Film-Reinduced Tourism. The Hatfield-McCoy Feud Case

In places like those of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, where blood, legend, myth and film-making have shaped images over the years, tourists come visiting with a state of mind that searches for answers to several sensorial stirrings, mostly visual. These stirrings reveal the desire to identify with the visited places, which change and palpitate like living beings.Parts of Southern Appalachia, where Ellen Churchill Semple went on a field research in the late 1890s, were the location of this feud. From then on these sites have been connected with their images. Representations of the feud that, according to their aims, have often highlighted the horror, the romance, the violence over and above the reality of the feud.Here touristic places and spaces have been established hand in hand with the creation of the myth, by telling and retelling the legend of a blood feud. Nowadays, also thanks to the contribution of the 2012 miniseries starring Kevin Costner, the Hatfield-McCoy feud is part of the folklore and known to every American. However, what visitors and tourists traveling to this area get to know are many myths and legends but only few actual facts. Yet these myths and legends, endorsed by the development of tourism, contribute to redefining the image that local residents have of their own territory.