“Uncanny Valley” By Gary D. Rhodes

I had to remind myself, / uphill or down, / never to speak of this again….

He appeared just
like desert rain—
there I saw myself
sauntering, and 

he looked
too much like me
to ever be, but
the sound,
the timbre. 

I had
to remind myself, 
uphill or down, 
never to speak
of this again, 

least of all
to him.

Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D., filmmaker, poet and Full Professor of Media Production at Oklahoma Baptist University, is the author (with William M. [Bill] Kaffenberger) of Becoming Dracula – Vol. 1 (BearManor Media, 2021), Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial (co-authored with Robert Singer, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (IAP, 2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (Bloomsbury, 2012) and The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), as well as the editor of such anthologies as The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and The Films of Budd Boetticher (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Rhodes is also the writer-director of such documentary films as Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004).

(Top image: Ryhor Cisiecki – Facebook/cisiecki AT gmail.com)