Horror films seldom make their actual settings known. To scare and unsettle most effectively, it’s useful to evoke a place, a time, and a cast of characters that remain undefined and unremarkable enough for broad audiences to see in their own surroundings. Horror is also, by definition, a speculative genre, and thus often takes place in imagined worlds, whether gothic and magical or artificially ordinary. But there are real places that—for reasons often related less to their physical appearance or cultural character and more to their financial and geographical convenience—end up starring often in horror and thriller cinema. The counties immediately north of San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma, were something akin to spatial scream queens in the decades leading up to the millennium. In August, I visited the region to see my brother, who lives in West Marin, and some of the locations that appear in the films of the North Bay Horror cycle.
Origins: Shadow of a Doubt
When asked to name a favourite among his own films, Alfred Hitchcock usually offered Shadow of a Doubt. Released in 1943, it was the sixth film he made in the U.S., and his first to achieve the status of a classic in the eyes of many critics. The thriller, about a young woman (Teresa Wright) who begins to suspect her beloved uncle of a string of sadistic murders, takes place in Santa Rosa, California, 50 miles north of San Francisco.
As the postwar suburban boom dragged metropolitan zones far beyond the natural borders of cities, Santa Rosa swelled into a formidable commuter burg, but in those days it was a small, sleepy town of around 12,000. Its quaint Victorian homes—like the whitewashed corner house where the family in Shadow lives—evoked a cozy pre-war simplicity that set the scene for sordid Hitchcockian mystery. In a documentary about the making of the film, Hitchcock’s daughter, Pat, explained that it had always been her father’s favourite “because he loved the thought of bringing menace into a small town.” Uncle Charlie’s (Joseph Cotten) sinister secrets bring violence—long associated with cities—into a pastoral setting not yet marred by urban encroachment. Something about Sonoma County must have appealed to Hitchcock’s vision; he returned twenty years after Shadow of a Doubt to shoot The Birds in Bodega Bay, west of Santa Rosa on the Pacific coast.
The Fog
It would be another few decades before horror cinema found its footing again in the North Bay. West Marin County stars, unnamed, in John Carpenter’s 1980 maritime ghost story The Fog. The southern end of Marin lies immediately north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate. The eastern side of the county is home to the county seat, San Rafael, and a number of affluent suburbs like San Anselmo and Mill Valley. But just on the other side of Mount Tamalpais, on the Pacific coast, is a pocket of Marin that appears positively rural despite its proximity to the suburban sprawl of the Bay Area. The Point Reyes peninsula—formed between Tomales Bay and the ocean—is dominated by lush woods of coast live oak and Douglas fir, its cold beaches littered with driftwood and ringed by stark, jagged cliffs.
And then, of course, there’s the fog—the star of Carpenter’s film—which rolls heavy and menacing across the Point Reyes peninsula every evening. In the film, it heralds the arrival of the ghost crew of a clipper ship deliberately sunk by the fictional town of Antonio Bay’s founders a hundred years earlier. Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), a DJ for the town’s radio station, watches the ominous fog from the lighthouse that houses the station. It’s played by the Point Reyes Lighthouse, at the peninsula’s far western tip, which has served as a modest tourist attraction since it ceased operations in 1975. Perched on a craggy rock at the end of a long, narrow walkway, the lighthouse looks fragile and miniscule against the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
West Marin is an apt setting not only for its appearance but also for its history. The 16th century English sea captain and pirate Sir Francis Drake once landed in a cove—now known as Drake’s Bay—on the southern side of the peninsula. Though his interactions with the Coast Miwok people were reportedly friendly and he established no permanent colony on the land they inhabited, he named the region New Albion and claimed it as English territory, setting the stage for future colonization on the crown’s behalf. The beach where Stevie’s son finds a piece of enchanted driftwood that portends the ghosts’ vengeance is the same one where Drake landed hundreds of years ago, bringing with him omens of violent European conquest.
Basic Instinct
While Carpenter mined the rural, desolate look of West Marin for its horror potential, Paul Verhoeven would exploit the county’s proximity to urban vice twelve years later in Basic Instinct. The sleazy neo-noir takes place primarily in San Francisco, where homicide detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) lives and works. Writer and femme fatale Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) maintains a San Francisco home as well as a beach house outside the city. It’s supposed to be in Stinson Beach, one of the seven small communities making up West Marin, but is played by a sprawling modern seaside mansion in Carmel-by-the-Sea, at the northern end of Big Sur a hundred miles south of San Francisco. Sonoma County shows up for real, though—Nick tracks Catherine to the home of her friend, the elderly one-time mass murderer Hazel Dobkins (Dorothy Malone), in downtown Petaluma, 15 miles south of Santa Rosa.
Scream
A prototypical erotic thriller, Basic Instinct revels in juxtaposing harsh violence and explicit sex with serene, glamorous settings. The bucolic suburbs of a major city with a long history of starring in noirs and thrillers form an obvious backdrop for these contrasts. Slashers, too, involve the invasion of carnage into idyllic suburban settings, so it follows that Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), a simultaneous celebration and send-up of the genre, makes such effective use of the North Bay region. Pre-production location debates were charged—the Weinsteins, who produced the film, wanted to cut costs by shooting in Vancouver, but Craven insisted on working in the U.S. to make the film feel American.
Settling on Sonoma county, the producers hoped to shoot the school scenes at Santa Rosa High School, but the school board denied their request, objecting to the script’s depictions of brutal violence amongst youth. Three years before production, nearby Petaluma had been shaken by the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, a rare instance of the kind of stranger-danger violence that shaped a cultural panic in the tough-on-crime 1980s and ’90s. Craven found a suitable substitute for Santa Rosa High in the Sonoma Community Center, a 1916 redbrick building that once served as the schoolhouse for the town of Sonoma.
The teens terrorized by their masked peers in Scream are notably affluent. The family homes of protagonists Sidney (Neve Campbell), Tatum (Rose McGowan), Casey (Drew Barrymore), and Stu (Matthew Lillard) are—rather than the modest suburban bungalows of earlier slashers—secluded McMansions set far back from winding country roads. When I tried to visit Sidney’s house on the hilly outskirts of Santa Rosa, I found that the address listed on movie location blogs only led me to a locked gate in front of a long private road that presumably led to it, though the property’s elevated terrain and dense woods hid it from view.
It’s no accident that Craven chose to shoot Ghostface’s reign of terror in homes that so ostentatiously emphasize their own security and privacy. In Scream, the safety fetishized by wealthy refugees from urban centres is upended. In deconstructing the slasher, Craven—an architect of the genre—took its attributes to their logical extremes. The film’s characters are not merely comfortable suburbanites, but ultrarich exurbanites; the killing not merely senseless, but cynical and ironic. Scream is often characterised as a postmodern slasher; the postmodern architecture of the McMansion and the postmodern attitude of irony replace the earnest modern terror of the genre’s roots.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
The last major film in the North Bay horror cycle was Jim Gillespie’s 1997 seaside slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer. Written by Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, it drew comparisons to the former film, sharing its backdrop of teenage melodrama and themes of cyclical slaughter. Though most of the film is shot in Williamson’s native North Carolina, pivotal early scenes make use of Schoolhouse Beach, near Bodega Bay, and the winding Pacific Coast Highway just north of it. Anyone passingly familiar with the topography of East and West Coast beaches can see that the road where Last Summer’s teens accidentally kill a pedestrian one summer night curves along the Pacific Ocean, but geographical accuracy is less important in horror than aesthetic and affective accuracy. The harrowing gothicism of the PCH, waves crashing against rocky cliffs below it, sets the stage for terror better than the flat stretches of highway along Southeastern coastlines.
These days, the American South stars in horror far more often than northern California. High costs of living in the latter region and tax incentives in the former have driven innumerable low- and mid-budget productions southeastward. The 2022 Scream “requel,” though set in the original’s fictional Woodsboro, California, was shot entirely in North Carolina. Producers hope we won’t notice because these regions and cities are chosen in part for their ostensible anonymity. The idea of an American “every town” is a fallacy. Landscapes, flora, weather, architectural styles, and residential layouts differ vastly. A railroad town in the Northwest looks different from a postwar suburb in the Southeast, no matter how ordinary both may appear. Our cultural image of middle America is constantly being constructed by the very media that purport to represent it.
Horror films seldom make their actual settings known. To scare and unsettle most effectively, it’s useful to evoke a place, a time, and a cast of characters that remain undefined and unremarkable enough for broad audiences to see in their own surroundings. Horror is also, by definition, a speculative genre, and thus often takes place in imagined worlds, whether gothic and magical or artificially ordinary. But there are real places that—for reasons often related less to their physical appearance or cultural character and more to their financial and geographical convenience—end up starring often in horror and thriller cinema. The counties immediately north of San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma, were something akin to spatial scream queens in the decades leading up to the millennium. In August, I visited the region to see my brother, who lives in West Marin, and some of the locations that appear in the films of the North Bay Horror cycle.
Origins: Shadow of a Doubt
When asked to name a favourite among his own films, Alfred Hitchcock usually offered Shadow of a Doubt. Released in 1943, it was the sixth film he made in the U.S., and his first to achieve the status of a classic in the eyes of many critics. The thriller, about a young woman (Teresa Wright) who begins to suspect her beloved uncle of a string of sadistic murders, takes place in Santa Rosa, California, 50 miles north of San Francisco.
As the postwar suburban boom dragged metropolitan zones far beyond the natural borders of cities, Santa Rosa swelled into a formidable commuter burg, but in those days it was a small, sleepy town of around 12,000. Its quaint Victorian homes—like the whitewashed corner house where the family in Shadow lives—evoked a cozy pre-war simplicity that set the scene for sordid Hitchcockian mystery. In a documentary about the making of the film, Hitchcock’s daughter, Pat, explained that it had always been her father’s favourite “because he loved the thought of bringing menace into a small town.” Uncle Charlie’s (Joseph Cotten) sinister secrets bring violence—long associated with cities—into a pastoral setting not yet marred by urban encroachment. Something about Sonoma County must have appealed to Hitchcock’s vision; he returned twenty years after Shadow of a Doubt to shoot The Birds in Bodega Bay, west of Santa Rosa on the Pacific coast.
The Fog
It would be another few decades before horror cinema found its footing again in the North Bay. West Marin County stars, unnamed, in John Carpenter’s 1980 maritime ghost story The Fog. The southern end of Marin lies immediately north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate. The eastern side of the county is home to the county seat, San Rafael, and a number of affluent suburbs like San Anselmo and Mill Valley. But just on the other side of Mount Tamalpais, on the Pacific coast, is a pocket of Marin that appears positively rural despite its proximity to the suburban sprawl of the Bay Area. The Point Reyes peninsula—formed between Tomales Bay and the ocean—is dominated by lush woods of coast live oak and Douglas fir, its cold beaches littered with driftwood and ringed by stark, jagged cliffs.
And then, of course, there’s the fog—the star of Carpenter’s film—which rolls heavy and menacing across the Point Reyes peninsula every evening. In the film, it heralds the arrival of the ghost crew of a clipper ship deliberately sunk by the fictional town of Antonio Bay’s founders a hundred years earlier. Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), a DJ for the town’s radio station, watches the ominous fog from the lighthouse that houses the station. It’s played by the Point Reyes Lighthouse, at the peninsula’s far western tip, which has served as a modest tourist attraction since it ceased operations in 1975. Perched on a craggy rock at the end of a long, narrow walkway, the lighthouse looks fragile and miniscule against the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
West Marin is an apt setting not only for its appearance but also for its history. The 16th century English sea captain and pirate Sir Francis Drake once landed in a cove—now known as Drake’s Bay—on the southern side of the peninsula. Though his interactions with the Coast Miwok people were reportedly friendly and he established no permanent colony on the land they inhabited, he named the region New Albion and claimed it as English territory, setting the stage for future colonization on the crown’s behalf. The beach where Stevie’s son finds a piece of enchanted driftwood that portends the ghosts’ vengeance is the same one where Drake landed hundreds of years ago, bringing with him omens of violent European conquest.
Basic Instinct
While Carpenter mined the rural, desolate look of West Marin for its horror potential, Paul Verhoeven would exploit the county’s proximity to urban vice twelve years later in Basic Instinct. The sleazy neo-noir takes place primarily in San Francisco, where homicide detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) lives and works. Writer and femme fatale Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) maintains a San Francisco home as well as a beach house outside the city. It’s supposed to be in Stinson Beach, one of the seven small communities making up West Marin, but is played by a sprawling modern seaside mansion in Carmel-by-the-Sea, at the northern end of Big Sur a hundred miles south of San Francisco. Sonoma County shows up for real, though—Nick tracks Catherine to the home of her friend, the elderly one-time mass murderer Hazel Dobkins (Dorothy Malone), in downtown Petaluma, 15 miles south of Santa Rosa.
Scream
A prototypical erotic thriller, Basic Instinct revels in juxtaposing harsh violence and explicit sex with serene, glamorous settings. The bucolic suburbs of a major city with a long history of starring in noirs and thrillers form an obvious backdrop for these contrasts. Slashers, too, involve the invasion of carnage into idyllic suburban settings, so it follows that Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), a simultaneous celebration and send-up of the genre, makes such effective use of the North Bay region. Pre-production location debates were charged—the Weinsteins, who produced the film, wanted to cut costs by shooting in Vancouver, but Craven insisted on working in the U.S. to make the film feel American.
Settling on Sonoma county, the producers hoped to shoot the school scenes at Santa Rosa High School, but the school board denied their request, objecting to the script’s depictions of brutal violence amongst youth. Three years before production, nearby Petaluma had been shaken by the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, a rare instance of the kind of stranger-danger violence that shaped a cultural panic in the tough-on-crime 1980s and ’90s. Craven found a suitable substitute for Santa Rosa High in the Sonoma Community Center, a 1916 redbrick building that once served as the schoolhouse for the town of Sonoma.
The teens terrorized by their masked peers in Scream are notably affluent. The family homes of protagonists Sidney (Neve Campbell), Tatum (Rose McGowan), Casey (Drew Barrymore), and Stu (Matthew Lillard) are—rather than the modest suburban bungalows of earlier slashers—secluded McMansions set far back from winding country roads. When I tried to visit Sidney’s house on the hilly outskirts of Santa Rosa, I found that the address listed on movie location blogs only led me to a locked gate in front of a long private road that presumably led to it, though the property’s elevated terrain and dense woods hid it from view.
It’s no accident that Craven chose to shoot Ghostface’s reign of terror in homes that so ostentatiously emphasize their own security and privacy. In Scream, the safety fetishized by wealthy refugees from urban centres is upended. In deconstructing the slasher, Craven—an architect of the genre—took its attributes to their logical extremes. The film’s characters are not merely comfortable suburbanites, but ultrarich exurbanites; the killing not merely senseless, but cynical and ironic. Scream is often characterised as a postmodern slasher; the postmodern architecture of the McMansion and the postmodern attitude of irony replace the earnest modern terror of the genre’s roots.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
The last major film in the North Bay horror cycle was Jim Gillespie’s 1997 seaside slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer. Written by Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, it drew comparisons to the former film, sharing its backdrop of teenage melodrama and themes of cyclical slaughter. Though most of the film is shot in Williamson’s native North Carolina, pivotal early scenes make use of Schoolhouse Beach, near Bodega Bay, and the winding Pacific Coast Highway just north of it. Anyone passingly familiar with the topography of East and West Coast beaches can see that the road where Last Summer’s teens accidentally kill a pedestrian one summer night curves along the Pacific Ocean, but geographical accuracy is less important in horror than aesthetic and affective accuracy. The harrowing gothicism of the PCH, waves crashing against rocky cliffs below it, sets the stage for terror better than the flat stretches of highway along Southeastern coastlines.
These days, the American South stars in horror far more often than northern California. High costs of living in the latter region and tax incentives in the former have driven innumerable low- and mid-budget productions southeastward. The 2022 Scream “requel,” though set in the original’s fictional Woodsboro, California, was shot entirely in North Carolina. Producers hope we won’t notice because these regions and cities are chosen in part for their ostensible anonymity. The idea of an American “every town” is a fallacy. Landscapes, flora, weather, architectural styles, and residential layouts differ vastly. A railroad town in the Northwest looks different from a postwar suburb in the Southeast, no matter how ordinary both may appear. Our cultural image of middle America is constantly being constructed by the very media that purport to represent it.