Stumbling Upon The Silver Falls Slasher

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If you've been reading MNPP for awhile then you've probably seen that whenever I go on vacation I try to visit whatever the local famous movie spot is when I go somewhere new. When I went to Austin I sought out the cemetery from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the bar from Death Proof. When I went to Oregon I made sure to stop in Astoria, where The Goonies was filmed. I hit as many of the Vertigo locations as I could when in San Francisco.

And when I was in Italy earlier this year, we stayed in the mountains not far from where The Fearless Vampire Killers was filmed - although we really couldn't find any information on precise locations - and I managed to make my way through the maze of Venice's streets to the building where Donald Sutherland meets the red raincoated dwarf at the end of Don't Look Now... which I'm just now noticing I never posted any pictures of! Shame on me! The building, called the Palazzo Grimani, was closed the day we were in town so I couldn't get into the galleries where most of the running around takes place, but here are some pictures of the outside.

I wish I'd had a red raincoat to pose in!

Anyway point is, this is a thing I do. And apparently it's become second-nature to me at this point so that I don't even have to think about it anymore, which is something I realized last night while re-watching the fabulously underrated 1981 slasher movie Just Before Dawn.

If you're unfamiliar with JBD, it tells the terribly original story of a bunch of kids who go into some strange woods and are picked off one by one by nut-jobs. And it does so really well! It's got great atmosphere and better-than-expected characterizations, and it never fails to creep me out whenever I watch it. Anyway I'm sitting there with the boyfriend watching the movie and they're hiking around this waterfall and the boyfriend mentions that it looks an awful lot like Silver Falls in Oregon, which is a place we hiked on that same trip last year when we visited The Goonies' hometown of Astoria. I made fun of him because, for one I'm an asshole, but for another there have got to be tons of waterfalls that look like that, right? It couldn't be the same one.

That's a shot from the movie on the left and a picture of me in front of the falls on the right. Five minutes later I was on the movie's Wikipedia page and yup, it's the same one. I had no idea when we were there! We were just drawn to it, like... like a moth to a maniac with a giant knife.