Pages

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Horror in Broad Daylight

Here is the third in what I’d like to make a series on this blog: Drew recommends horror movie scenes that happen in the daylight.

See, It Follows has stuck with me. (And yeah, insert your joke here.) One of the many things it does that other horror movies don’t do often enough is stage scary scenes during the daytime. It feels like a violation of a horror rule, but it isn’t. We’re just so used to seeing our fodder protagonists running though the dark that it’s all the more jarring when they get attacked during the day.

In 1983’s Curtains, a group of actresses vying for a role spend a weekend with the director in a secluded cabin. One by one, they get picked off my a mystery killer wearing a hag mask. And one of the first to encounter this hag is Christie (Lesleh Donaldson), who makes the mistake of stepping out one morning to go ice skating. That seems like a safe decision in a horror movie. It isn’t. And the scene works, in spite of the fact that it’s happening in full daylight, in spite of the fact that ice skates have never otherwise seemed scary.



The rest of Curtains also gets my recommendation, by the way. It has to be noted: Isn’t Curtains the perfect name for a slasher movie about actors?



The full movie is available on YouTube, in case you don’t mind subtitles.

Previous horror movie scenes that happen during the day:

No comments:

Post a Comment