- Into that silence came The Voice. Without warning, inhuman, penetrating...
There's a reason Agatha Christie is known as the grandmother of the slasher film, and that reason is And Then There Were None.
The book
- The killer puts the ten little murder victims through a cycle of psychological torture first, which involves mirroring the nursery rhyme that is framed in all of their rooms just to remind the remaining ones that they're next.
- Vera goes up to her room alone and begins smelling the scent of the sea where Cyril drowned. Then she seems to feel a cold hand touch her neck. An incredibly effective use of seaweed (which was hung from the ceiling)!
- One of the surviving men references the rhyme, saying how it mentions one of the little Indians being killed in a zoo, which is absent on the island. Vera answers that they've all lost their humanity.Vera Claythorne: Don't you see? We're the zoo!
- Emily Brent's hallucination of the dead Beatrice Taylor walking towards her fits here too. Especially if you know what she has done to the girl.
- Made worse when you realize Emily saw Beatrice as a sinner who went to hell. What must have been going on in her head?
- An even scarier, generally forgotten moment comes earlier. Emily writes in her Diary something along the lines of the following."They don't know who the killer is. Only I am safe, only I know."
THE MURDERERS NAME IS BEATRICE TAYLOR" - A rather chilling line from the epilogue."I know what you're going to say sir. That it was Vera Claythorne. That she shot Lombard, pushed a block onto Blore and hanged herself. That's quite alright... up to a point. There's a chair with seaweed markings, same as her shoes and it looks like she stood on that chair, adjusted the noose, and kicked away the chair. But that chair wasn't found kicked over. It was, like all the other chairs, found neatly put up against the wall."
- The letter to the police, revealing who the real killer is. Among other things, there's an interesting line about how they knew Vera would kill Lombard and hang herself. It really hammers in how much of a Chess Master they are.
- Vera Claythorne, the original Final Girl. You thought she was the protagonist? She murdered a kid and hangs herself at the end.
- The fact that Cyril was murdered by someone entrusted with his care. The plethora of Real Life cases like this doesn't help.
- Marston killed two children while driving at high speed. And he didn't feel the slightest amount of guilt about it. Does he have some kind of Freudian Excuse for it? No. He's just an unfeeling sociopath with no sense of responsibility. This is also painfully true in Real Life.
The adaptations
1987 USSR adaptation
- Differently from the Alan Towers adaptations, the Russian film plays the atmosphere of the book completely straight. This was the first version to show the aftermath of every murder.
- Apart from an eerie leitmotiv and a scare track, the film has almost no soundtrack. This, coupled with the frequent close-ups, creates a very claustrophobic atmosphere.
- Anthony Marston doesn't simply choke on his poisoned drink, he crashes face-first into a glass plate. And we are shown the aftermath.
- Emily Brent hallucinating about Beatrice Taylor knocking at her window during the second night. Emily breaks down and yells at the girl, throws the Bible at the window and then, suddenly, regains her calm and whispers to herself that she now knows who the killer is — Beatrice Taylor.
- The scene, absent from the book, in which Lombard rapes Vera. If there was any doubt about his sociopathic nature, that scene erases it.
- The film shows Dr. Armstrong's death in detail. Up to that point, the murders were mostly quick-acting poison and blunt force trauma. Armstrong gets pitched over a railing by the killer, a person he completely trusted, and gets to fall screaming down a cliff into the heaving sea, where he eventually drowns. In addition to the terror of knowing he's going to die, he also probably has some long moments to realize how effectively he was duped by the killer, and possibly feel regret for allowing himself to be fooled the way he was.
