In this essay, then, I turn to a cultural text—the 2011 Hollywood thriller Straw Dogs, written and directed by Rob Lurie—that helps us see how the contemporary US South continues to function as the nation's internal other, and how similar processes have operated in another national context across the Atlantic. Because Lurie's Straw Dogs is a remake, the movie and its textual antecedents—a novel and another film—facilitate a fuller comparative, transnational analysis of how nations' regions function ideologically. Amy and her screenwriter husband David (James Marsden) plan to redevelop Amy's storm-damaged childhood home, the Wilcox farm, following the death of her father. Amy becomes the object of a struggle between cerebral, bespectacled David and buff, self-declared "redneck" Charlie Venner (Alexander Skarsgård), leader of a work crew contracted to repair a barn on the farm, and Amy's high school sweetheart. The drama climaxes as Charlie, Norman, fellow crew members Chris (Billy Lush) and Bic (Drew Powell), and their former football coach Tom Heddon (James Woods) lay siege to the farm after learning that the Sumners are harboring the mentally challenged Jeremy Niles (Dominic Purcell), who has accidentally suffocated Heddon's teenage daughter Janice (Willa Holland).