Lighting Ideas

One of the main elements of creating a movie, lighting can change the entire mood and perception of a scene. Horror movies utilize lighting to set the tone of a scene and also give foreshadowing of events to come. For example, if a girl is in a dark room with light only coming from her phone or natural lighting from an open window, then the audience sit in baited breath for something to jump out of the darkness. The reactions the audience have are also due to lighting conventions of horror such as profile lighting, back lighting, under lighting when the lights shine upwards, and ambient lighting. Each of these gives a specific tone to each scene that is unique.

Profile lighting is when light falls on only half of a person’s face. This gives a sinister tone to the scene and the character or it can highlight the shock on a victim’s face. Another use for this lighting is to highlight specific features that may be deemed grotesque, and this effect enhances that.  This image below is an example of profile lighting in Halloween.

Under lighting is also used for all of these reasons but is achieved by having a high angle light shine on a character from below them to make them seem menacing. These effects may be used in our trailer to bring focus to the protagonist’s shocked face as the protagonist attacks her.

Back lighting is the placement of a light in the background of the scene to create a silhouette of those in the foreground. This technique hides the features of those in the foreground and also gives a sinister effect.

Ambient lighting is the available lighting in a scene, such as the sun. This gives a more realistic and natural look to the scene. We will use this technique during the street scene as it will be outdoors and most styles of lighting will be rendered useless. Another example of ambient lighting is the moon, which is typical within the horror genre because it adds that eerie effect the the footage. Darkness is also something that could be used within a horror movie trailer because it is a typical convention of horror, using darkness instead of light will scare the audience further. Using shadow is also another option whilst filming, profile lighting is an example where shadow is used cleverly to create a sinister look to the antagonist. Half of the face is in shadow and half is in light therefore the antagonist is partially hidden. 

For my horror movie trailer, ambient lighting will be our main source available. We are filming the majority of our trailer within an apartment, therefore the lighting that we have will be used. For example, we have a shot of our main actress running down the hallway, and for this shot we turned all of the lights off, except one light to increase visibility, but also create an eerie effect. We decided to use ambient lighting throughout our trailer because we feel that supernatural horrors need to have a sense of realism in order to frighten to audience, and we feel that by creating this sense of realism, the audience will effectively be frightened.