What movie is this from? I distinctly remember it:
Someone (a woman, I think) is trapped in a dark place and can’t see anything around her. The only source of light she has is a disposable camera. She fires the shutter once to get a burst of flash, in order to see…then you hear her winding the film…then fires again for another burst…etc etc…I think, after two bursts, on the third burst of flash she sees the scary monster/killer/whatever it is that is after her. A great deal of suspense is built up through this extremely clever device.
Also pretty sure I saw the idea used in an episode of the New Mickey Mouse Club (some episodic segment, the episode in question had two of the kids stuck in a cave trying to find their way out).
For a fun variation, there was an episode of Due South that had gunfight in a dark hallway illuminated with the gunshots.
Aw, my memory kicked in and I know it’s night vision goggles not a camera flash, that was used in The Silence of the Lambs. I was thinking Rear Window, too, but mixed it with Grace Kelly in the opposite apartment. Weird, tired brain.
There was a movie on TV when I was a kid (probably a made-for-TV movie) that scarred me for life — it featured some hideous gremlin-type things that came out of a family’s chimney. They were blinded/dissuaded by light, so in a pivotal scene, when the heroine is being dragged into the fireplace by these loathesome creatures, she keeps flashing a camera at them to drive them back. I vowed I would always carry a camera after that day, to keep the monsters at bay.
This is the original version of “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” with Kim Darby. A terror from my childhood too. I’m still a little nervous about opening wall panels–god knows what’s lurking in there.
I never saw the original, but that sounds like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – recently, theatrically remade with a little girl in the main role. I found the remake very surprisingly scary (and amusing in that she even seemed to know what a Polaroid camera was).
