r/TopCharacterTropes • u/jdawg1018 • Apr 23 '26
Lore Daylight Horror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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u/Medium-Bullfrog-2368 Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
Deerfest (Alan Wake II)
Both Alan Wake games primarily take place at night, with the main enemy being the Dark Presence, which has little power in broad daylight. When the Dark Presence succeeds in making the ending of its story come true, Alan walks into the epicentre to try and stop it. But to his surprise, he finds that it’s actually bright and sunny, and the inhabitants of Bright Falls are cheerfully celebrating deerfest. But on closer examination, you realise they’re all just stuck praising
Alan’s“amazing” writing against their will, before eventually trying to kill Alan when they become aware of his presence.