Hello, it's Richard McClain Smith here. Season 7 of Unexplained will begin on Friday, July 28th.

As we replay some of our favourite episodes in the meantime, this week we're going back to July

2018. For me, the Spanish film Veronica, directed by Paco Plaza and released in 2017,

is without doubt one of the best horror films depicting demonic possession of recent times.

Incredibly, the true story it's based on is even more terrifying.

Incidentally, if you want my absolute favourite film about possession,

which also happens to be just one of the greatest films of all time,

that would be André Zelewski's 1981 masterpiece. Possession. But for now,

here's Unexplained Season 3 Episode 7, Shadow Play.

To paraphrase author Terry Pratchett, though light might think it travels fastest,

darkness appears always to find a way of arriving first.

Wherever light goes it seems, the darkness is already there, ready in waiting.

In the United States's Detroit Institute of Arts, hangs a strange and captivating

painting of an unconscious woman dressed in white. Her body stretched out across a bed with her

arms and head dangling toward the floor. Squatting on her chest, staring out at the picture

with dark red eyes is a peculiar and somewhat grotesque, cherubic imp.

Though the woman is bathed in light, the imp, clearly a creature of the night,

resolutely remains, steadfastly refusing to be cast back into the shadows.

And in the darkness beyond, another creature is emerging, a black horse,

with flaired nostrils and bright white eyes. The Nightmare, painted by Henry Fusoli in 1781,

serves as an ironic repost to the Enlightenment, Europe's pervading cultural movement of the day.

Or as art historian Dr. Noel Paulson puts it, the painting demonstrates the ultimate

...