In 1964, film director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg remarked that “you make the movie through the cinematography—it sounds like a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.” That same year, Roeg worked as a cinematographer on The Masque of the Red Death, director Roger Corman's adaptation of Poe's 1842 short story. In his article, “The Phosphorescence of Edgar Allan Poe on Film: Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death,” Mário Jorge Torres notes that Roeg's cinematography artistically achieves a “deep sense of richness and texture,” especially as it facilitates the Poe narrative's “depths and ambiguities” of images and meaning:

Dynamic cinematography may similarly be located in disparate horror narratives also produced in 1964, including Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (directed by Robert Aldrich, shot by Joseph F. Biroc), The Strangler (directed by Burt Topper, shot by Jacques R. Marquette), and Devil Doll (directed by Lindsay Shonteff, shot by Gerald Gibb), as well as in other popular film genres: these include Robert Burks's use of the colored lens to instill mood into a sexually conflicted character in Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller of the same year, Marnie, but is especially true in the mid-1960s war narrative. For example, the low-angle, atmospheric framing in Back Door to Hell (directed by Monte Hellman, shot by Nonong Rasca) and the compelling two shot in The Thin Red Line (directed by Andrew Marton, shot by Manuel Berenguer) memorably illustrate filmmaker Robert Bresson's comment that: “Cinematography is a writing with images in movement and with sounds.”

These cinematographers, frequently working with proscriptive budgets and other creative restraints, focalize the perspective of the audience, to establish how one sees the film narrative.