Nightmare Fuel / Picnic at Hanging Rock

• There's something deeply unsettling about a mystery story where the mystery never gets explained.
• The more time Miranda, Marion and Irma spend on the rock the more they seem to lose touch with reality. Finally the girls walk further into the rock as though they are drugged. Edith starts screaming and runs away. We never find out what happened.
• When Albert finds Michael battered and catatonic on the rock, complete with Scare Chord, after staying there all night looking for the missing girls.
  • Michael's Thousand-Yard Stare as he's loaded into the doctor's carriage - he looks at Albert intensely and presses something into his hand. It's a tiny scrap of white lace.
  • Albert scrambling back up the rock and finding Irma's body.
  • That whole sequence is one of the dramatic high points in a film that's mostly notable for its lack of horror.
• Irma being mobbed by her classmates.
• Mlle de Poitiers finding Sara strapped to the backboard.
  • Everything about Sara's life is Nightmare Fuel, really.
• It was deleted in the Re-Cut, but the scene of Mrs Appleyard going through Sara's things in order to cover up her suicide was extremely menacing.
• Mr Whitehead noticing the hole in the glass roof of the greenhouse, and then finding Sara's body.
• Mrs Appleyard at the end of the film: Mr Whitehead rushes into her office to tell her Sara has committed suicide, and she's sitting at her desk in full mourning dress, with all her packed luggage around her. The expression on her face is like a death mask - Rachel Roberts was an incredible actress.
  • The film’s original ending was just as intense. Mrs Appleyard climbs the rock and the ghost of Sara appears. Later Mrs Appleyard's body is recovered from the rock.
    • This is the Novel’s ending as well but the difference is Sara’s ghost is decayed.
• The book ends with the suggestive hint that most of the records destroyed due to a bush-fire at Woodend that also took the Appleyard College building - just as the search party ends, a scrap of the missing teacher’s dress is found.