Hollywood Darkness / Live-Action Films

Titanic sank on a moonless night, not cast underneath studio lighting.

Straight Examples

General:

• In the silent movie era, the scenes were often shot in daylight and the final print tinted blue for night scenes. Old, unrestored prints of Nosferatu show that the vampire is walking around in daylight, although he shouldn't be able to.
• Too many historical films and TV series to list film their indoor scenes with so much light that the candles appear to be just decoration, even if they should be the only light source in the room. For example, the BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles — especially the scene of Angel and Tess having supper.
• Done out of necessity in films shot in deserts, as the nights are freezing and the vastness of the desert makes it all but impossible to both light the area convincingly and evenly. Examples include:
  • Lawrence of Arabia, where the hard sun is fairly easy to spot.It's obvious by the shadows cast in the sand that all nightly desert scenes were shot during day time.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road: In most visual media, the "blue filter = night" trope generally works because we're used to it at this point, but like everything else in this movie, it's played way over the top by tinting everything electric blue (except for conspicuously orange flames, and a spotlight on the Doof Warrior).

Creators:

• Alfred Hitchcock:
  • In Rear Window he used a blue filter for exterior night scenes, but filmed in darkness for interiors.
  • Psycho has some day-for-night shots, particularly the sequence where Norman is getting rid of Marion's body and her car (the shadows are very sharp).

Movies:

• 28 Days Later has scenes of Jim walking through downtown London at night. The film makers shot these scenes using day-for-night effects so they didn't need to worry about trying to get all of the lights in the buildings and on the streets shut off.
• 28 Weeks Later has the underground train station sequence. Tammy and Andy can't see a thing and are very vocal about this since they keep bumping into corpses and such. But when it cuts away from P.O.V. Cam the audience can see just fine.
• The film version of the musical 1776 averts this in "Piddle, Twiddle, and Resolve", which is clearly shot during actual night in front of the Independence Hall facade. However, the blue filter is later used in "Yours, Yours, Yours", although that one is an imaginary sequence.
• When the protagonist of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch sneaks into his dad’s room at night, he and his sleeping dad are lit by so much blue light that it may as well come from a spotlight. This contrasts with the dad’s office in the next scene, which is lit by an orange lightbulb.
• In Blind Fury, the blind swordsman shuts off all the lights in a room full of armed goons and says, "Welcome to my world!" before slicing them all up. It's supposed to be so dark that the goons can't see him, but the viewer can easily see everything.
• Almost all the night scenes in The Burning are done by using a slightly dark filter on scenes actually shot in daylight. Only the campfire scenes are shot in actual darkness.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari goes one step further. Unable to afford the tools necessary to produce such low level lighting, the nightime shadows are actually painted on to the set, adding to the surreal dream-like atmosphere.
• In Casper, when Carrigan and Dibs first enter the manor at night, the audience can see the room fine, but Carrigan snaps for Dibs to use his lighter. This adds virtually no illumination to the vast room, but it's suddenly treated as if they can see everything fine.
• Used from time to time in Cast Away, identifiable by the sharp shadows at night. Also averted completely when Chuck is stranded at sea after the plane crash; several theaters posted signs informing the audience that nothing was wrong with their projectors and the film is supposed to go totally black during that sequence.
• The characters in The Cave might be trapped underground, but lucky for them the titular cave is apparently entirely self-lit.
• The Descent Part 2's caverns are conspicuously well-lit, which is especially bothersome when the first film's use of darkness was one of its greatest strengths.
• In Diamonds Are Forever James Bond finds himself in a closed coffin in one scene, and in an underground pipeline in another — the light is good enough for reading in both places.
• In Dune (1984), a hunter-seeker drone is sent into Paul's room to kill him. Paul claims it is too dark for the probe to see, even though the room is well-lit. Justified in that Paul has consumed his first dose of pure spice, and has his senses enhanced—the bright lighting being what he now sees compared to the hunter-seeker.
• eXistenZ does it deliberately, as a reference to an earlier era of low-tech special effects.
• In another silent film, Harold Lloyd two-reeler From Hand to Mouth, it's quite light outside at midnight when Harold gets his girl to the lawyer's office to claim her inheritance Just in Time.
• Godzilla vs. Gigan notoriously tinted stock footage of daytime monster attacks and battles to fill out sequences primarily taking place at night.
• Ghostbusters II, when Janosz goes to check on Dana and Oscar during the power blackout.
• Inverted behind the scenes in The Godfather. Director commentary reveals that, due to time constraints, some of the broad-daylight wedding scenes (close shots of Michael at the table with Kay) had to be filmed at night. They blasted the area with sufficient light that it's not noticeable.
• Gore Orphanage employs semi-realistic lighting in some scenes, but most night scenes are instead filmed in Hollywood Darkness.
• The Grand Duel features obvious day-for-night footage - the bounty hunters cast strong shadows as they approach the lake, and sunlight can be seen glinting off the water in some shots.
• The Green Hornet Serials just filmed almost everything in normal lighting and made sure someone called the Hornet "that night-riding bandit" on a regular basis. Justified in that the serials were filmed in black and white.
• In the 1996 film of Hamlet, the burial-of-Ophelia scene was so light that you might not even realize that it's supposed to be night. It's shot on a set.
• Harry Potter: The graveyard scene in Goblet of Fire, and the cornfield scene in Half-Blood Prince. The corn is vibrant yellow but the fire is burning hundreds of yards away.
• During the first live-action film of The Hobbit, this happens in the Misty Mountains. When the dwarves are camping on the goblins' front porch, it's night, there are clouds outside, no fires are allowed, they're not in direct sight of the entrance, and there isn't an opening above them. However, it's as light as any normal cloudy day — brighter even than the mountainside was minutes before.
• In Jaws, during the opening scene on the beach, Chrissie Watkins is taking off her clothes to go swimming at "night". This was done with filters to obscure the fully-nude actress, both entering the water and while you see her from the shark's perspective, presumably to keep the PG rating.
• The Bollywood film Koyla has a rather poorly done version of this as the protagonists are hiding by a river in the forest: a filter is applied, but only for the top half of the shot.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The night battles at Helm's Deep and Osgiliath are shown in a blue tint.
  • The lair of Shelob in is fairly well-lit. In the book it was pitch black, invoking Nothing Is Scarier and Dark Is Evil (we are told she "secretes" darkness), but here the audience has to see. Frodo does run right into a web he should have been able to clearly see, so it's obvious that the lair is lit in our view, but not in his.
  • According to the commentary tracks, Sean Astin queried this in a subsequent scene where Frodo is being held prisoner at night in Cirith Ungol in what should be an unlit room.
    Sean Astin: Where is the light coming from?
    DP Andrew Leslie: The same place as the music.
• Used many times in The Man from Laramie for scenes obviously supposed to be at night, like the fight between Chris and Will, where there's light enough to throw shadows.
• Played straight, averted and played straight again in Man-Thing; most of the night scenes take place in visible darkness, but when Roberts ventures into deeper parts of the swamp, the darkness is initially displayed more realistically, before returning to more visible output.
• The beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun has an assassin pitted against Scaramanga. He gets the drop on Scaramanga, but Nick-Nack turns the lights off, causing him to miss. We see the room flooded with red light.
• The Mask plays with different kinds of blue light for effect. When Stanley is just being Stanley, the blue lighting is plain, ordinary, naturalistic blue lighting. Whenever Stanley's dreaming, or whenever the Mask is involved, though, it turns into this harsh, unnaturally oversaturated cobalt blue (or, as director Chuck Russell called it, "horror movie blue").
• Metropolis: The catacombs under the city are supposed to be dark. They were lit dimly enough for Rotwang's flashlight beam to be visible, but they're still bright enough to make viewers wonder why it was needed in the first place.
• A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy doesn't even hide the fact many of the night scenes are shot during the day — nor does it care as a No Budget Speech-Centric Work.
• Extremely poor day for night shooting in The Naked Witch makes it almost impossible to tell which scenes are supposed to be taking place at night. When the witch extinguishes the torch inside the cave, there is no change in the level of light.
• For his legendary Plan 9 from Outer Space director Ed Wood couldn't afford the filter, with the result that scenes switch from day to night and back again, adding to the film's surreal charm.
• The night surfing scene in Point Break (1991) is clearly just daytime shot through a blue filter.
• Used in the nighttime scenes of the biopic film PT-109. Gets especially obvious during shots of the Japanese destroyer, which practically looks like it is sailing in broad daylight save for a weak blue filter.
• Pumpkinhead has fun with the blue filter.
• Scary Movie 2 uses a blue filter to represent darkness in scene where Cindy is in the secret study. Given that this movie is a parody of other movies, it was probably intentional.
• Used in the classic Western The Searchers. Not very convincing at all, since they're supposed to be way out in the middle of nowhere in the American West, and yet the sky is dark-to-medium blue.
• In Silence of the Lambs, Agent Starling gets trapped in a pitch black basement by Buffalo Bill. The scene is shot from the perspective of Buffalo Bill's night vision goggles, but you can clearly see that Clarice is casting a shadow on the walls of the basement as she stumbles around, revealing that the scene was shot with on-set illumination and then tinted rather than being genuinely shot in night-vision.
• Street Angel: In the last scene, Gino lights a match to see Angela's face, entirely visible to the viewers.
• The future scenes in the Terminator films, being night battles or inside the warrens humanity has been forced into.
• Titanic: After the ship's lights go out near the end of the sinking, everything is bathed in a blueish tint. Since Titanic sank on a moonless night, this part would have been nearly pitch black in Real Life.
• Van Helsing: Rather amusingly, during their final confrontation Aleera extinguishes all the fiery light sources in the chamber they're fighting in to disorient Anna in the dark and it seems to be working... despite the fact that at best Aleera just made the room look more atmospheric, since everything is still visibly lit with dark blue lighting and the occasional Dramatic Thunder.
• In Wait Until Dark, the blind Susy Hendrix tries to even the odds with the sighted Harry Roat by smashing every light bulb in her house; the house never goes entirely dark to the audience. ^note In some productions of the stage version, they do make the theater dark for that scene.
• Done poorly in Werewolf (1996), riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000. In one scene the Sun with its luminous corona is clearly visible in the sky of a supposedly night-time scene cast in just enough blue that you almost forget that there are dramatic afternoon shadows cast from everything.
• The German Winnetou movies frequently darkened daylight shots to simulate night. While it mostly works well, it's very easy to spot when the sky is in the frame, which usually is a very uniform light blue.
• Wolf (Mike Nichols): Will runs into the forest at night and preys on a deer in what is CLEARLY a scene shot during the daytime with the lighting lowered in post-production.
• Averted in X-Men. In the scene outside the train station (where Magneto confronts the police) which, if you watch the making-of video, is revealed to have been shot in broad daylight. It looks like night and the clear lighting of the characters and location is from police floodlights.
• Zathura. So they cut off every light and heat source in the house, which happened to be floating in space at the time, apparently far away from any star. Ignoring the thousands of other implausibilities in that situation, the characters shouldn't even be able to see the backs of their own eyelids.
• In Sky Riders, the hang gliders approach the monastery under cover of a day for night shot, complete with shadows, light shining off rocks, and puffy clouds floating across the slightly darkened sky.
• In Sweet Hostage, Doris Mae attempts to escape from Leonard's cabin under cover of an extremely obvious day-for-night shot.

Aversions

• The Relic is probably one of the strongest aversions to this trope in film. As explained in this video, director Peter Hyams was sick and tired of the constant use of Hollywood Darkness that saturated the medium, and made the film with the express purpose of using darkness as it would really work to ignite fear. By being as blind as the characters, the audience would be just as terrified of what could be lurking around every corner.
• In Equilibrium, most night scenes are well-lit by spotlights or headlights. The opening nighttime gunfight is lit only by brief muzzle flashes.
• Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown contains a confrontation between Pam Grier and Samuel L. Jackson in total darkness (but not just a blank screen; the occasional flash of light proves the camera is actually filming them in a dark room).
• Excellently subverted in Kill Bill when the audience watches the Bride get put in a nailed-shut coffin and Buried Alive. We are treated to a terrifyingly long shot of this as the lights slowly go black, followed by minutes of panting, shifting, and the sound of dirt loudly covering the coffin and filling the grave. And then more panting and shifting. We only finally see light as she turns on a flashlight. Apparently, the fear was real.
• Pitch Black is well-named, since during the triple eclipse the whole planet becomes astonishingly dark.
• Except for two scenes where they cheated, the only lighting in the cave in The Descent came from the caving equipment the characters had on them or in one case, a makeshift torch. This could get very confusing when the only thing you could see was the light on someone's helmet.
• In the Spanish zombie flick [REC], we see the action through a two-man TV crew's camera, when the light goes out, the camera light comes on, but when the camera light bites the dust, it gets dark.
• In Ultraviolet (2006), vampires try shooting out the lights of a corridor they are in, because they are being chased by humans. Unfortunately for them, the humans have night vision goggles, meaning everyone present is still able to see each other. The screen goes black until back up lights go on, presumably because the audience can't see them. Or the muzzle flashes.
• An interesting take on it appears in Blade II, where it's daylight that has a soft bluish hue. Night scenes are filmed in actual darkness, and light sources tend to be harsh, halogen yellow.
• Watching Eraserhead without a well-tuned screen can be frustrating. Thankfully, the DVD release comes with a screen test before the menu.
• Similarly with The Fountain, one of the most Chiaroscuro films ever. At least one DVD is quite sketchy, since about half the film contains faces framed in pitch black shadows, making anything less than a perfect transfer hard to watch.
• Averted in Harold Lloyd's first talkie, Welcome Danger, which stages parts of a fight scene in complete blackness to showcase the novelty of having sound effects.
• Averted for humorous effect in Blazing Saddles, when Lili von Schtupp attempts to seduce Bart.
• Collateral was notable for being shot with HD cameras, so they could film during the night.
• Averted, although not necessarily in a good way, in AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem. Most of the movie takes place outdoors, at night, and the film is so dark you can barely see what's going on.
• Averted in Pee-wee's Big Adventure where Pee-wee is stranded in the middle of nowhere at night. The screen is completely black except for a pair of (animated) eyes.
• In Disney's The Black Hole, the exteriors of the two main ships are completely dark unless lit up by one another (the Palomino uses a spotlight to look at parts of the Cygnus as it flies over it) or itself (the Cygnus suddenly lighting up "like a tree on Christmas morning"). During the duel between V.I.N.C.E.N.T and S.T.A.R., the realistic darkness of the scene can actually make it hard to see S.T.A.R. The biggest offender seems to be the titular black hole itself which glows blue for visual necessity.
• Averted in Paranormal Activity as everything shot in darkness was filmed using the night setting on the camera.
• The duel by lantern-light between Michael York and Christopher Lee in Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers (1973).
• Actually averted in original black and white films, when blue-tinted film was used for night scenes. Because most replications of silents do NOT use tinted film, this aversion is lost. A restored version of 1921's Nosferatu is available with blue-for-night tinting.
• Notably averted in The 13th Warrior, which used nothing but source lighting. This made the cave scenes extremely claustrophobic.
• Saw: Averted with the darkroom where Adam gets abducted, which is in his already dark apartment.
• The Fritz Lang movie Ministry of Fear has the final confrontation take place in a hotel stairwell lit only by muzzle flashes.
• Metropolis, has a scene in a cave where one character chases another with a flashlight. The flashlight is the only illumination at all, and the rest of the frame is pitch black.
• MST3K-subject The Giant Spider Invasion "averts" this to the extent that in night sequences, or just poorly lit interior sequences, it can be almost impossible to make out anything.
• Seventh Moon averts the trope and combines it with Jitter Cam.
• Apocalypse Now, especially in Kurtz's lair, features memorable night scenes bathed in darkness and shadow.
• A large majority of the 2009 French zombie flick La Horde was shot during an overcast night and relied heavily on natural lighting.
• Averted in some of the Star Trek movies, where the Enterprise has exterior floodlights aimed at the ship's hull, specifically to make it visible.

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