Originally published on Homingo Learn .

Dark is not the same as scary. A horror palette is a small set of colours with jobs: what feels safe, what is wrong, and how much of the frame the dark is allowed to take.

Most horror palettes on the web are mood boards: five dark swatches and an adjective. They look right in a grid and go muddy in a video, because nothing says which colour goes where. This guide treats a palette as a set of roles, gives five palettes with hex codes, shows how to check them in grey, and grades the finished frame in Remotion or with ffmpeg.

Give every colour a job

Roughly how much of the frame each role takes in a calm shot. The wrong colour is the smallest on purpose.

Ground is the darkest colour: shadows and the dark itself. Lift it a little above pure black and tint it, so compression does not turn it into blocks.

Mid is the room: walls, furniture, the far parts of the frame.…