Kit Roberts
A filmmaker who made a documentary series about 'America's most inbred family' has opened up about the first time that he met them.
Mark Laita made the YouTube series Soft White Underbelly, and met the Whittaker family from Odd in West Virginia in 2020.
After Laita's interactions with them, the family went on to gain widespread attention both in US media and around the world.
The generational inbreeding began after the children of Henry and John, identical twin brothers, got married.
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This in turn led to inbreeding which has caused a number of members of the family to have serious disabilities.
While he would go on to get to know the family closely, Laita has now spoken about the first time that he met the family.
He appeared on the Koncrete Clips podcast, where he shared that it was not easy to make contact with the family due to protective neighbours.
Eventually, a police officer said he would take Laita to the Whittakers' home.
"We came around to this road, which turns into a country road, which turns into a dirt road," he told the podcast.
"Then we come to this trailer and then a little shack on the other side of the road. And there's these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us."
Laika also likened his first encounter with the family as being like something out of the film Deliverance, in which a group of business men on a trip run into trouble with residents in an isolated community.
Laika said: "One bloke, you would look him in the eye or say anything and he would just scream and go running away, and his trousers would fall around his ankles, and he would go running off and go and kick a rubbish bin.
"And this would happen over and over. It was out of control - the maddest thing I have ever witnessed."
The filmmaker described how it had been difficult to build a relationship with the family, but was able to gain their trust when he took photos of a relative's coffin for them.
In 2020 he would go back to the family, when he filmed Inbred Family - The Whittakers.
After his first contact with them, Laika would go on to document the family's daily life as part of the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly, a series where he looked at the lives of people across the US.