Even the bravest of us is, on some innate evolutionary level, afraid of the dark. Who knows what dangers could be lurking in the inky black shadows? It’s a natural fear, and many horror movies tap into it, putting moviegoers (who are themselves in a dark theater) face-to-face with ghouls, killers, and other creatures of the night.
However, bad things don’t only happen at night. There’s plenty of terror to be found in broad daylight — and on some level, it might even be scarier to see something that ought not be in the supposed safety of the warm sun’s illuminating rays. These movies might not take place exclusively during the day, but all 13 of them feature frightening sequences that are actually scarier because they take place during daylight hours.
And, as an added bonus, if you’re trying to get scared on a slightly older TV or computer, or are yourself watching a movie during the day and dealing with glares that make dark sequences near-impossible to see? You’ll still be able to make out every chilling detail of these sunlit scares.
The Birds (1963)
A big part of why daytime horror scenes can be so effective is that sunshine is not supposed to be scary. The threats in Alfred Hitchcock’s avian tale of terror are also not supposed to be scary. The Birds features several scenes in which various birds unleash chaos in broad daylight, including an attack on a child’s birthday party, an explosive assault on a gas station, and the iconic sequence outside of the schoolhouse where a murder of crows aims to make the name for a group of their species literal. The Birds’s terror comes from the inexplicable mundanity of the winged attackers. Sea gulls, crows, sparrows, and other birds are normal, everyday creatures, so it’s only fitting that they would be flying about every day.
Duel (1971)
You don’t need to drive too far out of traffic-plagued Los Angeles to find yourself alone on a sun-drenched desert highway. Stephen Spielberg’s directorial film debut transforms the setting of a road trip into a trip to hell when a truck driver — whose face we never see — decides he has it out for the protagonist, who is simply trying to make a work trip in his little sedan and made the “mistake†of passing the Peterbilt. Spielberg, using techniques he would soon perfect when he swapped a big rig for a giant shark (more on Jaws in a bit), ratchets up the tension on the vast, hot, and bright emptiness of the roads. It doesn’t matter that the driver can see the horizon; he’s trapped on the road as the truck runs him down.
The Wicker Man (1973)
This totemic folk-horror classic largely takes place during the day, which is exactly what makes it so disquieting — and occasionally funny — right up until its horrific fiery ending. Compared to the foggy stiffness of British society, Summerisle is a pagan paradise, a place of sunshine and love and community. The cost of this halcyon way of life is human sacrifice, as Sergeant Neil Howie (perhaps the stiffest man who ever was) discovers. The climax is set to the cheery singing of an old Middle English song “Sumer Is Icumen In,†a deliberate and effective dichotomy.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
The blistering Central Texas sun that illuminates most of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre casts a harsh and revealing light on the film’s nightmare version of American Gothic. Though the traumatic “dinner†scene with Leatherface and his family takes place indoors and at night, the outside action makes the dilapidated emptiness of forgotten America clear. Part of the reason why Leatherface & Co. got this way was because they were ignored for so long. Now, swinging a chainsaw in the dawning sun, they’re impossible to overlook.
Jaws (1975)
There’s a credible case to be made that Jaws is the scariest movie of all time. Thanks in large part to Jaws, it’s impossible to go into the water and not worry, on some, small, primal level, that you might get bitten by a shark. It doesn’t matter what a beautiful, fun day at the beach it is — a shark could be out there. The film’s first attack takes place at night, but the terror of the killer great white is most overt when it devours poor Alex Kintner at a crowded Amity Isle beach with countless other beachgoers and sunbathers. A shark that just attacked people at night or on gloomy, off-season days wouldn’t be as scary. Jaws makes the beach in its most desirable circumstances into the most terrifying.
Mulholland Drive (2001)
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive may or may not qualify as a horror movie, depending on your standards, but it’s hard to deny that one scene is among the most terrifying ever filmed. The dreamlike movie cuts, without much explanation, to a scene in a diner called Winkie’s where two friends are having a meal and one is describing a recurring dream — a nightmare, really — that he has. In the dream, he walks out behind this diner and sees the most horrible figure emerge from an alley. When the two men walk outside to actually investigate whether or not the man is really there and set the dreamer’s troubled mind at ease, suspense mounts as he gets closer and closer — before the man appears. Not only does the sequence take place in broad daylight, but it happens just after the audience has been explicitly told what’s about to happen. And yet the fact that we can clearly see what we’ve been told to expect only makes it more shocking when the nightmare appears during the day.
Signs (2002)
The invading, water-phobic aliens in Signs don’t limit themselves to daylight hours, but it’s when the sun is up that they first make their presence known. First, there are the signs themselves, crop circles whose discovery M. Night Shyamalan makes eerie despite being extraterrestrial cliches. Signs’s true moment of daylight horror, however, comes via news footage of the aliens’ first sighting when one walks out from the bushes at a Mexican child’s birthday party. It’s such a suspenseful movie that you’re not expecting the alien to make an appearance out in the open like this, and even though the footage is blurry, viewers’ real-life reactions probably mimic Joaquin Phoenix’s horrified response.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
The first ten minutes of Zack Snyder’s remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (itself a great example of daytime scares) are a near-perfect horror short film. This isn’t Night of the Living Dead, and indeed the world goes to hell when the sun comes up. Ana, a nurse coming home after a tiring shift, narrowly misses several ominous signs that could have clued her into the looming zombie apocalypse. Instead, she and her husband have one last night of normalcy. When she wakes up, her now-undead neighbor girl walks into their bedroom and savagely attacks her husband, who in turn transforms into a crazed zombie himself. When Ana narrowly escapes through her bathroom window and emerges into the morning sunshine, she sees that her idyllic suburb has become a war zone. Overnight, the world she knew is over — it’s literally clear as day. Much of the rest of the movie takes place during the day, too, though it’s hard to tell in the windowless, fluorescent-lit catacombs of the shopping mall where Ana and other survivors hide out.
The Host (2006)
There’s something comical, almost, about the mutated monster’s first appearance in Bong Joon Ho’s The Host. Park Gang-du, an underachieving shopkeeper, is among several parkgoers looking at what appears to be some strange big animal in the river. It disappears, only for Gang-du to look, quizzically, down the bank of the river where what looks like a horrible, lumbering, tadpolelike creature storms toward him. The monster is gangly and awkward, slipping as it rampages through the park, but it’s deadly and the chaos it causes is disturbing. A typical monster movie tends to dole out fleeting glimpses of the monster, teasing it until a grand reveal in the climax. But The Host shows the monster outright during this first daytime park attack scene, throwing out the normal “rules†of the genre and leaving audiences initially stunned, like Gang-du, until we’re terrified (like Gang-du).
Zodiac (2007)
Zodiac is really more of a historical thriller than it is a horror movie, and indeed the David Fincher film largely eschews a lot of the normal beats and trappings of the horror genre. Yet it’s perhaps because the murder sequences — which are deeply researched and based on eyewitness accounts of the real killings — are so atypical that they’re so disturbing. Perhaps the most chilling is the 1969 attack of Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard at Lake Berryessa. It’s coldly clinical despite the warmth of the Napa County sun, and there’s an uneasy, chilling nonchalance and lack of pretense to the Zodiac Killer’s assault as he ties up and eventually stabs the pair; an uncanny verisimilitude that’s much more effective than any trope-ridden masked slasher’s killing could be.
It Follows (2014)
The sexually transmitted curse in It Follows doesn’t run or sprint. It simply follows, day and night, taking on a form that may be mundane or may be grotesque, but it never stops walking unerringly, and eerily, toward its target. Many of It Follows’s scariest scenes come from the paranoia and mounting dread Maika Monroe feels as she looks across a seemingly normal campus quad only to see one figure advancing slowly toward her. “It†does not need to be surprising, lurking in the darkness to be terrifying. Just the opposite. (Although, admittedly, the one nighttime scene in which It takes the form of an upsettingly tall man and appears in the shadows is one of the movie’s scariest.)
Midsommar (2019)
Midsommar might be the example of daytime horror, taking the sunshiney folk horror The Wicker Man canonized decades earlier and upping the ante by putting this cult community in Sweden, where the midnight sun means it never gets dark. The Hårga are making an effort to hide the true nature of their commune from Florence Pugh and her ill-fated fellow visitors, but the bright sun and brilliant whites make all of Ari Aster’s horrors impossible to miss — or even look away from.
Shin Godzilla (2016)
The kaiju in Shin Godzilla eventually evolves into a laser-spewing demon of a monster, but when it first emerges from Tokyo Bay at the start of the movie, it’s a flopping, tadpole-esque Muppet from hell. It shouldn’t be scary, and yet seeing this creature awkwardly rampage through Tokyo is so clearly “not right†that it loops from being amusing to scary. This Godzilla is a fish (or something) out of water, and he looks as out of place in the daytime as he does even existing in the first place.