The Colour of Horror

Lesley Istead, Andreea Pocol, Sherman Siu, William Chen, Alex Zdanowicz, Alex Rowaan, Craig S. Kaplan

Abstract: In this paper, we present a simple method to produce a colour palette for film trailers. Our method uses k-means clustering with a saturation-based weighting to extract the dominant colours from the frames of the trailer. We use our method to generate the palettes of 29 thousand film trailers from 1960 to 2019. We aggregate these palettes by era, genre, and director by re-applying our clustering method, and we note various trends in the use of colour over time and between genres. We also show that our generated palettes reflect changes in mood and theme across films in a series, and we demonstrate the palettes of notable directors.