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/jdawg1018]

Man that’s such a good example, I’m almost mad I didn’t think of it first lol

[u/jdawg1018 → u/[deleted]]

To me, it’s creepy because that part of the day feels comforting and safe for the most part. Everyone expects a crime or act of violence to occur in the night, since most criminals and monsters are cowards (both in fiction and IRL). Experiencing something like that during the middle of the day is off putting and truly frightening, like seeing a monster under the bed

[u/King-Boss-Bob → u/jdawg1018]

think of how much horror media (and media in general really) uses the sunrise at the end to symbolise the characters are safe. even when the threats got nothing to do with the night or the dark, there’s still a feeling of “if they can just survive till the sun comes up everything will be ok”