So Help You God
““I looked across the street and there were six poles with nooses on them. I said what are those for? ‘That’s for those kids from Kentucky.’ I’m back a couple of weeks later and there’s six more, I said what are those for? ‘That’s for the lawyers.’””
So Help You God consists of documentary film segments and a game that explore the story of six Appalachian teenagers who were incarcerated for murder. The project is an ongoing (we have been working on it intermittently and as capacity allows us to for over 15 years) experiment in computational storytelling that investigates a collection of personal stories dealing with this case and by extension, the criminal justice system more broadly. The project allows users to interact with raw footage, production journals, police files, and court evidence.
““Documentary games collide with a problem of participation. Can something qualify as historical documentation if the player is able to modify the actual course of events as they are known to have occurred?””
The project is anchored by the voices and stories of mentally ill and sexually abused youth, including three young women, and examines a case where we see teenagers face the death penalty and get sentenced to life in prison. The story explores how an entire community got caught up in the satanic panic epidemic that swept America in the 1990s. It reveals how court officials became immersed in a narrative about what the mostly Christian community believed to be the devil’s influence over the teenagers and demanded the teenagers be executed. This project constitutes the first time all six defendants, prosecutors, families, and community members come together to explore the lasting impact of this high profile and controversial murder case on a southern community and its citizens.
Many of the questions this project provokes relate to the ethics of documentary tradition and to one of the form’s longstanding concerns – the responsibility documentarians have in the process of representing real lives and events. Research for the project allowed us to immerse ourselves in a world that profoundly impacted our understanding of criminal investigations, capital punishment, the debate surrounding life sentences for juveniles, and how incarcerating America’s poorest citizens systematically maintains a permanent underclass in the United States.