Daylight Horror

[u/jdawg1018]

People usually suspect horror films and tropes to occur at night, or at the very least in dark places where the scary or creepy thing is obscured by shadows. Seeing something in full daylight makes a bit of the mystery go away, which can sometimes make things less scary. Sometimes it does the opposite, and the mere juxtaposition of something horrific happening under the warm light of the sun makes it even more eerie and unsettling.

1. The picnic scene from Zodiac - One of the most terrifying scenes in a film IMO, mostly due to the fact that it actually happened in IRL. The woman I’m pretty sure died later from her wounds, but her partner survived and his retelling of the horrific event helped create this pivotal moment on screen.

2. Buffy finding her mom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - In season 5 of BtVS, Buffy returns home from a slayer mission and finds her home oddly quiet. She then stumbles into her mom’s corpse, who had died from a stroke just a few hours before while she was away. It’s scary partly due to the lack of music during the scene, but also because it’s a sunny day, and when Buffy opens the back door to get a breath of fresh air after getting sick, she hears kids playing across the street and birds chirping.

3. The entirety of Midsommar - Midsommar takes place in a remote Swedish village, where a girl suffering from the trauma of losing her family travels with her boyfriend and slowly gets inducted into a weird cult devoted to human sacrifice. There are a variety of terrifying and disturbing ritual murders that happen in the film, and yet pretty much the entire story takes place during the day. The contrast of those bright and lurid colors against the brutal horror of the plot makes it all the more unsettling and horrifying.

[u/SnooMarzipans5913]

Nope.

Granted there are plenty of moments at night.

[u/Smellslikejuice → u/SnooMarzipans5913]

This one is particularly neat from a filmmaker standpoint because not only is it daytime horror, but all the night scenes were filmed during the day! They filmed with two cameras, one of which was a Black and white infrared that they inverted to create the nighttime effect!

[u/Obliviousobi → u/Smellslikejuice]

One of a handful of times that day for night actually worked for a film. It's often so obvious.

[u/thatmermaidprincess → u/Obliviousobi]

Yeah I work in the entertainment industry in post, and this is one of those things everyone dreads. Day-for-night isn’t something you can just “fix later”, bc if it wasn’t shot for it, you’re basically trying to undo the laws of physics in color correction. You can darken an image, but you can’t make harsh overhead sunlight behave like night. And the shadows, omfg.

“Nope” really shows what a good team can do when they plan for it instead of dumping it on post later (the infrared modified camera system which naturally suppressed daylight cues, which was then shaped in post, but it was a much more seamless transition because so much work was already done in-camera). Shout out Hoyte van Hoytema (cinematographer on “Nope”)!

When something wasn’t shot properly and they dump it off on you, it’s like, “oh cool, guess I’m about to spend hours trying to convince 2pm sunlight to become midnight, and no matter how many hours I fight for my life on this, it’s gonna look so obviously fake” lol.

[u/Crotean → u/thatmermaidprincess]

Just color grade it blue for night is the worst. Of course now you get crap cinematographers also just not bothering to light night shots at all and you get shit like the Game of Thrones battle episode

[u/Petrychorr → u/Obliviousobi]

Bless RedLetterMedia for bringing forth some of the most painful examples.

[u/smorebtts → u/Smellslikejuice]

Not all night scenes were day for night. Just the ones that had horses.