Deliverance

A group of Atlanta businessmen encounter horrors while on a canoe trip.

Deliverance was a landmark film. Following the lead of Hitchcock’s Psycho, Deliverance shows us once again that mankind has the capacity to be far more frightening than any monster we can dream up.

Director John Boorman captures the perfect tone for the film, dramatically contrasting the beauty and power of nature with the ugliness and frailty of man. The resulting film is both beautiful to look at, and deeply disturbing.

Boorman couldn’t have hoped for a better cast. The actors all seem born to play their various parts, and even the film’s screenwriter James Dickey, who also wrote the novel upon which the film was based, seems natural in his role as a skeptical sheriff.