Sherry Chandler

A few days ago, I posted about the silly people I worked with in Chicago who got scared of the South after watching Deliverance. I should have known that Rebecca Clayton of Pocahontas County Fare had already visited this territory.

In a thread I’ve traced back to May 2006, Rebecca features Deliverance as entertainment suitable for discouraging unwanted tourism. Or, as she says in her “review” of the inbred-hillbilly-cannibal movie Wrong Turn:

…the trailers revealed it was set in West Virginia and featured frightening hillbillies doing terrible things to vacationing suburbanites. With all the tourists visiting Pocahontas County (especially the despised skiers throwing their Starbucks cups and other trash out the car windows as they drive home from Snowshoe Resort) some local residents consider such cinema wish fulfillment. …Here on Droop Mountain, in the Greenbrier backcountry, we consider Wrong Turn propaganda for our cause. We’d like to have it played continuously on cable TV at Snowshoe Resort, or perhaps it could alternate with “Deliverance.”

And from today’s post, which started it all, a review of Wrong Turn 2:

One of the things I liked best in the original was the parking lot the hillbilly cannibals kept by their house, filled with the SUV’s and cars of the tourists they’d devoured. Mountain bikes and ski equipment filled the luggage carriers and back seats. Pocahontas County is being promoted as a tourist destination, and much of the real estate changing hands becomes vacation property. While the Tourism Board probably wouldn’t agree, I think many natives might like to see a DVD three-pack in every ski condo rental unit: Deliverance, Wrong Turn, and this new movie, Wrong Turn 2 - Dead End. Y’all come back now, hear?

Read also Lies, Deliverance, and James Dickey

I was sick that winter. It was inconvenient because my big room was due to be whitewashed. I was put in the little room at the end of the house. The house, nearly but not quite on the crown of the hill, always seemed as if it might slide off into the maize fields below. This tiny room, no more than a slice off the end of the house, had a door, always open, and windows, always open, in spite of the windy cold of a July whose skies were an interminable light clear blue. The cat, a bluish-grey Persian, arrived purring on my bed, and settled down to share my sickness, my food, my pillow, my sleep. When I woke in the morning, my face turned to half-frozen linen; the outside of the fur blanket on the bed was cold, the smell of fresh whitewash from next door was cold and antiseptic; the wind lifting and laying the dust outside the door was cold—but in the crook of my arm, a light purring warmth, the cat, my friend.

—Doris Lessing, from Particularly Cats (Knopf, 1991)