Technique: Horror

DOPs Krzysztof Trojnar and Vince Knight talk tackling the horror genre and share their top techniques for building suspense on-screen

Words Katie Kasperson

From slow zooms to POV shots, there’s an art to engineering fear. John Carpenter mastered the slow burn with long takes, wide shots and shadows. Steven Spielberg played with the idea that suspense comes from what’s unseen (the shark in Jaws gets four minutes of screen time), forcing the audience to use its imagination.

From movement to framing and lighting, DOPs have learnt how best to scare us; to feel dread, thrill or disgust. For Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen – a horror series about the wedding jitters, produced by the Duffer Brothers – DOP Krzysztof Trojnar drew inspiration from Rosemary’s Baby. Like Rosemary’s fear that her baby is in danger, “the fear of the wedding becomes the horror,” says Trojnar. “Later, you feel like that anxiety was there for a reason.”

 

A personal touch

To portray such intense anxiety, Trojnar knew that he had to stay on Rachel, the bride-to-be. “We described the ‘Rachel shot’ as a master shot on a Steadicam,” he says. “Throughout the season, it’s a progression of movement; we’re starting with the Steadicam, and then it gradually goes to a gimbal rig and then ends up being handheld.” Regardless of what’s happening, Trojnar wanted the camera to ‘travel with her, wherever she goes’.

Switching to handheld often signals future chaos. In Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (part of the so-called Twisted Childhood Universe, or TCU), DOP Vince Knight also manipulated the camera movement. He notes: “To make things feel more frantic. There’s a fight sequence towards the end of the film, when Wendy is trying to escape. We kept ramping up the movement as the scene went on.”

Knight, like Trojnar, likes to stick with his subjects, conveying their thoughts and fears so the audience can empathise. He often holds a smooth, continuous shot, ‘staying with them for a period of time, without cutting, to give the audience the feeling that they’re with the character’. On Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, there’s a therapy session sequence, and the protagonist begins to lose his grasp on reality. Knight rigged both the camera and actor on a single dolly, so they moved together while the background stayed the same size, suggesting that he’s sliding into insanity.

Camera movements can have different impacts, depending on tone. For example, a slow spin around the main character is a romance staple – but Trojnar used it in Something Very Bad to convey emotional suffocation, “creating this vertigo effect,” he says. Rachel’s fiancé, Nicky, has a strangely intense family, who circle her like a wake of vultures (what’s scarier than in-laws?) as she tries on his mother’s wedding dress. At one point, we switch over to Rachel’s POV, who Trojnar replaced with a headless mannequin. “We have the camera spinning 360° as it follows the other characters,” with Rachel’s hands coming out from underneath.

The series opens on Rachel’s POV, too. As she walks down the aisle, we see the view from underneath her veil and hear her breathing, Darth Vader style. Trojnar opted mostly for a wide-angle lens and combined that with close-ups, often with the subject centred and looking straight into the camera. “I’m a strong believer that closeness gives you a window into what they’re feeling,” he states.

Knight, on the other hand, went wide in Bambi: The Reckoning. The forest is a character, he says. “The actors feel really small in the frame, and the woods feel very expansive surrounding them. Quite a few times, the actor would look somewhere, trying to see in the darkness, and there would be a still frame. We’d hold there, and then Bambi would move, and you’d be like ‘Oh, shit!’ It caught the audience off guard.”

Beware of darkness

Achieving that darkness is a delicate balance; too much and the audience might miss something, not enough and the film isn’t as scary. “The issue we are constantly having is: everyone has a different viewing experience,” Knight describes. “People are watching on their phone, on the train, in daylight; others are in their house with a bright TV in a dark room.” Between cinemas, streaming services and home releases, ‘there’s no configuration that’s universal’.

Whether in darkness or daylight, a well-timed jump scare – a horror staple – can go a long way. Something Very Bad’s opening episode contains several. The first is in a diner, where Rachel and Nicky pause their road trip; the second is in a rest stop bathroom, where she searches for the parents of a baby that’s been left in a parked car. When she can’t find them, she drives down the road to a bar, urging an employee to call the police. While in the bathroom, a man peers over the stall and stares at her – the third jump scare. There’s another when she returns to the rest stop, wondering where Nicky and the other car have gone.

“Those moments were evident in the script,” says Trojnar. The more unexpected, he thinks, the better. “My favourite was the one where Nicky smashes his hand against the glass,” while Rachel’s in the car, transfixed on the trees – and what might be beyond them.

With lighting, meanwhile, Trojnar was trying to create a mood more than fear itself. “We tried to keep it as mysterious and gritty as possible,” he says, while grounding it in naturalism. “It’s a horror story that starts as a family drama. The lighting shouldn’t be too enhanced or manipulated,” he thought.

Taking place primarily at Nicky’s family’s winter cabin, Something Very Bad benefitted from the bright, snowy light outside and lack of sunshine during shoot days. Like Knight, he grappled with the darkness early on. The dailies, which were compressed, ‘started to lose a lot of detail; there was some worry of whether we’d see the actors’. He urges viewers to watch the show in 4K HDR and in a ‘horror-friendly environment’ to get the greatest effect.

While Something Very Bad is Netflix-backed, Knight’s projects tend to be low-budget, independent productions. He’s currently filming Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 3 with one gaffer and one spark. “We haven’t got the manpower for big lights and generators and cables,” he admits. “We’re using an Aputure STORM 80c; it punches so much light.” It’s serving as a stand-in for a street lamp, as it’s ‘lightweight and safe to put up high’.

Knight also uses Aputure MCs, which are his ‘get-out-of-jail card’, on almost everything he does. “I can hide them, as they’re magnetic and low profile. They’re small enough; if I want to sneak in an eyelight or a bit of backlight, I can.” For glass, Knight often turns to ZEISS Super Speed lenses, which perform well in low light – but on the whole, he chooses kit based on ‘whatever suits the project’.

Worth the wait

Horror tends to have its own subculture, with some films collecting a cult following. The TCU has a devout fanbase, and every film gets a cinema release, often accompanied by a Q&A. “We don’t have the budget to do proper test screenings,” Knight shares, so he enjoys watching the audience react in real time.

Pinocchio: Unstrung is Knight’s latest wrap. It premieres at Raindance Film Festival on 21 June and hits worldwide cinemas on 24 July.

As for Trojnar, Something Very Bad is his most recent release and he reunited with Baby Reindeer director Weronika Tofilska, filming episodes 1, 2, 7 and 8. It’s a show that shares Baby Reindeer’s anxiety-inducing atmosphere. “There’s a similarity to those stories, in terms of the first-person perspective,” he concludes. “We used a bit of that language but in a more horrific way.”

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is now streaming on Netflix

This article appears in the June/July 2026 issue of Definition