This trope occurs in works of fiction when crime happens, or seems to mostly happen, at night. Some comic book heroes and villains prefer operating at night, either due to habit or necessity. Crime in movies and television happens after the sun sets.
For filming movies and television shows, this is sometimes a matter of practicality. Filming at night makes it easier to show people being vulnerable because it's dark, they're alone, and there aren't any witnesses or bystanders around. In addition, it's often easier to get permits from cities to film at night, since they're naturally reluctant to shut down streets during the day which greatly affects both traffic and business.
Other times, the filmmakers will simply pretend it's dark.
Can be a sister trope to Always Night and Nice Day, Deadly Night. Compare Evil Is Not Well-Lit and Darkness Equals Death.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Batman: Batman prefers to operate at night, because in Gotham that is usually when the majority of crimes that need his attention occur. Batman himself has wryly noted on several occasions that his costume is much more effective at night.
- The Joker throws a lampshade on this in The Dark Knight, when he crashes a meeting of underworld leaders and mockingly tells them that the reason they have the meeting in the middle of the day is because they do not want to go out at night due to being scared shitless of Batman. He also points out to them that not being able to operate at night has severely cut into their profits.
- Daredevil: Ol' Hornhead tends to do patrols at night and encounters a lot of street crime. Partly due to his day being taken up by a lawyer's office hours. Darkness might also give him more of an edge on sighted criminals, although as a Handicapped Badass with mild superpowers, it's not really one he needs.
- Nova: When Richard Rider first got his powers, he tended to stay out late on patrol looking for criminals, which severely cut into his sleep time. After several instances of being too tired to get out of bed, he made a note to not stay out later than midnight.
- The Punisher: Frank Castle has adopted a nocturnal lifestyle, as most of the drug dealers, rapists, parole violators, pimps, and mob goodfellas he targets tend to operate at night and are easier to hit then. He spends the day sleeping, eating, patching himself up, hitting the gym, and honing his fighting and marksmanship skills.
- Spider-Man: While present-day Spidey is likely to encounter crime anytime, in the early Stan Lee/Steve Ditko era, he primarily operated at night, which was when he encountered most street-level crime. Justified in that he was a high-school student whose daylight hours were occupied with classes, homework, and trying to squeeze money for pictures out of Jameson. Supervillain battles, such as going up against the Sandman, Doctor Octopus, or the Green Goblin, could happen either day or night.
Fanfics
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: When Ami needs to break someone out of imprisonment, she does it at night.
Live-Action Films
- Die Hard: The thieves infiltrate the building at dusk, but don't put their plan into action until it's fully dark.
- Home Alone zig-zags this. Once the McAllister family (minus Kevin) and their neighbors leave for their winter vacations, Harry and Marv intend to ransack the empty houses at night. Though after Kevin scares them off the first time, they return in the daytime and systematically break into the houses, leaving the McAllister home for last, where the climactic showdown takes place at night.
- In Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Harry and Marv plan to break into Duncan's Toy Chest and steal the large charity donation fund at night.
- The Purge: Most of the violence in this film and its' sequels takes place at night, despite the Purge itself being a 12-hour period which would naturally have some daylight time involved. The Purge is by design scheduled to encompass mostly the nighttime hours, when citizens would be more comfortable releasing their predatory instincts and committing acts of violence.
- Spider-Man: Homecoming: When Peter gets out of school and changes into his Spider-Man outfit, he helps little old ladies by giving them directions, rides on top of the subway, stops a car thief only to discover it was just a guy who locked his keys in his car, does requests to perform acrobatic stunts, leaves messages for Happy, and eats a snack someone bought for him. The only time he dealt with an actual crook was when he caught a bike thief. All of this was before sunset. For the rest of the film, with the exception of the ferry boat scene, all the crime takes place at night.
Live-Action TV
- The serial killers and other menaces on Millennium (1996) mostly operate undercover of darkness. Frank Black will often start a case off in daylight, giving his profiler's read on the crime scene after the fact, but eventually have to face the criminal in the dead of night.
Video Games
- In The Sims, burglars only come at night at the house.
- In each act of Dragon Age II Hawke needs to take care of various gangs that terrorize the streets at night while there's generally very little fighting during the day, at least within the city proper.
- In the Thief series, Garrett relies heavily on stealth to pull off his burglaries, and thus naturally prefers to do so at night.
Visual Novels
- Averted in Daughter for Dessert. Mortelli’s break-in at the protagonist's apartment and the protagonist's break-in at Mortelli’s office both take place during the day. The protagonist's and Lainie’s deception of Lainie’s lawyer also happens during the day. The same is true of Lily trespassing in the hotel swimming pool. However, Kathy’s underage drinking hijinks and (probably) the toaster theft happen at night, and the protagonist breaks into Cecilia’s hotel room in the evening.
- Averted in Double Homework. Daytimes and nighttimes each contain their fair share of crime.
- The two thefts in Melody (of a plate of food and the title character’s guitar) happen during the night hours. Melody also breaks into Steve’s dorm room at night, and Steve attempts to sexually assault Melody at night as well.
Real Life
- Studies have shown that while there is plenty of crime during the day, most violent crime (muggings, rapes, fights, drunk and disorderly, etc.) tends to occur at night. Taking it up a notch, on weekends all crimes occur more frequently at night. Due to this, many police departments in large cities or metropolitan areas have "all hands on deck" policies for Friday and Saturday night, where everyone is required to be on duty and available unless sick or on leave. Plainclothes officers will be placed in known trouble spots, and it's not unusual for plainclothes Sergeants and Lieutenants to respond to calls for backup.
- Studies have conclusively shown that adding more streetlights is much more effective at reducing crime than placing cameras everywhere.
- Some jurisdictions have curfews specifically to prevent night-time crimes.
