The 2005 film, The Skeleton Key is a film that employs substantial Southern Gothic visual and narrative tropes: the supernatural, images of swamps and plantations, references to Voodoo, and an ever-present sense of menace all contribute to the film's construction of the South as a Gothic space of otherness. By way of contrast, the documentary film Deepsouth highlights the plight of HIV sufferers in the South and seems not to participate in the Southern Gothic at all, yet a sequence in a dilapidated church suggests an awareness of Southern Gothic conventions informs the scene to some extent. Therefore, with such a diversity of examples making up the Southern Gothic as a screen genre, this survey of screen texts emphasizes certain trends that can be understood as paradigmatic only in the sense that they display connections or resemblances that allow the trends in the first place. To this end, this survey begins with what has had the greatest impact on Southern Gothic screen representation: adaptations of Southern Gothic fiction. It then looks to films and television series that position the South within the framework of the benighted South to depict the region as a space of backwardness or degeneracy. These texts are those that employ such tropes and character types as the redneck or the hillbilly, moral and social decay, menacing natural environments, or the various manifestations of southern religiosity. Southern Gothic screen texts with narratives and/or themes that resonate with the vestiges of slavery and Civil War will also be examined.