A different kind of action in this psychological thriller, aka fantasy-horror film:
BLACK NARCISSUS, with Deborah Carr and Kathleen Byron.
The mad scene, at film's end, had been fitted to the earlier-composed, shadowy music, which swells with blood-curdling, operatic intensity toward the climax. The clips on Youtube of one of filmdom's scariest scenes, has had, sad to say, its lush and evocative original score replaced with today's pop music. Why can't excellence be left alone? You simply must rent and view the movie. A devout nun and a deranged psychopath: two sides of the same coin.
Horror, psychodrama, and windiness all peak during the meticulously engineered ‘composed film’ sequence that punctuates Black Narcissus (1:31:50-1:35:35). The stalking begins most explicitly with a shock cut (another popular horror convention) to an extreme closeup of Sister Ruth’s abject eyes (1:32:01) that interrupts a serene but brooding Gothic segment where Sister Clodagh’s silhouette gazes out to the mountainside at dawn, her ‘peripatetic’ lantern placed by her feet. (1:30:55-1:32:00). The tension stirred by the thick shadows, slow-moving camera, howling wind, and lilting harp makes this shock cut all the more eerie and compelling. Following this startling cinematic gesture, the floodgates are opened for what is arguably the film’s ‘crowning jewel’, where “Sister Ruth’s climactic stalking features the subjective camera’s restlessly prowling and startling close-ups of red-rimmed eyes, recognizable aesthetic strategies of the horror movie” (189) and more specifically, the ‘slasher’ subgenre that would develop decades later.