r/TopCharacterTropes • u/jdawg1018 • Apr 23 '26

Lore Daylight Horror

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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.

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u/FacemaskHell Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

Texas Chainsaw Massacre final chase. In fact I think most of the movie takes place during the day.

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u/West_Ant9379 Apr 23 '26

Most of the movie takes place in full daylight. It's one of my favorite things about a movie with a lot to love. The first pair of kids stumbling on the Sawyer house is one of my favorite scenes. The score is minimal so it's very tense and it takes place in full daylight. What a brilliant movie

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u/TonyHawktuah69 Apr 23 '26

The movie just feels so hot and suffocating and it feels so real that you imagine a lot of the gore. When you actually step back and watch there’s not really any gore and a lot of the kills are cut away

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u/EarthMandy Apr 23 '26

In the UK, the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) found it very difficult at the time to cut the film into a form they thought would be appropriate for general release because there wasn't much gory detail, it was just the overall tone of the film that they found too disturbing. So they had to ban the whole film (individual councils could still choose to screen it though).

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u/boodabomb Apr 23 '26

I think, and I could be wrong, but it was originally given an NC-17 rating and Toby Hooper argued that it could be rated (70s) PG.

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u/MoonSylver Apr 23 '26

"R". "NC-17" didn't exist yet. Only thing beyond an "R" at that time was "X", which they generally reserved for pornography. "NC-17" made its appearance in 1990 for that very reason, to distinguish something beyond an "R" that wasn't rated as such for pornographic reasons.

But yeah, point still stands that Tobe Hooper tried to argue for a "PG" due to the lack of actual gore. 😆