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Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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Random Creepy Scene #2,786: Insidious

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As I’ve mentioned on here before, I consider myself quite a hardened horror fan. It takes a lot to actually scare me. The stuff I find that tends to inflict sleepless nights upon me is low-key, subtly suggestive material, not wall to wall gore. The last film I saw that truly ‘scared’ me was Insidious . In it, a family who believe their house is haunted eventually realise that their comatose son has been attracting evil spirits who want to possess his body, while his soul is stuck in a permanent state of astral projection, lost in a shadowy realm where the dead don’t rest easy. Even though the film follows a vulnerable young family and the inconceivable forces that stalk them, Insidious still has a cold, often detached feel which really enhances its ability to disturb. Perforated with unsettling imagery, methodically orchestrated jump scares, moments of flesh-creeping dread and (for the most part) a slow-burning and ominous atmosphere, Insidious is a well crafted and unnervin...
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Just Before Dawn (1981)

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This underappreciated backwoods-slasher is a top-tier example of the subgenre, demonstrating just how powerful and effective the slasher can be as a form of storytelling. Released in the early 80s, the Golden Age of the slasher film, Just Before Dawn combines eerie atmospherics and breathless suspense, emerging as a survivalist horror creeper with echoes of an environmental message. Its premise is standard slasher fare (but hey, that’s why we’re here, there’s comfort in the familiar) as a group of friends head into the mountain forests of Oregon to explore a piece of inherited land, only to fall foul of a sadistic killer who picks them off one by one. Hmm, a backwoods slasher in which city-folk camping in a deep, dark forest are brutalised by a hulking, machete-wielding bogeyman? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Just Before Dawn is far from a Friday the 13th clone though. While it was released the same year as Friday the 13th Part 2 and The Burning , it’s a very different beast: relative...
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Random Creepy Scene #487: Quiet As A Nun

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Armchair Thriller was a British television series, broadcast on ITV by Thames in 1978 and 1980. It was essentially a horror/supernatural orientated anthology series that specialised in adapting various spooky novels and stories. It consisted of two weekly 25 minute episodes, usually screened at 8pm on a Tuesday and Thursday evening. I’m too young to remember it, but a recent conversation with several ( ever so slightly) older friends alerted me to one particular episode of the series entitled Quiet as a Nun … Adapted from the 1977 novel of the same name by Antonia Fraser, Quiet as a Nun was a six part dramatisation revolving around Fraser's regular sleuth Jemima Shore, who revisits the convent where she was schooled following the mysterious death of one of the nuns. The nun, Sister Miriam, was a former friend of Jemima’s and she apparently starved herself to death in a ruined tower in the grounds of the convent. Jemima soon learns from the girls at the convent about a myste...
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