The idea was to make viewers feel as if they were taking a trip to their dentist’s office to have a painful procedure performed. Those real, lived, firsthand experiences are where the true horror comes from.įor example, in one episode of American Horror Story: Asylum that I shot, there is a sequence in which Sarah Paulson’s character, Lana Winters, wakes up in a room with white tile floors, stainless-steel operating instruments and plastic curtains stained with blood - the lair of the multiple murderer “Bloody Face.” The crew assumed I would light that room with heavy shadows and pockets of threatening darkness, but instead, I chose to light it entirely with bright fluorescent lights in the ceiling. So, the cinematographer must be faithful to reality - not the reality of what something would logically look like, but the reality of what it would feel like in the character’s mind. That goal requires the cinematographer to recognize and accept what they felt during traumatizing events in their life, and to work up the courage to put that experience onscreen. The kinds of visual pyrotechnics that might work in an action film will ring hollow in a horror movie if they’re not connected in a very insular way with the characters. It’s not enough to be visually audacious when you’re shooting a horror film. Michael Goi, ASC, ISC on the set of American Horror Story.

Also, Bava’s groundbreaking use of color as a motif for the presence of evil was never more effective than in the segment of his anthology film Black Sabbath titled “The Drop of Water,” in which the increasingly garish color scheme portended the arrival of gruesome death. Director-cinematographer Mario Bava often used the image of children smiling outside dirty windows to invoke a feeling of dread. Therein lies the key element of horror: dread.ĭread as a visual device can take many forms. But it’s the irrational that lies at the heart of true horror, the deviation from what we know and accept as real and controllable. It’s a genre that relies on the filmmaker forming a connection with the viewer in a way that exposes the deepest parts of both their fears. More than any other form of filmmaking, a horror movie requires the cinematographer to tap into primal emotions - the kind we normally suppress as being irrational. Three cinematographers dissect the chilling imagery they created for this trio of unsettling feature projects.

Cinema studio floor lamp