Ya couldn’t stop in a densely-populated METROPOLIS?

I think there's some kind of metaphor contemporary to the era with movies like this where the protagonists are stuck and tormented in some rural place and can't get back to the safety of modern, urban areas.

The 1970s seem to have had a run with movies involving people trapped in small towns by crooked and/or evil/satanic cults and conspiracies. I'm kind of wondering if it was tied to the cultural shifts of the era, with small towns representing the kind of backwards, conservative, right wing aspects of America. The protagonists are almost always young people, too. In RWTD they're like some kind of proto-Yuppies even.

It kind of makes me wonder whether a lot of people in the 1970s had actual perceptions of rural areas as corrupt or dangerous places.