YMMV / Just Before Dawn

• Cult Classic: The film has become a small cult favourite for its surprising originality and beautiful cinematography.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Megan may be one of the less prominent campers, but she has a lot more fans than the average obligatory Slasher Fanservice provider for her Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak characterization and platonic relationship with her boyfriend's brother.
  • Roy is absent for much of the action but is constantly praised for his high level of competence and compelling sense of loneliness.
• He's Just Hiding: Although Daniel and Megan are written off as dead by the other characters, both of them are screaming for several seconds after the last moment they are visible on camera, making it remotely possible that they survive and escape.
• Nightmare Fuel: It's arguably one of the few slashers to give off a genuinely unnerving atmosphere.
  • The opening sequence features someone being stabbed in the genitals with a toothed machete. After this, most of the killings are relatively tame by the genre's standards.
  • In one scene, Connie kills one of the twins by stuffing her fist and her entire arm down his throat. Granted, it was self-defense, but sweet Jesus.
• Signature Scene:
  • The rope bridge attack is bound to come up when you look for information about this movie, due to being one of the most effectively creepy moments of the film and having a secondary character struggle impressively hard to survive and use the remains of the bridge to climb to safety.
  • The campers dancing to radio music in the woods is a well known moment of slasher film levity.

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