I walked to Subway and back (Tuscan Chicken Melt, if you must know), and enjoyed the good light today, and the mild-but-sunny weather. Just lovely. Snapped a few pictures on my way, including that haunted fucking house I've photographed before (but likely haven't put on this blog). Just a loomy kind of old Victorian building. Gotta watch out for those looming Victorians! Anyway, I was disappointed at Powell's -- their free book box was ransacked by a codger who snapped up a thick stack of novelized screenplays just before I got there. D'oh! Had I gone to Powell's before Subway, I'd have snagged a treasure trove of'em, but I was hungry, and I wanted to get ahead of the Subway lunch rush, so there you go. I thought of asking the old guy for the "Deliverance" and "Taxi Driver" (two that I saw, among the baker's dozen he snagged), but I figured he might as well enjoy'em, but I was peevish at being thwarted!
I think of both of those movies are Horror, even though they're not actually officially branded that way. But how can anyone watch "Deliverance" and not feel the terror and horror throuthout it? And I'm not just talking about poor Ned Beatty's character getting piggy-raped in the Georgia forest; the whole movie is deeply, darkly Southern Gothic in all sorts of harrowing ways. Even the banjo duel just drips Southern Gothic...
Banjo Duel
One scene in particular scared the hell out of me as a teen -- I remember watching it, must've been my senior year in high school, in our big house, all alone. Our den had some doors you could close to seal it off from the rest of the place. Anyway, I would watch movies by myself and shut those doors, feel reasonably safe in there.
So, I'm watching "Deliverance" and it's skeeving me out, as it always does, and because it was on late, I dozed off on the sofa, and I woke up during this part when Jon Voight dreams that the body of the man they killed surfaces -- and it's this creepy-as-hell moment where there's the water of the lake made from the dam, and this hand surfaces from the water with this droning music playing.
Anyway, I woke up to that music, that fucking hand rising from the water, alone in my folks' house, and I was completely creeped out!
