Old Gods of Appalachia
Season One: Barlo KY, 1917
This piece focuses on a podcast series, Old Gods of Appalachia, as if it were adapted into a television series. The first season is named after its primary setting: Barlo Kentucky, 1917. The plot explores what happens within a small mountain town after the Old Number Seven mine violently explodes, killing 64 men and releasing the ancient horror which had been imprisoned beneath that very mine for millenia.
Steve Shell, co-creator of the podcast, summarizes his plot as follows:
Old Gods of Appalachia is an eldritch horror anthology podcast set in the darkest mountains in the world. Our world is an alternate Appalachia, where these mountains were never meant to be inhabited.
Long before anyone lived in these hills, beings of immeasurable darkness and incomprehensible madness were entombed here. It was during this bygone age, when the Appalachians towered much higher and more menacing than the gentle slopes and ridges we know today, that they were conscripted after a great battle to serve as the final prison for those dark forces. But of course, time marches inexorably on. Eons passed and the walls of the prison begin to wear thin. And Things that slumbered soundlessly below for millennia began to stir and become restless.
They began to call to those who would hear them.
To dig. To seek and find. To follow and serve. To keep this dark and bloody landfor themselves and their masters.”
In this version of Appalachia, European immigrants have settled into remote insular communities, having had little interaction with the world beyond their mountains. They hold tightly to their cultural roots and utilize folk clothing styles of their homelands, causing the region to look outdated. The inclusion of fashion elements such as kilts, breeches, shawls, ghillie shoes, Crios belts, woven and knitted items, and embroidered accents reflect their Scotch, Irish, Polish, etc. origins.
These people still make their own clothing, as well as everything else. Their common aesthetic is largely defined by natural fibers and dyes derived from the Appalachian region in which they live. A wide variety of greens, browns, and other earth tones, as well as a gradually intensifying range of natural reds (as the show progresses) grounds the community in sober reality amidst the emerging mythic and menacing unknown.
There is a secondary plot told alongside the events within Barlo, focusing on the life of Daughter Dooley, an exceptionally adept witch who immigrated to Virginia from Ireland with her two mothers in the late 1700’s. From the costume perspective, this plotline is used as a point of reference for where this Appalachia’s timeline diverts from ours. Here we see clothing most heavily inspired by the people’s original homelands; the people of the Blessed Folk settlement coming from the British Isles, and those of Last Harbor being originally from Poland. There are several elements which will connect the two time periods, but the goal is to give a clear visual evolution of what these ‘alternate’ Appalachians wore across two centuries.
