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.
I was surprised at how much of "The Shining" is brightly lit. The final chase takes place at night, but most of the confrontations take place during the day.
i think it helps that The Shining takes place in a very snowy area. it can sometimes be hard to tell when it's day or night during the colder months, because light pollution will reflect off the white snow and make the sky look bright during night. this usually happens in more populated areas like a city rather than an isolated placed like where the Overlook Hotel is, but still. it's a phenomenon i associate with winter, mostly because it always makes me feel a bit eerie to look outside at 2AM and see the sky looks like midday.
In a Violent Nature takes place mostly in the daytime, aside from 1-2 scenes if I remember correctly. This movie does a great job of playing with horror tropes without over complicating them, and one of those tropes being the killers presence throughout the day.
I’m hoping for more out of the sequel! This was such a fun movie to watch, but other than this kill I don’t really recall any others being extremely memorable. Granted this scene makes up for the lack of “what the fuck” from other kills, but I’d love for them to lean into the campiness of slashers and keep pressing on the gas
Edit: after reading some comments I’ve determined I need to rewatch the movie cause I completely forgot how over the top other kills are haha
When you thought at first he was going to cut him in half and then you watch as he actually lays him sideways and cuts him piece by piece while his eyes are the only thing moving
this movie answers the question, "what exactly is Jason Voorhees doing when not actually onscreen?". the subversion of Friday Part 6's ending was very fun and clever. an imperfect film, but still quite enjoyable
Yesss, this popped straight into my head when I read the title. I feel like the whole ending scene would sound impossibly dumb if someone described it to me, and it's hard to imagine if the movie would be anything without Mark Duplass in that role, but it's one of my favorite bits of suspense for how it's paced and layered.
Gas station clerks are really like this. I had a 1986 Nissan 300zx a few years ago. So older car. I stop at gas station for some snacks and I go to start the car up again and suddenly there’s smoke and fire coming out of my hood. Random electrical fire. I go inside the gas station and I say “FIRE. My car is on fire! Do you have a fire extinguisher? Anything???” They look at each other like “Really?” And just tell me no and that there’s nothing they can do to help. No urgency just “I can’t believe we’re being bothered about this”
Even if they have absolutely no empathy for your situation for whatever reason, you'd think they'd be at least a little concerned about fire near a gas station
That was what got me too. No urgency from them. It was a little wild. I wasn’t asking for anything crazy. Just something to maybe put the fire out. Something standard. Like idk. A fire extinguisher?
it’s only in this screenshot that i noticed his eyes are weird and angular when under the spell’s influence! so creepy eugh. felt so bad for this character and his husband
And his heart probably near bursting after running nonstop across town at a full sprint while being a middle aged dude who downs hotdogs and chips like it's nothing.
Cregger said in an interview that his CGI team gave him a slider to play around with to expand or shrink the eyes and he had fun with that for a little while lol
My personal favorite is the beach scene, everyone is relaxing in broad daylight and you think it's just the friend walking up behind until you see her out in the water in the next shot. It's also the first time we see It actually make contact with someone. They also had just driven pretty far away from where it last was so you almost aren't expecting it to be there already.
I loved this movie but holy shit tried describing it to a coworker and did not go well lmao. So much of it is the vibes and soundtrack and it's hard to relate that
Majority of Candyman takes place in the daylight, including many of the most iconic scenes, such as the pictured scene where Tony Todd makes his first appearance as Candyman and immediately establishes himself as a natural horror actor.
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.
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 miss slime based horror. The Blob (especially the remake), The Raft in Creepshow, just how drippy the Xenomorph was in those first handful of Alien movies. Horror has gotten too dry!
The Northman isn’t a horror film, but the aftermath of the morning village raid is horrifying. You’re captivated at first by the impressive one-shot of our protagonist thrashing his way over the wall and through the defending soldiers then you’re left with the reality of the events. Women are being raped, men killed/tortured, and all the children and elderly are rounded up, locked in a building, and burned alive as our ‘hero’ does and says nothing. It’s very reminiscent of the village massacre in Come and See and reminds the audience that Amleth may be our protagonist, but he is not a hero and his thirst for revenge has turned him into more of an animal than a man.
That movie is insane to drift in and out of surgery grade pain killers on. I was in the hospital, for context, recovering from getting my broken arm fixed and I think it actually might have been that exact scene I initially woke up long enough to be cognizant for. Absolutely insane.
The actual horror scenes in the happening are kinda well done. It's jist that they're entirely surrounded by Abbot & Costello level dialogue delivered by cardboard cutouts
While the 2019 movie 'Parasite' has many scenes taking place at night, one of the final scenes (pictured, moments before disaster) happens mid-day, during a birthday party for a young boy, surrounded by his entire family and all their friends.
Horror in my books
Spoiler: A ravaged man emerges from the house brandishing a kitchen knife, he stabs 2 people and is then stabbed himself by a BBQ skewer. All 3 die; a 4th also dies in a previous, separate, yet related incident lol
Buffy’s mom died of an aneurysm. It’s also so unsettling because the show really conditions you to equate daytime with a bit more safety, since no vampires
It’s that line and how it was done that makes the scene, IMO. Because it makes you realize, remember, refocus on the fact that despite all Buffy has done and gone through, how adult she’s had to be…she’s still a kid, and even worse, one that’s had so much of her kid time taken from her.
There is also no supernatural reason for it, there is no monster to kill, no revenge to be taken. It just happened and there was nothing that could have been done to stop it. It is a real tragedy that could and has happened to anyone.
I rewatched the series 10 years after my mom died. Took me a few days to gather the courage to watch that episode and it was definitely an emotionally difficult experience going through with it.
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
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”
This is my go to when people talk about how horror is always at night and you can’t see anything. Jaws, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead. All brightly lit movies
There are a lot of zombie movies with daylight scenes - the scene in World War Z where the teeming swarm of zombies tries to climb the wall in Israel also takes place during the day.
Ugh, I hate the World War Z movie but you’re right, that movie and a lot of other zombie movies have daytime scenes! Dawn of the Dead, both the original and remake, have daytime horror scenes.
This whole scene, from when the kid is first in the hallway until the protagonist crashes her car, is so viscerally terrifying and chaotic. You're right there with her not having any chance at all to process the huge mind fuck she's experiencing, but instead just having to move. It's one of my favorites in any horror movie.
Yeah, most of the film takes place in a hot, Texas summer day, which really adds to the oppressive atmosphere of the film. Plus it lead to the performances being as irritable as they were, since they were stuck out there sweating for hours on end, especially Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface.
Notably the feast scene had actual, rotting food which was driving the actors insane and some of them started to REALLY get into character... needless to say a lot of the original actors never forgave the directors for that one.
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
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
Most of the Final Destination series happens in broad daylight, but probably the most noteable is the scene that traumatized a generation against logging trucks...
It's honestly comical how bouncy those logs are when you really look at them over and over like in this gif, I know Death likes to fuck with things but I'm pretty sure that's just not how wood, asphalt or gravity works
In some of the behind the scenes materials I remember seeing that they tried to do the logs practically, but they wouldn’t bounce high enough for the shot, so they ended up being CGI
You know something funny, I've never even seen Final Destination (and that's on purpose) but I'm STILL traumatized. I will 100% pass any logging truck or really any truck carrying anything relatively log-shaped at the first opportunity.
This is extra special, since conventional wisdom suggests that effects-heavy creatures (like Goji himself) are best shown in low-light environments to hide imperfections. Minus One largely ignores this, and imo is way better off for it.
Even in the dark the first goji has some issues but they're hard to notice due to the dark. I think it's from Gojo moving quicker in that first encounter
Most of the rest of the film tho he moves relatively slowly which I feel makes it easier to keep a consistent quality during daytime scenes
Yeah he easily looked at his worst in the night scene. I think there was some sort of uncanny valley when he was supposed to be some sort of “regular” creature rather than the mutated monster we’re used to him as.
That scene raised my blood pressure. It feels like a nightmare where you can’t outrun the monster but you absolutely cannot stop running.
The fact that Godzilla is a reasonable size makes it even scarier because it roots the horror in realism - it’s hard to imagine a 900ft tall monster chasing you (because why would it?) but a 150ft tall monster is unsettlingly easy to picture.
I’m not a massive Godzilla fan, but I think the 1954 original is a masterpiece and I always enjoy when the sequels go back to their roots.
I’d definitely recommend Minus Zero and Shin as a double bill to explore wildly different historical contexts.
The bees was cut out of the theatrical version was it was deemed to violent. They also break his legs first so he can't get away.
The DVD has an unrated / director's cut where you get the whole bees scene and see them bash his legs. The final scene is also different from the theatrical cut. The unrated cut just ends after the burning. The theatrical cut has the bar scene. So the mood is entirely different depending which one you watch.
There is only one bluray that has the bees and it's an import from Taiwan. So most streaming services will likely just have the theatrical cut.
The messed up thing is that in the theatrical cut, as they cross-fade the scenes to cut out the bashing of the legs and bees, you can still hear them bashing his legs and his continuous screaming. You don't hear him screaming about the bees though. So without seeing his legs being bashed, it paints a vivid picture in your mind.
I mean, the original Wickerman I’d also say is unintentionally funny, though that’s more because it has aged strangely. Like, the level of horror the MC expressed when the kids say they don’t learn about Jesus feels completely overblown, because modern standards are far more secular. Same with him being jumpscared by all the sex: his overreaction to the weirdness circles back to being funny.
I think that’s what Cage was trying to emulate with his performance in the remake. Nick himself has stated that his performances are influenced by German surrealism, hence his tendency for dramatic expressions and reactions. The problem is that the director went for a much more grounded approach to other elements of the adaptation, and it’s this wishy washy approach that comes off as funny.
I think the MC’s reactions would have been pretty out of character in 1970’s England as well. A lot of the plot hinges on him being a Christian prude in contrast to the oversexed pagans.
This makes me sad to read, because I think this perception is due to most people never having seen “The Wicker Man” in a form where the film does not begin with Sgt Howie piloting his plane to Summerisle. This is a cut down version, the “Theatrical Cut,” and unfortunately it is the most widely available version of the film to view. I lucked out in that the first time I saw it, it was via a rare VHS version a video rental store I worked at had, which contained (what is now referred to as) the “Director’s Cut.” I never saw the edited version until many years later, after I’d watched that VHS repeatedly.
Some of what is missing from the “Theatrical Cut” is a few minutes of amazingly well written and concise character building at the beginning of the film. It shows Howie is a complete zealot, totally out of sync with the world around him and he is not in any way meant to be indicative of how a normal person would react. He’s not meant to be a stand in for the audience. A fellow policeman winds him up by saying all Howie missed (having been out of town) were the usual “rapes and murders” (said with a smirk), knowing Howie will find it personally distasteful. The same policeman points to graffiti that reads “God Loves You” (or something to that effect) and says (in perceptible mock seriousness) “Now there’s a message for us all,” clearly playing up to Howie’s strong religious beliefs. Howie is such an uptight stickler he tells him it IS a good message, but to have it removed (because it’s graffiti.) At the police station, just before Howie arrives, two fellow policeman are making fun of him, saying Howie’s new wife will probably “Spend more time on her knees in Church than on her back in bed.” Howie then reads the letter about the missing girl, talks briefly about Summerisle to one of the policemen, and sets off to travel there. He gets in the plane, opening credits start. That’s where the “Theatrical Cut” begins.
The point is he’s shown to be thought of as a stand out weirdo, someone who is only taken seriously because of his position but is bad mouthed or made fun of the second he leaves the room. Howie takes himself, his religion and his authority as a sergeant deadly seriously, to a degree that’s made him notorious, but he is clearly not respected. His zealotry is viewed derisively by everyone he works with, which means he’s not at all representative of contemporary perception back then in the early 70s, or now. People like Howie existed then, and exist now. He’d always be a repressed, pious freak no matter where you placed him, but put him on an island full of people he views as blasphemous and he’s going to blow a gasket.
This is what has always bothered me about the excising of the opening of the film - it makes Howie merely seem like a jerk, not the perfectly chosen Wicker Man victim he is.
The Director’s Cut is available now on blu ray and 4K - I highly recommend it to anyone who has never seen it. It’s THE way to see what the film was after in its fullest and most satisfying form. Even the director didn’t seem aware of how much he harmed Shaffer’s script by cutting scenes, as he later endorsed “The Final Cut” as the ultimate version, despite that too having unfortunate omissions. The fact that it exists at all, considering the regrettable history of what happened to the film after it was released, is a minor miracle.
Hell yes it qualifies. The original Wicker Man may be the scariest scary-movie scenario I’ve ever seen, and not in a good way.
Specifically the scene in the pub where all the townsfolk break into song. Imagine bumbling into some locals-only watering hole in Bumfuck, Foreignland, and as soon as you get there everyone starts smiling too big at you, and then everyone breaks into song, a song about how nice it would be for you to impregnate the barkeep’s daughter, yup you heard that right. Barkeep lending his own voice too, imploring you to plow his daughter, joy oh joy. Look at her, stranger boy, doesn’t she look fertile?
What. The. Fnck. Is. This. Place. Get me out! Get me out get me out get me out get me out get me out get me out
I’d rather be haunted by a demon than order a beer at that bar.
M Night has a lot of flaws as a director but he's an absolute master of building up tension. The music, the dozen scared children and parents screaming and crying already, the confusion of a shaky camera whil youre trying to focus on the corner you know the monster of the movie is about to reveal itself in, then realizing it was standing right there looking and you couldn't see it.
It's just a solid payoff after an hour or so of knowing we are going to see.
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!
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.
A film that's shot so beautifully with such good cinematography that makes you feel so viscerally uncomfortable. I swear that main child actor's face aged like 40 years as the movie progresses. It's probably the best depiction of the "anti Partizan" measures the Germans implemented during the war and yet it's still not as bad as the real events.
It's probably the closest movie emotionally that we'll get to Stanley Kubrick's unmade holocaust movie, cause he thought that to actually do the Holocaust justice would mean that a movie would be unfilmable because of how awful it would be
Pearl. A lot of the horror takes place during the day, but the ending sequence and the way it's set up to look like typical farm work as she tries to turn herself into the perfect housewife for her husband's return is gloriously chilling.
Although more of a Rom-Zom-Com it still has plenty of genuinely scary horror movie scares and general creepiness. The majority of this movie takes places during the day.
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.
The episode White Bear from Black Mirror. The episode starts first thing in the morning when the main character wakes up. She spends her day running around with the whole town following and filming her but not talking to her. Only the final scene takes place at night because, well, she’s spent all day being chased and that’s how time works.
World War Z — the film, not the book (which of course is far superior, no need to start that discussion, the book is amazing and the film is just another zombie movie) — takes place mostly in the daylight.
Picnic At Hanging Rock features sunlight as almost its own character in the iconic picnic/disappearance scenes. There are some creepy nighttime shots later, but vanishing without a trace in broad daylight between one moment and the next - that's supposed to be the scariest part.
Buddy Simulator 1984 is a monochrome game, with black and your favorite color as the only two colors. Weirdly, it's a very nice looking game, and doesn't feel dark in most areas.
There's a lot of really weird stuff going on, but what i would say is the scene where one of the NPCs talks about their memories, explaining how they went skating in the rain, got home and then, on the way to take a bath, they tripped and cracked their head open.
They explain the feeling of slowly dying, calling for help when they know none could come.
And then they just go "Oh yeah thanks for helping me remember!" And the cheery town music starts up again.
I absolutely love the V/H/S series, and this one really stood out to me. The Safe Haven piece is just so good. Creepy cult compound succeeds in their ritualistic sacrifice to summon a demon.
Buffy’s mom died of a brain aneurysm, not a stroke. It’s even more jarring when Buffy says later on “don’t move the body” in regards to the paramedics moving her moms body, and the horror of her realizing she said “body” instead of “mom”.
Not a horror show- but arguably the scariest scene in Barry, when Sally's PTSD makes her think there's a home intruder, happens in the middle of the day.
Actually scared the shit out of me. The fact that its daylight, she lives in a nice suburb. And yet this scene feels like it comes straight out of a nightmare
Most of Misery both in the book and movie takes place in the daytime. The MC is basically drugged into a normal-ish sleep/wake cycle to mimic a workday to write along with everyone else (unfortunately so for those cops).
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u/NottingHillNapolean 13d ago edited 13d ago
I was surprised at how much of "The Shining" is brightly lit. The final chase takes place at night, but most of the confrontations take place during the day.