And it's not endemic to horror cinema, either...it seems like EVERY movie is full of blown-out backlighting combined with a minimum of "rim lighting", resulting in scene after scene of actors who are barely discernible from the backgrounds. I don't know if it's the passover from film to digital, or what, but it's an absolute blight. Wicked cost $150 million, and it looked like watching a movie with the 3D filter left over the lens in the theater, Meanwhile, three decades ago, nighttime scenes were lit like this:Hey, look, each actor is clearly outlined against the background!
And I know some people will blame it on the theater for having low-wattage bulbs, or the settings on your TV at home not being calibrated properly, but it's like cinematographers have just plain forgotten how to illuminate actors in dark settings so the audience can actually make out what's going on. The Obi-Wan series on D+ was so badly lit that whole scenes looked like pools of inky blackness with lightsabers bobbing around in them. People used to crack jokes about the great cinematographer Gordon Willis being "The Prince of Darkness", but he always allowed you to know what you were look at, even if an actor's eyes were hidden in deep pools of shadow, like in The Godfather.
