The scary stuff doesn’t *have* to happen in the shadows—sometimes, the daylight can heighten the tension. With summer coming to a close and the spooky season just around the corner, I asked the BFS community for their favourite daylight dark fiction (horror, dark fantasy, etc) story in any format. What are the books, movies, TV shows, games, audio dramas, and more that bring the scares despite the light?
Below you’ll find suggestions for great dark stuff that just happens to be set in the light. Lots of films in this one, but I guess those are more memorable for the quality of light! What are your own favourites—did we miss anything? Give your own thoughts by leaving a comment at the end of this article, or jump back into Discord to get involved. Are you a member but not yet in the BFS Discord server? Contact us to request your invite.
-Lauren McMenemy, BFS Marketing
@laurenwrites.bsky.social
Comments are presented as they were in Discord, including back-and-forths between multiple members. Where an individual contributor came back with more thoughts separately, those comments have been summarised as one.
The first one that comes to my mind is Stephen King’s ‘Children of the Corn’, which is full of sunshine, but also wonderfully creepy 🌽
-Veronika Groke
A lot of The Blair Witch Project takes place during the day.
-Eric Spikol
Yup, dig into your folk horror faves! And probably a few camp slashers, too 😉
-Lauren McMenemy
The obvious one that springs to mind is Midsommar. That does really well to build tension over the course of the movie and really makes use of all the daylight.
Perhaps a less obvious one, but Cujo always sits in this place for me too. The main threat people think of was obviously the dog, but being trapped in the car in peak summer heat was just as great a danger.
The Wicker Man is great daylight horror – that gorgeous shot at the end when the head falls off the wicker man to reveal the sun behind it is forever in my brain. And Withered Hill by David Barnett, currently shortlisted for the BFA for Best Horror Novel, has some brilliantly creepy stuff going on in daylight.
-Shona Kinsella
Most of Kit Power‘s stuff fits this:
- God Bomb takes place during a church service. Man walks into a church with a bomb, demands god speaks to him or he’ll kill everyone.
- A Song For The End. A band writes a song and if you hear it you have to tell the truth or you die instantly,
- Millionaire’s Day – everyone in the UK wakes up with a million pounds under their bed. Violent chaos ensues.
- The Finite – a nuclear bomb goes off in London, a man and his daughter in Milton Keynes struggle to survive the aftermath.
All excellent! I will never forgive him for The Finite, that got under my skin in a way nothing else ever has. Highly recommend!
-Katie Bruce
I’ll admit it’s in my to-read pile in book format, but the film is great. Misery, Stephen King. I’m not one for horror at all, but that one kept me on board the whole way.
-John McCloy
Misery was the last book that really scared me. (I read it some 7 years ago.)
-Veronika Groke
My first experience of daylight horror was forced on me as the person expected me to be terrified as a child. It is a film you could dismiss easily these days due to CGI and technology. To the person’s dismay, I laughed my head off through Hitchcock’s The Birds. But looking back that scene with the children singing in school and one by one crows appear in the playground. Classic daylight horror!
-Corinne Pollard
(Still from The Birds from IMdB)
Hide by Kiersten White was fantastic. Excellent at building tension and a great twist in the second act.
-Alice Younger
I’ve asked before about Christmas ghost stories set in the Southern Hemisphere, so hot and sunny rather than cold, dark and snowy. I’d be interested to know of any! As I’ve recently rewatched it, if you count the film Wake in Fright as horror, as some do, it’s set over the Christmas holidays but there isn’t much of peace, love and goodwill to all folks in it.
-Gary Couzens
I’d argue your fave Picnic at Hanging Rock is a daylight gothic – not a xmas one though.
-Lauren McMenemy
Train to Busan is: 1) Absolutely superb, with beautiful and heartbreaking moments of extremely well observed humanity in all the growing horror, and 2) Almost entirely set during the day.
-AK Faulkner
A couple of monster movies I’ve enjoyed are Lake Placid and Tremors. I think both hit a sweetspot of being funny while also being proper scary. I love them and highly recommend them to anyone who likes laughing while wanting to hide behind the sofa! One of the things I think they do well is to create the tension and suspense without relying on a fear of the dark – which is really just the fear of the unknown/things we cannot see.
They both do this through having the big bad hidden underwater or underground, so it makes for great daylight jump scares.
-Sian O’Hara
(Still from Tremors from IMdB)
Phil Rickman’s The Cure Of Souls (from the excellent Merrily Watkins series of detective/supernatural/folk horror books) is set during a hot summer and tied to the history of travelling hop pickers, for whom the heat of midday turns out to be a dangerous time for the supernatural.
-Ben Moxon
Graham Joyce’s Year of the Ladybird is a really poignant and at times scary book. Set entirely during a blazing hot summer in the 1970s.
-Dan Howarth
I can’t think of an example from literature, but the noonwraith in The Witcher 3 is a good fit.
-Oli Arditi
Film-wise, my brain goes straight to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s a night time stretch in it, but for me it’s defined by the opening shots of the weird corpse monuments at the cemetery at the start, the heat of the setting, and then your big man swinging that chainsaw and dancing about at sunrise. Big part of the scariness is showing these maniacs in the full light of day. Scariest bit in it, for my money, takes place in full daylight when Leatherface first runs out and konks that poor chap on the head with a mallet. That this family can get away with doing all of this in the full light of day is a huge part of the creepiness.
(Still from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre from IMdB)
And it might be cheating because the film’s generally very dark, but the sequence in Mulholland Drive where Patrick Fischler is in the diner describing his dream about the man out the back is ridiculously suspenseful and horrific, done in the full light of day and carried by an amazing performance and the weirdness of the situation. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I don’t even remember his part in the film, even he even had one. It works like a perfect little short film.
-Martin Smith
Insomnia, an Al Pacino and Robin Williams (in one of his creepier turns) film directed by Christopher Nolan (of course)—the tension is literally because of the endless daylight and people can’t sleep. It’s more of a crime thriller but still super creepy. Also agree with Jaws, Wicker Man and Tremors (the latter is much fun). Plus, the sandworm scenes in Dune are very tense…
-Chris Hawton
I recall there is one night scene in it, but for daytime scary, Jaws takes the biscuit . . . the whole packet of biscuits . . . and the biscuit tin.
-Stephen Frame
