His documentary has gotten quite a bit of attention.
A caution has been issued by filmmaker Mark Laita to those who wish to witness America's "most inbred family" in person.
For a few years now, YouTuber Mark Laita has been chronicling the peculiar family's existence in America.
The social media creator has gained access to the unconventional life of the Whittaker family, who reside in the hamlet Odd, West Virginia.
But while Laita can now highlight that the family live in an isolated backcountry shack with no formal education, it proved difficult to get them to agree to in the first place.
Laita faced threats from their watchful neighbors at first, but he persisted and was finally led by police to meet the Whittakers.
Since the family members could only talk in grunts or squeals and appeared to be physically and psychologically ill, the neighbors were first worried that they would be taken advantage of and exploited.
Speaking about his first interactions while on the Koncrete KLIP podcast, Laita said: “It was like that little scene from Deliverance that everyone knows. We came around to this road, which turns into a country road, which turns into a dirt road.
"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.
"And then one guy, you would look him in the eye or say anything and he would just scream and go running away, and his pants would fall around his ankles, and he would go running off and go and kick a garbage can. And this would happen over and over. It was out of control - the craziest thing I have ever seen."
Laita has also cautioned others in his YouTube broadcasts from just trying to locate the family and attempt to do something comparable to producing a documentary. He said that they won't likely receive a cordial greeting.
He has stated that "They are kind of protected by the neighbours and the relatives [who] don’t like these people coming to ridicule them."
The YouTuber has also acknowledged that determining the exact degree of inbreeding in the family might be challenging.
The documentary's director had conversations with cousin Timmy as well as siblings Betty, Lorraine, and Ray.
He said: "There is no way I would be able to confirm that the Whittaker parents were related, but given that this does happen in this part of the country and the Whittakers are the most extreme case I’ve seen so far. I would bet that inbreeding was at least partly responsible for the mental and physical abnormalities seen in [siblings] Lorraine, Freddie, Ray, and [cousin] Timmy.”
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