It was the summer of scares. And it was awesome.
This year, despite any reports to the contrary, was a great one for the horror genre, and that’s true of both the indie output and the studio output. Oddly enough, horror reigned supreme at the summer box office in 2016, and two of the films that were both critical and financial successes in those warm months were sequel The Conjuring 2 and shark attack flick The Shallows.
Both films, though they deal with entirely different subject matter, share the common bond of bringing truly nightmarish images to the big screen this year, whether we’re talking about the demonic nun in The Conjuring 2 or that Jaws-like killer shark in The Shallows. And two of those images, well, they were plucked right out of the Internet’s “nightmare fuel” folder.
In The Conjuring 2, James Wan made good on a promise teased at the end of the first film by kicking off the hit sequel in Amityville, New York. Like in real life, Ed and Lorraine Warren arrive at the infamous Ocean Avenue home to help out the Lutz family, and it’s in the home that Lorraine comes face-to-face with one of the murdered DeFeo children.
The boy, who has glowing white eyes, stares at Lorraine from behind a wall, and if that terrifying image seemed familiar with you, it’s probably because you have indeed seen it before. A ghost photo taken inside the real Amityville house has become the stuff of legend here on the Internet over the years, and Wan brilliantly brought that very image to life in The Conjuring 2…
The real photo, seen at the top of this post, has never been disproven as a hoax, and while many believe that it’s the spirit of young John DeFeo that was captured by the camera, others are convinced it’s merely one of the investigators who was on the scene at the time. Why then are his eyes completely white? A camera glitch, perhaps? We may never know.
Either way, the creepy photo inspired James Wan, and made for one hell of a spooky scene.
And then there’s The Shallows, which similarly drew inspiration from a photo that has surely been shared to Reddit’s “Creepy” sub-site. It’s hard to tell whether it’s real or not, as many Photoshop experts over the years have conjured up nightmarish shark images, but this particular photo shows a surfer riding a wave… and there’s a big ass shark literally inside that wave…
The most striking image from Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows is almost exactly that image…
Pure nightmare fuel is the only way to describe the scene, which sees Blake Lively’s character get attacked for the first time by the shark she battles throughout the film. Like the surfer in the photo above the screen-grab, we see the shark but the ill-fated character does not, and the sight of it quickly approaching her from within the water is truly breathtaking in the scariest of ways.
Fiction? Reality? Horror is often at its most effective when it’s blending the two.
