated and immersed in this community and landscape that is alien to them. It is only when Jenn puts aside her etiquette as a teacher, becomes as savage as the youths, and begins hurting and killing children that she gains a brief upper hand. The families of the teenagers eventually murder Jenn, partly for revenge because Jenn killed one of the gang and partly to protect the group because as in the parting line of the film, Brett’s father tells his friends “we look after our own round here.”
 
Conclusion: And the Road Leads to Nowhere?
The cinematic white trash body is a figure that is mutable, albeit always with an underlying theme of pollution. I have based my reading of the white trash monster in rural horror around the fear that the poor white bodies’ polluted identity is contagious, which stems from the unfounded beliefs of the eugenics movement. This article has examined the ways in which etiquette-based boundaries feature in both American and British rural horror, noting the ways in which these boundaries have begun to shift in post-millennial horror, no longer the sole preserve of the upper classes, the lower-class whites have now begun to value their boundary lines too. It is in the poor white rural character’s move transnationally into the figure of the chav, however, that we begin to see how ferociously protective of their territory the poor white monster has become.
 
In closing, it is important to note that whereas the films I have examined present the rural or underclass character in an antagonistic role, there has been subsequent movement towards reclaiming both the rural white and the chav character. In Attack the Block (Cornish, 2011) for example, a group of chavs are first presented as the antagonists of the narrative, as they mug a young woman at knifepoint. Their dialogue, clothing and attitude firmly places them in the same characterisation as the feral youth of Eden Lake. However, when aliens attack their estate, they become the heroes of the film. Similarly, the premise of horror-comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (Craig, 2010) centres on a group of college students, who have assumed that Tucker and Dale are murdering hillbillies because of their appearance and domicile. The comedic quality of the white trash figure is tempered somewhat however by other contemporary white trash horror narratives that involve a more serious and dramatic treatment of the figure. Rob Zombie’s films, including House of a 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), Halloween (2007), and Halloween 2 (2009) for example, all use characters coded as white trash antagonists.
 
It is the white trash body’s simultaneous sameness to and difference from the normative white protagonists that holds the key to their threat and longevity in the horror genre, a monster that is similar to, but different from, the heroes. The idea of a polluted poor white identity, with poisoned blood that will infect future generations, has been carried from the Eugenics Records Office through to a British counterpart in the chav. This has resulted in the characterisation of a polluted body that needs to be kept separate from the populace by way of exclusion from executive homes in gated communities, for fear of contamination by monstrous poverty.

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Footnotes

1. Rose, J. (1992) Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution. London: Faber and Faber.
2. Stopes, M. (2013) Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who Are Creating the Future. London: Forgotten Books (originally published 1921). 247.
3. Porter, D. (1999) “Eugenics and the sterilization debate in Sweden and Britain before World War II”, Scandanavian Journal of History. 24 (2). 145-162.
4. Dugdale, R. (1877) The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 54.
5. Galton, F. (1869) Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into its Laws and Consequences. London: MacMillan. 1.
6. Stone, D. (2001) “Race in British Eugenics”, European History Quarterly, 31 (3), 397-425. 398.
7. Quoted in Yudell, M. (2014) Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. 36.
8. An in-depth account of this case is Lombardo, P. A (2010) Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
9. Hartigan Jr., J. (2005) Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural History of White People. London: Duke University Press. 62.
10. Abbott, J. (1860) South and North; or, Impressions Received During a Trip to Cuba and the South. New York: Abbey and Abbot. 148.
11. Abbott, J. (1860) South and North. 150.
12. www.cshl.edu
13. Estabrook, A. & Davenport, C. (1912) The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics. New Era Printing Company.
14. Examples of these are available from https://www.eugenicsarchive.org
15. Laughlin, H. (1922) Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory of The Municipal Court of Chicago. Available from: https://alexwellerstein.com/laughlin/Laughlin_Model_Law.pdf. Accessed 10/08/17)
16. Galton, F. (1909) “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims”, The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. X. 36-37.
17. Weismann, A. (1893) Germ-plasm: A Theory of Heredity. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
18. Stoddard, L. (1922) The Revolt Against Civilisation: The Menace of the Under Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 6.
19. Sweeney, G. (2001) “The Trashing of White Trash: Natural Born Killers and the appropriation of the white trash aesthetic”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 18 (2), 143-155. 143
20. Quote from The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972).
21. Clover, C. (1992) Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 126.
22. Dugdale, R. (1877) The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 54.
23. Williamson, J. W. (1995) Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and what the Mountains Did to the Movies. North Carolina: North Carolina University Press. 6.
24. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. 13.
25. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger. 118-122.
26. Newitz, A. (1997) White Trash: Race and Class in America. London: Routledge. 33.
27. Hartigan Jr., J. (2005) Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural History of White People. London: Duke University Press. 69.
28. Hurley, K. (2004) The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin De Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 68.
29. Newsnight [Television programme], United Kingdom: BBC2. Broadcast: 12/08/11. 30 mins.
30. Gentleman, A. (31st March 2010) Is Britain Broken? The Guardian. Available from https://theguardian.com/society/2010/mar/31/is-britain-broken (Accessed: 10/08/17).
31. Duncan, C. (2000) Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America. Connecticut: Yale University Press. 7.
32. Sergeant, H. (19th September 2009) Feral Youths: How a Generation of violent, illiterate young men are living outside the boundaries of civilised society. The Daily Mail.  Available from: https://www.thedailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1214549/Feral-youths-How-generation-violent-illiterate-young-men-living-outside-boundaries-civilised-society.html (Accessed: 10/08/17).
33. Goad, J. (1997) The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats. New York: Simon and Schuster. 98.
34. Plan B (2012) Ill Manors, Ill Manors [CD]. Atlantic Records.
35. Hess, A. (29th October 2014) Eden Lake: The film that frightened me most. The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/29/eden-lake-the-film-that-frightened-me-most (Accessed: 30/09/17).
    
36. Graham, J. (5th November 2009) Hoodies strike fear in British cinema. The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/nov/05/british-hoodie-films (Accessed: 30/09/17).