10 Terrifying Horror Movies Set During Daylight
Scary stories to tell in the... light?
There's something otherworldly about the middle of the night. Everything we know by day becomes distorted, shrouded by darkness that transforms even the most familiar of shapes into an uncertain force of evil. The night is a conduit for the unknown, after all, and turns everything it touches into something uncomfortable as we struggle to make sense of what we can't see.
Night is inherently scary by nature, and so day time - in the way all things must be balanced - is not.
Day time is for brunches and barbecues, for park runners and melting ice cream, for destination holidays spent soaking up nothing but sunburns and good times. Sunshine wasn't meant for monsters, which is why we banish them to the dark recesses under the bed and in the backs of our closets.
But sometimes, the terrible things confined to night break out, and daylight only serves to illuminate just how gruesome they really are.
Day time horror movies are hard to pull off, but these ten picks weaponised the comforts of the light and made us face up to some truly terrifying sights in the process. That night light doesn't feel much use any more...
10. Rogue
What embodies everyday horror better than a big old crocodile going wild on a bunch of tourists in the middle of Australia? Okay, it might SOUND like a specialist subject matter to those of us not fortunate enough to live in the land down under, but in the same way films like Jaws and Anaconda take a very normal predator and spin them out into human-culling death machines, Rogue does the same with our reptilian pal. And all three films do so largely by the light of day.
Rogue follows a group that accidentally stumble into a crocodile's personal feeding ground, and upon discovering the collective, this croc quickly makes lunch plans.
Whilst a portion of the movie moves into a nighttime assault, that Rogue isn't afraid to show us the full, brutal horror of a very real threat by broad daylight only serves to make it all the scarier. And when night breaks back into day and we watch a terrifying third act play out in the beast's lair, we're once again reminded by the shafts of light coming through that this isn't a monster that can be confined to darkness.
As if water needed to be any scarier after Jaws.