One of the films featured in the Criterion Channel’s “Southern Gothic” series is Baby Doll (1956). It’s based on Tennessee Williams’s one-act plays 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Unsatisfactory Supper, which Williams adapted for the screen in collaboration with the most famous interpreter of his work, director Elia Kazan. It begins with the lurid, sexed-up horns of Kenyon Hopkins’s score vamping as if in accompaniment to a strip show as we approach a grimly dilapidated Mississippi plantation house with grimy pillars like the post–Civil War plantation in Gone with the Wind. And there we have in a single film moment a perfect summation of the Southern gothic. It’s a subgenre that takes a sensationalistic, yet critical and modern, revisionist approach to the culture of the contemporary American South, countering the romantic narrative of the “Lost Cause” that was invented to salve the wounds of losing the Civil War and, along with it, an economic model reliant on slave labor that made a minority planter class obscenely rich.

The South’s collective post–Civil War determination to conjure up something noble and grand out of an evil history of exploitative violence helped create a culture so peculiarly dreadful that it inspired a whole new literary form in the hands of twentieth-century writers who grappled with its shocking effects, led by William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, and Carson McCullers. They were the literary cabal dubbed “Southern gothic writers,” and they took on the horrors encapsulated in the famous Faulkner line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”