Tfw you finally screen a movie you have been scared to watch since you were a kid, and you realize have have found the source material for important elements of at least two Cormac McCarthy novels

Kind of a perfect grindhouse movie to screen on an August night in Texas, the way it makes you feel the heat off the pavement, but it really wants to be seen in an air-conditioned and preferably dingy theater

The first act feels more like the real 70s of my memory (from being a little kid around college kids like these) than any other movie I can recall, and captures what the Austin of the Armadillo days must have really been like

I once tried to explain to my millennial son how ubiquitous hitchhiking was when I was a kid, before movies like this and a thousand urban legends scared us off, but he wasn’t buying it

The scariest thing about the movie was to see how much the scary locations they chose look like our neighborhood

And even scarier was how much the DIY decor of the house you never leave looked like the little shrines of woodsy found objects I accumulate around here (an observation my native Texan brother-in-law told me he had already made when I mentioned to movie at Sunday dinner https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😅" title="Lächelndes Gesicht mit offenem Mund und Angstschweiß" aria-label="Emoji: Lächelndes Gesicht mit offenem Mund und Angstschweiß">)

And being a true Texan movie, gas station barbecue becomes a key plot element, in a story that deals with industrial cattle production and slaughter in a clever if oblique way.

*And for locals, tfw when the credits roll and you see people you know (in my case, the stuntman turned high-powered real estate developer)