Research: The lighting of Thrillers

 Intro

The other day while I was watching a thriller movie to better understand  the genre that we are making out film from , I noticed how almost at all times this type of movies have a low-key type of lighting that contributes in helping the suspense and create an unsafe setting. Thrillers use a lot of silhouettes and backlighting to create an uncertainty of what is really happening in the dark

Research

As I was doing my research I tried to do my research on two examples of movies that have great lighting for the thriller genre. 

I found two examples:

• Long legs 
• The Running man 

Firstly, we have Longlegs, which was a movie from 2024 that steps away from traditional thriller lighting conventions.  Due to the setting of the movie being in the snow, this movie relies on high key lighting that creates the feeling of exposure not like a typical thriller where you can at least hide in the shadows and be "safe".  

 

 

Not having the conventional lighting that thrillers have Long Legs conveys the feeling of how evil is always present, not like a ghost or creature that disappears when the sun comes up. 

 

Long Legs also uses negative spaces and open frames to keep lighting levels relatively close throughout the whole movie, one example is that instead of lighting only the main characters face the movie lights up the whole room making edges of the frame visible lacking that shadowy feeling that the viewers are accustomed to. What this does is that we as the audience look more at the background instead of paying attention to the characters, and it turns us into paranoid lookers. 

Another interesting feature that this movie does extremely good is color grading between inside and outside; it works like a transitional phase that helps differentiate between the cold dark blueish-hued outside to orange waves in the inside. This is meant to mess with the viewers head by giving two worlds, on the inside it feels like a lifeless setting where everything is decaying and it lacks color, and on the outside, it gives how there is no escape for any of the characters. 

 

As is finished reading the review, I understood why the author used the type of lighting that they chose to use to transmit the message of the movie. 

 

 

For my second example I chose The Running man which is considered a dystopian action-thriller, that works well with a world that runs and is controlled by media. This movie uses lighting to create a world that feels hyper-surveilled and clinically cold, for example the overexposure with extremely bright, white-washed backgrounds in the upper-class areas of the city. 

 

what this does is that it give the message that the superficial world is doing well and that we can say is almost "clean" ;however, the character brings us to reality showing how the poor people suffer beneath all the propaganda that high levels present to the public, hiding what is really happening with the people in the movie. 

 

Another feature that this movie has is how they use LED colors to convey a different message to the viewers that are watching the main character gets hunted and almost killed. Small LED lights of handheld cameras or the blue-Ish "screen glow" of recording devices, what i believe this conveys is the feeling of realism between the viewers and main character. For the viewers is not a dangerous game and that can be seen because there is a lot of color when the show is presented 

Overview

Lighting is the " storyteller" of cinema that controls every scene of a movie; by controlling the intensity, direction, and color of light, filmmakers can physically guide a viewer's eye to crucial details, visually externalize a character's internal psychology. This helps the movie with mood, depth, and narrative intent. It is like the rules or guidelines that a movie follows to help achieve the purpose .

The running man

Long legs Review