12 Incredible Slow Burn Movie Scenes With Killer Pay Offs

8. Audition -€“ Telephone

Considering that for its first few scenes, Audition feels like an offbeat romantic comedy, it's quite commendable how quickly it transforms into one of the most unsettling horror films ever made €“ and it's all thanks to one shockingly disturbing scene.

Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is hosting auditions for a fake film, hoping to meet a girl to cure the loneliness he's experiencing as an ageing widower. He instantly falls for one girl in particular: a beautiful, tall and quietly intelligent ex-ballerina, dressed all in white.

Eventually, Aoyama goes to contact her by telephone, and after a couple of reversals on his decision, he finally starts dialling. Director Takashi Miike has carefully constructed a sense of anxiety leading up to the phone call, through claustrophobic cinematography and eerie silence. This is then combined with interior shots of the girl's apartment, which is totally empty save for a burlap sack and a telephone, between which the girl sits, hunched over and motionless.

The phone finally rings in the girl's apartment, breaking the silence with its ominous echoes, before the burlap sack suddenly rolls over in the background, making a deeply unsettling gargling sound as it moves. In that single scene, we go from comfortable to completely disturbed in about two minutes, and it's all through subtle suggestion.