10 Most Intense Scenes In War Films

Under the Shadow is a strange war film in that it is also a horror film. It depicts an Iranian mother, Shideh, and her daughter living in an apartment while Tehran is attacked with missiles by the Iraqi Air Force.

Shideh looks out her window, which she has been continually taping to prevent explosions from shattering it, in a shot which director Babak Anvari uses to centre our attention on the window as the focal point of the scene.

She falls asleep then wakes back up to see that the tape on the window is starting to fall off. The scene remains mostly silent. Things seem off, but not overly so, despite that nagging tension that keeps us a bit unsettled. She walks to the window to fix the tape.

And then it happens. A hand bursts through the quiet and through the window. Shideh screams. Suddenly, she's back in her bed, having just startled herself awake.

And then, as she slowly looks back at the window, now in-tact and fully taped, a shape flashes by. What might have been a cheap jump scare becomes a startling indication that nightmare and reality are now virtually indistinguishable.

Neither sleeping nor waking life is safe from human or supernatural threats. This scene winds the tension tight, the jump scare not ultimately relieving tension as jump scares usually do, but instead making the tension linger. Above all, it introduces fear as a crucial effect of war and makes us feel that fear intensely.