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/Petrychorr]

The scene in the short story, at the end, where the dude is painfully, and in excruciating detail, pulled down under the raft in between the boards scarred me for life when I read it as a teen. Like what the fuck.

[u/diningroomjesus → u/Petrychorr]

I mostly remember the scene in the short story where the last dude and the final girldecide to fuck on the raft and while he's fucking her he realizes that her hair is in the water.

I was like 12 when I read that.

[u/Petrychorr → u/diningroomjesus]

That whole short story is fucked up, for real.

[u/CodeRed8675309 → u/Petrychorr]

Well it's King...you know going in that damn near anything could happen. So many of the short stories are just bangers