Where are you!? Location in Horror
It’s funny to me how seemingly safe places can be considered unsafe if the conditions are right. A familiar street in the daytime becomes a fear inducing trail within the night, a well traveled road suddenly is more ominous if you only see one or two people on it instead of the usual crowds, and of course, a beautiful two story house gets a sinister vibe if you find out a whole family was murdered inside while they slept. Location is more than what sets the story in terms of space, it is what helps determine the atmosphere and theme of the whole narrative in some cases. After all, a haunted house story is different than a home invasion story, even if both are set within a scary house. So today we are going to explore how location can make a story familiar or unique, location as a character, and location description ideas.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep...
A thing I often find in horror is how often we label horror stories based on their location. Haunted House, Cabin in the Woods, and Southern Gothic all give you an idea of what the place where all the horrible things are happening is going to go down. Yet the problem with location-based horror is how easily it can fall into a box. Haunted House stories, while having varying branches, tend to fall under a handful of tropes, and how often the Cabin in the Woods motif is used in parody explains how oversaturated the location is. So, how can we avoid these footfalls? I feel it is best to avoid (as best one can) tropes by taking the scene location, but having things play out very different. Instead of the Cabin in the Woods with the young college kids, how about it being a fishing group of 40 something year old men? That would change the dynamics a lot, especially how they would handle the situation. How about the haunted house route, let’s change the family moving in to the family that has lived there for years, decades even, and suddenly, their house starts acting up (this one has a real life example, look up The Atlanta Blood House if you’re curious) . That leaves a lot of questions: “why now?” being the biggest. While the location is half of the situation in most of these stories, there are opportunities to go beyond the expected and change something to make it uniquely yours.
Yet the best locations are the ones with personalities in my opinion. If you’re going to make a horror story, the dread should come from just hearing the description of the location, especially one that feels like it is watching you. This comes off very well in many cases, mostly haunted houses but I will focus on two different stories for this. First off is a novel called Horrorstӧr by Grady Hendrix, which I have mentioned before and I will have to mention again. It’s wholly dedicated to the concept of a haunted store, a store that is haunted by its past every night but looks like an off brand Ikea during the daytime. I personally have never been in an Ikea store (lack of opportunity) but it gives you that vibe of how those stores work and where everything is. I probably know a lot more about how Ikea is laid out now than I did when I started reading that book that is for sure! As the night goes on, more and more of the building’s history and character seeps into the store, much like a lady removing her makeup after a long night on the town before bed. By the time you hit the end, the store has no more secrets, and the characters are just trying to get out alive.
An equally dynamic location would have to be from the movie The Witch, involving the forest itself. The way the movie is filmed, it has only two major set pieces: the woods and the farm. The farm is in a meadow surrounded by the woods, like the woods is attempting to gang up on the little farm. A predator encircling its prey, it knows what lives within the farm and it wants them. The woods themselves seem endless and often following our characters makes us wonder exactly how far away from the relative safety of the farm they are. For those watching, it seems like they are miles away, until you can hear people in the distance, then you realize they actually didn’t travel very far at all. Also it is an old wood forest with not many low lying plants and no smaller trees to be found, which adds to the dark fairy tale vibe the forest gives. The forest is a monster, luring people in with its beauty and then taking what it wants from them courtesy of the witch that lives there.
So how can we make a description of a location so that the audience knows not only where everything is, but is unnerved by such things? Giving the description time to form and make room for some, not all, of those little details that will matter. Yes you can mention that the house was three stories, with two windows at the top, a balcony at the first floor with two windows reaching out and three seasons room that sat under it. Yet if you mention the two windows at the top look like eyes in their quarter circle formation with lights peeking out at night and the rest makes the house seem like it is smiling unnervingly, you got the makings of a description of the horrifying Amityville house.
If you wish to give a location a personality, make it unsettling of a description. Say that the edge of the forest seemed almost like there was a line between the forest and the meadow nearby, and every day it seemed like the forest crept quietly beyond the line. Mention how the distant sound of cars on the highway was the only clue that you may be near civilization and even then, you may not be so sure due to how long the trails seemed to be. Talk about how the undergrowth looks, add descriptions that make it seem like a layer of dead leaves was a soft blanket for the little bits of seedlings to pop up from in the spring, like life forced out of death’s domain. Give it human characteristics, how it seemed to be stoic among the noise of the squirrels and birds, giving no commentary to their jabbering. Give it a soul, a soul that shows old rocks that came in from glaciers centuries and eons past that now sit there as a reminder that there was a time before you showed up, and there will be one after you leave. Your location is as much of a person as it is a place, treat it as such.
What are your favorite descriptions of places in horror? I happen to love the description of the graveyard in “Sex, Death, and Starshine” by Clive Barker. It shows the age and the beauty of such a forgotten place. Please tell me your favorites below and I will catch you all next food Thursday!
