Editorials
Sun-Soaked: 8 Great Horror Movies Set in Broad Daylight
In horror, dawn tends to be the most pivotal time for survival. When the sun rises, the evil that thrives in the dark is forced to retreat. The sun is a reprieve from unrelenting terror. All you have to do is survive until dawn and you’re home free. The dark is a scary place to be, which is why so many horror movies are set at night. From a technical standpoint, the dark makes it a lot easier to craft scares and hide any creature imperfections, too. Which is why daylight-set horror is such an interesting niche.
Creating atmosphere and chills is so much trickier to pull off under the blazing sun. When it’s done well, not much is as inherently unnerving as horror set in the broad of day; where can you escape to if even the rising dawn won’t give you shelter from horror’s worst? Ari Aster’s sophomore follow up, Midsommar, makes a bold gamble by setting itself in the far North of Sweden where the sun doesn’t set at all during June. If the trailer is any indication, that bright sunshine makes things seem even more sinister.
While we wait to see just how nightmarish Midsommar will be, we look back at some of the best sun-soaked horror movies.
The Wicker Man
When you think of Pagan horror or daylight horror (or both), The Wicker Man is nearly always the first one to pop in mind. Police Sergeant Howie travels to the remote island Summerisle in search of a missing girl after receiving an anonymous letter. Howie, a devout Christian, is disturbed to find that no one on the island seems to know the girl, but he’s even more disturbed by the islanders’ Pagan celebrations of May Day. Of course, the true terror comes with the iconic closing moments of the film, where Howie discovers the horrifying truth about his summoning to the island. Based on David Pinner’s novel Ritual, and starring Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle, The Wicker Man is an unsettling summer hellscape for poor Howie.
Jaws
The opening moments of this seminal summer set horror film might take place during dusk, but the vast majority of the runtime is set over the bright Fourth of July holiday weekend. For police chief Martin Brody, professional shark hunter Quint, and oceanographer Matt Hooper, tracking and stopping the massive man-eating shark swimming the crowded waters of Amity Island is much easier by day. It is when the shark is going to be most active, thanks to the summer crowd buffet, after all. Steven Spielberg made audiences afraid to go into the water, and it had nothing to do with the dark.
Piranha 3D
A somewhat remake of the 1978 film, Piranha 3D lets loose a school of prehistoric man-eating fish on unsuspecting spring breakers partying on Lake Victoria. While the original film also counts for great sun-soaked horror, Alexandra Aja’s take injects a lot of humor and gore to the proceedings. Starring Elizabeth Shue as Sheriff Forester and Adam Scott as the seismologist investigating the earthquake opened a chasm that unleashed the carnivorous fish, this one is an entertaining summer gorefest. Look for fun cameos, like Jaws’ Richard Dreyfuss, and a rare film to embrace the 3D format (hello severed member).
Predator
Not all daylight set horror takes place at the beach or at Pagan festivals; sometimes they take place in the jungle. Sure, Arnold Schwarzenegger might have had his final face off with the alien creature after the sun sets, but much of the film takes place during the day, under the blazing sun that left much of the special ops team drenched in sweat. Until they were picked off one by one in brutal fashion, anyway. Seeing a group of highly lethal men get eviscerated so quickly and easily by an unseen creature, during a time of day with they should have an advantage, is a large part of why this film works.
Race with the Devil
This underseen gem is an action horror hybrid that crosses Satanic horror with a car chase movie, all set under the scorching Texas sun. For business partners Roger Marsh and Frank Stewart (Peter Fonda and Warren Oates), an RV road trip to Colorado with their wives turns into a harrowing fight for survival when the men stumble upon a Satanic sacrifice across from their campsite in central Texas. Looking to keep their coven a secret, the Satanists set out to silence the group permanently. While there are some night sequences, the bulk of the movie is set during the day, with Marsh and Stewart trying to out drive the enclosing Satanists. There’s nowhere safe for them to turn, either.
Death Proof
Like Race with the Devil, Quentin Tarantino’s half of the 2007 Grindhouse double feature showcased car chase horror set during the Texas sun. After a visceral scene that demonstrates the “Death Proof” part of Stuntman Mike’s car at night, the movie skips to fourteen months later where we meet a new group of ladies targeted by the murderous stunt driver. He closes in for the kill while the girls are test driving a car to play game of “Ship’s Mast,” resulting in an intense cat and mouse chase. Both the vehicles and the stunts/action deserved every bit of that bright sun spotlight.
Tremors
Perfection, Nevada is an isolated ex-mining town set in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In other words, it’s a pretty tiny desert town with a miniscule population. So, there’s really no outside help to fall back on when strange underground creatures start picking them off one by one. Perfection is a town filled with personality of its own, and leads Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) bring a buddy comedy sensibility to this fantastic creature feature. But it’s Tom Woodruff Jr.’s Graboid design and creation that delivered one of the most unique movie monsters and inspired an entire franchise. For the residents of Perfection, the underground monsters proved extra problematic thanks to the scorching desert sun.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
If there’s one thing this list makes abundantly clear, it’s don’t come to Texas during the summer. If the scorching heat doesn’t kill you, something else will. In this case it’s the cannibalistic clan Sally Hardesty, her brother Franklin, and their friends cross paths with when they decide to visit the old Hardesty home after stopping by their grandfather’s grave. While the traumatic climax takes place at night, which sees Sally flee toward the infamous house only to suffer as the guest of one brutal dinner party, much of the film takes place under the grueling summer sun. Including one startling introduction to the iconic Leatherface.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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