Running for the Mountains (2024)

The Curse and the Jubilee

An intimate, arresting portrait of the cursed Appalachian mining town of Ivanhoe, Virginia. The film captures the town as it prepares for the annual Jubilee, a wild 4th of July celebration where families and neighbors let loose and triumph over daily hardships, industrial abandonment, and race.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

This 2005 documentary film chronicles the life of Daniel Johnston, a manic-depressive genius singer/songwriter/artist, from childhood up to the present, with an emphasis on his mental illness and how it manifested itself in demonic self-obsession.

Rand University

Randy Moss has long been an enigma known for his brilliance on the football field and his problems off it. Sometimes there's even been an intersection of those two qualities. "Rand University" gets to that crossing by going back to where he came from - Rand, West Virginia - and exploring what almost derailed him before he ever became nationally known for his extraordinary abilities as a wide receiver.

King Coal

The cultural roots of coal continue to permeate the rituals of daily life in Appalachia even as its economic power wanes. The journey of a coal miner’s daughter exploring the region’s dreams and myths, untangling the pain and beauty, as her community sits on the brink of massive change.

Portraits and Dreams

Revisit photographs created by Kentucky school children in the 1970s and the place where their photos were made. Photographer and artist Wendy Ewald, who guided the students in making their visionary photographs, returns to Kentucky and learns how the lives and visions of her former students have changed.

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

Produced by Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine for MTV and Dickhouse Productions, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia is a documentary about the renowned West Virginia outlaw Jesco White and his eccentric backwoods family. In addition to getting in trouble with the law, the Whites, who live deep within Appalachia, uphold a time-honored dancing style, even as they contend with poverty, drugs and other issues. Alternately humorous and sad, the movie is an unflinching look at life on the criminal margins of rural mountain culture.

Mountain Monsters: A Tribute to Trapper

The Appalachian Investigators of Mysterious Sightings (A.I.M.S.) team comes together to reminisce and celebrate the life of their founder, John "Trapper" Tice, in this Mountain Monsters special.

Eyes of the Mothman

In 1966 West Virginia, four friends encounter a tall, winged creature in the woods surrounding an abandoned dynamite factory.

Mountain Talk

Mountain dialect, culture and identity are revealed by the true experts on Southern Appalachian culture--the people whose families have lived there for generations.

You Gave Me A Song: The Life and Music of Alice Gerrard

You Gave Me A Song offers an intimate portrait of old-time music pioneer Alice Gerrard and her remarkable, unpredictable journey creating and preserving traditional music. The film follows eighty-four year old Gerrard over several years, weaving together verité footage of living room rehearsals, recording sessions, songwriting, archival work, and performances with photos and rare field recordings. Much of the film is told in Alice’s voice and via interviews with musical collaborators and family members who share the story of Alice and others chasing that high lonesome sound.

The Mothman of Point Pleasant

Learn the terrifying, true story about thirteen months that changed history! In November of 1966 a car full of kids encountered a creature unlike anything they'd ever seen before. In the weeks and months to follow, the monster – now known as The Mothman – was sighted again and again on country roads and around the state of West Virginia.

Picture Proof

Examines the intergenerational impact of addiction by chronicling the love, labor, loss, and uncertainty of one woman’s struggle to live a life of sobriety. Weaving together moments of glee, fulfillment, acceptance, sorrow, and disappointment, this documentary takes an intimate look at the bonds that hold one family together and a disease that threatens to tear them apart.

Sprout Wings and Fly

Set in the North Carolina Appalachians, Sprout Wings and Fly honors the fiddle playing of 82-year-old Tommy Jarrell of Toast, NC. Tommy was quirky, gregarious and generous, and this film shows him at his best, in fine fiddling form.

The Hunted

Chasing their dream of landing their own hunting show, Jake and Stevie head to the dense, secluded mountains of West Virginia. Equipped with only their bow and camera, they have just three days to kill a monster buck big enough to grab the attention of the network...and they've found him. But the sun has set, and they realize they're not alone.

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

A group of people find themselves trapped in the backwoods of West Virginia, fighting for their lives against a group of vicious and horribly disfigured inbred cannibals.

Timber Falls

A weekend of camping in the mountains becomes an excursion into hell for a young couple, who become pawns in a grotesque plot hatched by deranged locals.

October Sky

The true story of Homer Hickam, a coal miner's son who was inspired by the first Sputnik launch to take up rocketry against his father's wishes.

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!

A small-town girl wins a date with a Hollywood star through a contest. When the date goes better than expected, a love triangle forms between the girl, the celebrity, and the girl's best friend.

Wrong Turn 2: Dead End

Retired military commander Colonel Dale Murphy hosts the simulated post-apocalyptic reality show where participants are challenged to survive a remote West Virginia wasteland. But the show turns into a nightmarish showdown when each realizes they are being hunted by an inbred family of cannibals determined to make them all dinner!

Wrong Turn

Chris crashes into a carload of other young people, and the group of stranded motorists is soon lost in the woods of West Virginia, where they're hunted by three cannibalistic mountain men who are grossly disfigured by generations of inbreeding.

The Last Sin Eater

In seeking her own redemption from the one man of whom she is most afraid, 10-year-old Cadi Forbes discovers a secret sin haunting her community of Welsh immigrants in 1850s Appalachia.

The Descent

After a personal tragedy, Sarah joins her friends on a caving expedition in the Appalachian Mountains. But when a rockfall traps them deep underground, their adventure turns into a nightmare. As they search for a way out, the group discovers they are not alone—lurking in the darkness are savage, cave-dwelling creatures. With rising tension and dwindling trust, the women must fight to survive against both the predators and each other.

Dear Wendy

In a blue-collar American town, a group of teens bands together to form the Dandies, a gang of gunslingers led by Dick Dandelion. Following a code of strict pacifism at odds with the fact that they all carry guns, the group eventually lets in Sebastian, the grandson of Dick's childhood nanny, Clarabelle, who fears the other gangs in the area. Dick and company try to protect Clarabelle, but events transpire that push the gang past posturing.

The World Made Straight

In a rural Appalachian community haunted by the legacy of a Civil War massacre, a rebellious young man struggles to escape the violence that would bind him to the past.

Loggerheads

A troubled woman seeks out the child she gave up for adoption; a gay motel owner takes in a handsome drifter; and the wife of a preacher frets that a gay couple has moved in across the street. All of their lives will intersect as Loggerheads subtly draws out their secret losses and desires.

The Mothman Prophecies

Reporter John Klein is plunged into a world of impossible terror and unthinkable chaos when fate draws him to a sleepy West Virginia town whose residents are being visited by a great winged shape that sows hideous nightmares and fevered visions.

Christy

Christy Martin never imagined life beyond her small-town roots in West Virginia—until she discovered a knack for punching people. Fueled by grit, raw determination, and an unshakable desire to win, she charges into the world of boxing under the guidance of her trainer and manager-turned-husband, Jim. But while Christy flaunts a fiery persona in the ring, her toughest battles unfold outside it—confronting family, identity, and a relationship that just might become life-or-death.

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings

A group of friends take refuge in a deserted sanatorium after they are left stranded in a snowstorm. Later, the place becomes a death trap when man-eating cannibals surround them.

The Devil All the Time

In Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters converge around young Arvin Russell as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family.

White Lightnin'

Deep in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, where every man owns a gun and a moonshine still, abides living legend Jesco White, "the dancing outlaw". As a boy Jesco was in and out of reform school and the insane asylum. To keep him out of trouble, his daddy D-Ray taught him the art of mountain dancing, a frenzied version of tap dancing to wild country banjo music. After his father's death, crazy Jesco dons his father's tap shoes and takes his show on the road.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Two hillbillies are suspected of being killers by a group of paranoid college kids camping near the duo's West Virginian cabin. As the body count climbs, so does the fear and confusion as the college kids try to seek revenge against the pair.

Mine 9

Two miles into the earth, nine Appalachian miners struggle to survive after a methane explosion leaves them with one hour of oxygen.

Lawless

In 1931, the Bondurant brothers of Franklin County, Virginia, run a multipurpose backwoods establishment that hides their true business — bootlegging. Middle brother Forrest is the brain of the operation; older Howard is the brawn, and younger Jack, the lookout. Though the local police have taken bribes and left the brothers alone, a violent war erupts when a sadistic lawman from Chicago arrives and tries to shut down the Bondurants operation.