Hixploitation

The apotheosis of the hixploitation movement was Smokey and the Bandit (1977), the directorial debut of Tennessee-born veteran stuntman Hal Needham, who actually cast Mel Tillis, Foster Brooks, and Ruth Buzzi for unironic effect.

While Black Snake Moan seems to unfold in a realm of synthetic fantasy—a hybrid of hip-hop's Dirty South, a bluesman's back roads, and the Dixie of '70s hixploitation flicks—it's actually set in a corner of Tennessee where a white girl named Rae (Ricci) holds the title of town slut.

Historians of what Scott Von Doviak dubbed "Hick Flicks" in his 2005 book by that name, point out that a "Southern" genre of film never emerged to compete with the western as such for a national audience, though there was a rise of hixploitation films in the 1970s whose success hinged on and ultimately died with the demise of the drive-in regional theater (French, Von Doviak).