"While many of Ingmar Bergman's films are extremely painful to watch, none of them (save perhaps for Vargtimmen [Hour of the Wolf, 1968]) contains as many references to the iconography of the horror film as does Persona... The moment when Alma becomes so desperate to get Elisabeth to speak that she is ready to throw boiling hot water in the latter's face is one of the most terrifying in the history of "art-house" cinema. The modern psychological horror film foregrounds the neuroses and psychoses of its principle characters, and much of the terror that emerges therefrom — if it doesn't degenerate into mad slasher clichés — is derived from the etiology of their neuroses, and the plausibility of how they act as a result." - Daniel C Shaw, Kinoeye