Horror films love the idea of a dangerous and demented hick. Hicksploitation had its foundational boom around 1972’s Deliverance. Ever since, films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Devil’s Rejects have continued the trope of dangerous southerners lurking on the edges of society. Peppered throughout this subgenre are innumerable takes on Appalachian culture, specifically, like Wrong Turn. While the aforementioned Deliverance is a film of substance, you can’t overstate how many horror films rely on backwards caricatures of Appalachian people. Placing outsiders in a place that, according to horror, is nothing but a junkyard of incestuous moonshiners ready to maim, kill, and sometimes cannibalize visitors is a cheap and easy scare.
So while Jug Face isn’t the first film to explore ritual in a backwoods community, it is one of the more inventive. Outside the usual redneck-sploitation, director Chad Crawford Kinkle takes elements normally wielded as backhanded tropes – moonshine, incest, spirituality, and enmeshment – and imbues them with twisted significance as dark as they are over the top. The film prioritizes an atmosphere of unease, punctuated by ambiguous supernatural lore around a pit in the center of the woods.
Jug Face Imbues Exploitative Tropes With Supernaturally-Enhanced Unease

Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) is “joined” to be married to a boy in the community, Bodey (Mathieu Whitman). This marks her coming-of-age, a status that offers few perks and heightened surveillance from those around her. Her mother, Loriss (Sean Young), is severely strict, and her father, Sustin (Larry Fessenden), is more doting but ultimately enables her mother and the community at large to keep rigid gender roles. But Ada is newly pregnant at the hands of her brother, Jessaby (Daniel Manche). At its barest, the film is already a nightmare portrait of religious Appalachian horror. Yet the unplanned pregnancy and the trauma of incest are not her biggest issues. Her community worships the pit, a deep hole at the center of the woods that purportedly heals or rewards them when they give it a human sacrifice.
Jug Face sets itself apart from other backwoods cult films – supernatural or otherwise – by building a kind of mysticism in who is chosen. Firstly, the film moves away from the typical exploration of incest that centers on brutality or an exploitative body horror related to resulting genetic defects. In a genre at times overly saturated with it, the abuse Ada experiences is not from an extreme sect of Christianity, but an unidentifiable spirituality connected to the pit. Kinkle takes it a step further by using the cliche of moonshine as part of the spiritual practice. Their community has a potter who makes jugs for the moonshine they sell in town, but the potter is chosen for their visions from the pit. Their visions lead them to create faces on the side of moonshine jugs, and the community takes this as a sign that it’s their time to be sacrificed.

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When Ada finds her face molded into one of these, she hides it, and the consequences touch every family around her. The village begins to feel that the pit is angry after strange deaths and Jessaby’s illness. This includes Ada, who i paranoid that hiding her own jug may be the cause. The group’s suspicion of Ada, the sole young woman who is already overly scrutinized, grows. Her mother is the worst of all, becoming increasingly violent towards her and shaming her for presumed sexual conduct. Jug Face paints a bleak picture of the way women are turned against one another for the sake of upholding family honor in isolated, patriarchal systems. Ada’s interactions with her mother are often more anxiety-inducing than anything the pit might conjure. From aggressive inspections of her underwear and even her body — with no similar scrutiny ever placed upon her brother and rapist, Jessaby — the film depicts a realistic system of enabling that likely fueled that incest.
Dwight and Ada Are Doomed by Their Roles in an Isolated Society in ‘Jug Face’

The potter, Dwight (Sean Bridgers), is Ada’s only real friend. His kindness towards her – and his many eccentricities – begin to cast suspicion on him. It makes it clearer what brought Dwight, a middle-aged man, and Ada, a girl only on the cusp of womanhood, together. While the town assumes it’s an illicit affair, it’s really their introspection and gentleness that upsets a social structure built on paranoia and sacrifice. But they share something else, too.
As the trauma unfolds, Ada begins having her own visions. With frenetic cuts and erratically evolving color-grading, Kinkle brings viewers into these visions. From Ada’s perspective, these visions are intrinsically tied to what the pit wants or what it might do. But even in a belief system built around visions, the cruelty of patriarchal standards prevails. Women aren’t considered for roles like the potter. Her father’s insistence that her only role is to bear children, coupled with her mother’s rigidity and at times violent outbursts, leaves Ada with no one to trust. Whether Ada is slipping into psychosis or legitimately chosen by the pit, she navigates it entirely on her own.
‘Jug Face’ Is Hicksploitation at Its Most Imaginative and Ominous

Image via Modernciné

Jug Face is a slow-burning film of dread and dysfunction that centers on Ada’s emotional and spiritual unraveling. Rather than passing judgment or throwing an outsider into the community to regurgitate tired tropes, Ada – and Carter’s doe-eyed and desperate performance – challenge viewers to experience those tropes firsthand. Once the incest is established, the film pivots to Ada’s survival instead of reveling in her violation. This takes the film from another piece of empty exploitation to a dark and enchanting character study. For lovers of doomed heroines and ambiance-heavy southern gothic, Jug Face is a hidden gem of isolation and psychological extremes.

Jug Face

Release Date

August 9, 2013

Runtime

81 minutes

Director

Chad Crawford Kinkle

Writers

Chad Crawford Kinkle

Producers

Andrew van den Houten