The scene where she is in convenient store making the call...

I said the same thing! Even if she seemed "off," they could've at least called the cops. She looked like she had been assaulted and I had hoped someone would've called the cops and sit with her until they got there.

I've read and heard of stories where people do nothing. Granted, it's a dangerous place but I often think what if it were my family member needing help. I'd hope someone would do so and I'd like to think I would do the same.

I wondered about that at first too. I figure, the way it was easy for her to figure them out and who they were online it would be even easier for the town to know about it. Maybe they were aware of this family and knew for their own safety to stay out of it, they hinted at prior trouble and a suicide from this family. Who knows what a small town gossip would turn it into. Like many movies like this, the small towns usually turn a blind eye to the type of character big driver was. I suspected Betsy was a family member or more familiar with them the way they inserted her character and talked about abuse etc.

I never read this story, but SK often depicts small town citizens as kind of monstrous in their own way. They often know something bad is happening but turn a blind eye. (The novel "IT" is a good example.)

One of the men in the store nodded at another, as if confirming they knew what had happened. In the end, when Betsy called Tess and congratulated her on wasting the rapist family I got the feeling people knew but were too scared to do anything.

These kids today, with their hula hoops and fax machines.

This scene was so sad. At least one person should have asked her how they could have helped her.

Look up Kitty Genovese. This lady was being taped and killed in an alley. She screamed for help and no one helped

I took it that they thought she was already talking to a friend or the police, and that the kindest thing they could do was not add to her obvious discomfort (she shied away from everyone's eyes) by interfering. Who would've assumed anything else? Why?

Here's a person obviously in need of help, talking on the phone - and relating, in some detail, a horrific experience, if one overhears any of it. It would seem obvious to me that she was in the process of getting help.

You don't sneak up on people in a zombie apocalypse, okay?

There have been enough social experiments to know that people, in general, have an obsessive need to "mind their own" in such cases. A woman being brutally beaten to death a while back, on a busy street, begged for help from many passers by and received none at all. When asked why they inevitably said they assumed someone else would help or had called for help.

Sadly, so many people these days would just assume that a stranger in that state of disarray is probably a junkie and somehow deserved whatever is going on with her or him... rather than assume they may need help because they've been attacked or even in an accident.

She looked like either of those events, so yes it's sad nobody helped her. But like I say, sometimes the first thing others assume of someone in startlingly ruined condition is drugs, so they stay away.

The other thing is that maybe the local people were fully aware of Big Driver's activities and fully realized she was an escaped victim - and didn't want to get involved because of that. I haven't read the book so don't know for sure.