Films and TV shows that feel like O Death by Ralph Stanley

A bare, haunting plea to Death itself, sung in a weathered voice with no instruments to hide behind, as mortality arrives in a Depression-era Southern landscape.

1. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000): The song's home: Stanley's a cappella plays in this Coen brothers Depression-era odyssey through Mississippi.
2. Cold Mountain (2003): Appalachian folk music and mortal dread run through this Civil War journey home.
3. Songcatcher (2001): A musicologist collects old ballads in the Appalachian hills, the very tradition this song comes from.
4. Winter's Bone (2010): Bleak Ozark mountain life, kin and death hang over every frame.
5. True Detective (2014): Southern gothic dread, ritual, and a haunted landscape in its first season.
6. No Country for Old Men (2007): Another Coen film with Death walking a dry Southern landscape.
7. The Night of the Hunter (1955): Southern gothic fable with hymns, river, and a preacher who embodies death.
8. Deadwood (2004): Hard frontier people facing mortality and judgement in a rough, unvarnished world.