A filmmaker has given a glimpse inside the lives of one of America's most inbred families in West Virginia after he visited them in their squalid home.
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The Whittakers - who live in the aptly-named village of Odd, 75 miles south of Charleston - have been known to bark at people, communicate through grunts and often run away when people tried to speak to them.
Producer Mark Laita has shone a spotlight on the family by releasing a short 12-minute film on his YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly, in a bid to report on untold stories from across the country.
He has described the inbred family as like something out of the 1972 thriller, Deliverance.
In April last year he revisited the Whittaker family, who he first met in 2004 and filmed in 2020, and spoke about it on the channel. The Whittakers are three siblings named Lorraine, Timmy, and Ray. Their parents were double first cousins, The Sun reported - first cousins, twice, because they share both sets of grandparents.
The genetic complications have caused a host of behavioral issues, Laita reported.
Laita was first acquainted with the West Virginia family in 2004 when he took pictures of them and he decided to return in 2020 to get to know them better.
In an interview with Koncrete podcast, recorded before Christmas, Laita recalled the most bizarre moments with the family.
'It was out of control,' he said.
'There's these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us.
'And [this] one guy, you'd look at him in the eye or say anything and he would just scream and go running away and his pants would fall around his ankles.'
Laita said the family have received a surge in interest since he first photographed and then filmed them. He said he needed a police escort to visit.
Laita recalled the building up of his relationship with the inbred family, particularly with family members named Ray, Betty, Kenneth, Ray, Timmy and Lorraine.
The first time he approached them was in the early 2000s when he was initially met by 'protective' neighbors with a shotgun.
'They don't like people coming to ridicule these people,' Laita said on the podcast.
At the time, Laita wanted to take photos of the Whittakers for his book, 'Created Equal.' The book told stories of diverse cultures in the US.
While he wasn't initially welcomed, he was eventually allowed to snap a few shots and even gifted some to the family.
One of the filmmaker's latest videos from 2021 showed the family's rundown conditions, with the group living in a small and overcrowded home with several animals.
Laita said he returned to the home on a whim to see how the family was doing.
He then decided to pick up his iPhone and grab footage of their 'level of poverty' and living conditions.