Stanley Kubrick said it contained the most terrifying scene ever filmed. John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) may have introduced “dueling banjos” and “squeal like a pig” into the American vernacular, but its queasy impact endures beyond rude boy humor.

Even for jaded contemporary viewers inured to every violent extreme, porcine good ol’ boy Bobby Trippe’s (Ned Beatty) rape in the Georgia woods hasn’t lost its transgressive horror. Deliverance has, over time, ripened into one of those American movies that transcend time and place to enter the realm of the mythic. The American cinema and psyche are unimaginable without it.

Brit Boorman’s quintessential American fable about the horrible wages of manliness and the eternal battle between hillbillies and city folk returns in a 35th Anniversary DVD featuring a package of nifty behind-the-scenes documentaries recounting author James Dickey’s drunken escapades on the Deliverance set and his ominous warning to anyone who would listen: “You know, it really happened.”

In the heyday of the 1970s revenge cycle of Dirty Harry and Death Wish, where masculine violence was fascist catharsis, part of Deliverance’s lingering and subversive allure is its deflation of the American cinema’s sacrament that violence will redeem, purify, punish and liberate. When even The Brave One’s liberal anxiety is overridden by a sense of vigilante justice, Deliverance stands alone as a film willing to emasculate the revenge story and lay bare the soul-death of extreme violence. Dipping into the action genre, thriller, war film and revenge story, Deliverance registers as its own genre: the Southern horror film. With a menu of sodomy, murder and guilt, the film is as much a Conradian journey into the dark recesses of human psychology as a literal one of four Atlanta businessmen down the Cahulawassee River.

Boorman’s films often pitted man against the environment, but Deliverance was the most troubling of his cautionary tales. Though Boorman saw the toothless hillbillies as nature’s revenge for civilization’s imminent damming of the Cahulawassee, by the film’s conclusion, most viewers—like Final Guy Jon Voight—were undoubtedly making a philosophical beeline for the reassuring comfort of crowds, traffic, plumbing and any buffer from that dreadful, primordial river.