THE FILTER

You may have seen a line referencing a color filter in the dialogue for the first trailer. 

I included that line because it came to my attention that many horror movies, but in the 2000s especially, had weird filters over the ENTIRE movie.

I mean just look at this shot from SAW.

and now compare it to how this same scene looks without the filter:

 I'm not saying that I dislike the green filter. I think it actually adds a lot to the grimy and dirty feel of the Saw franchise, especially when it clashes with the blood-red color of blood. 

(now that I look closer, it seems like the green filter was cranked all the way to 11 for Saw II)

But there are some other instances where the filters don't add anything to the movie, and can sometimes even make the movie actively annoying to watch.

Take a look at this image from Scream 4. What seems to be the issue here?

Yes, the ENTIRE movie has this weird blurry glow filter over it (nicknamed the vaseline filter by Scream fans). The first time I saw this movie it was really distracting, but over time I've gotten used to it. I still don't think it's good by any means, but it's definitely not as bad as in this specific shot the WHOLE time...

Like in this shot, it's not very noticeable (well with the image compression kind of is but ignore that) and that's due to the lighting.

As you can see in the first shot I showed, the light coming from behind + the filter is a match made in cinematic hell, but here at night with light coming from in front of the actors and not behind them the shot looks pretty good!

All this to say, the 2000s slaughter town will have a color filter on it. It'll be hard to find how strong I want that filter to be, because there's a very fine line between having it be really strong for comedic effect and having it be really strong to where the scenes look (unintentionally) ugly.