Any real estate agent can tell you the key to a successful listing is three things:
Location! Location! Location!
It’s the same in narrative.
Location! Location! Location!
It’s the same in narrative.
Setting is an important element of any story for several reasons.
- It can help give an historical context. You don’t just get a location; you get a location and its history. Historical settings imply limitations on character interactions. Social mores of the time periods must be come into play.
- It taps into social codes of behavior and expectations. For example, there are certain acceptable behaviors in a shower room and there are some behaviors that may be questionable. Think of it this way – I drop a bar of soap while shopping in a Kroger versus I drop a bar of soap in a prison shower room. The two different settings create different feelings regarding the expected possibilities of the same act.
- Some settings are archetypical, for example, The Dark Forest or Castles or Rivers or Crossroads or Labyrinths. This taps into our sense of mood and atmosphere as well as our associations with specific places. Think about it. For a romantic dinner would you make a reservation at a nice French restaurant or The House of Usher?
- Some settings have mixed emotional associations like hospitals. They are both a place of death and illness as well as healing and birth.
Settings are also Time Stamps. We are trained as children to be very aware of time as a setting. We hear the words, “Once upon a time…” and it serves to engage possibility while distancing us from whatever dangers may lie in the narrative.
Some stories have times in their names: High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma, AM11:00 (Korean movie열한시), 24 (TV show), Love in the Time of Cholera, etc.
Some stories have times in their names: High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma, AM11:00 (Korean movie열한시), 24 (TV show), Love in the Time of Cholera, etc.
Most narratives make use of multiple places. This adds interest to a story. A unique location carries unique characteristics. A murder on a boat carries isolation and the fear that a character is isolated with a murderer. Korean director Kim Ki-duk has made excellent use of isolated floating worlds in many of his films. Raymond Carver was very keen to write about single isolated moments in our lives where one event or decision spins our lives in completely opposite directions. His short stories are not about beginnings or resolving endings…they hone in on those moments and then he’s done. That’s why his stories have such polar opposite reactions from fans. Many storytellers play with conventions of setting to expand genre. We expect a crime story to be set in Las Vegas or the mean streets of Brooklyn, but in Disney World?
Conventions of horror movie settings are no different for viewers. We go to a Western, we expect a scene in a saloon. We go to a gangster flick, there had better be a gin joint. Horror movies make use of isolated locations and they don’t come more isolated than The Overlook Hotel in director Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. From the opening shot (done on a helicopter and pretty innovative for the 1980s) where the camera covers so much ground and dissolve after dissolve of road we get the feeling that this hotel is in the middle of nowhere. The isolation is emphasized. In “The Interview” section, Jack Nicholson’s character even says he’s looking for some isolation. There’s some talk about the tragedy of 1970 thus using another convention of horror – the Dark History- of setting. We find out there’s a Labyrinth outside the hotel…which was totally NOT in the Stephen King novel I read, but a nice addition to the setting, very mythic.
The hotel itself becomes a character in the film. It’s a labyrinth inside as well as out. There’s even another horror convention use of setting – the forbidden room…Room 237.
So you see, in horror movies, setting is as much a consideration as plot and character. If you’re doing a splatter film, you had better set it in a hospital with all the white uniforms and white walls to contrast or highlight the red blood! If you’re doing a ghost story, then you had better have someone run out of gas near a graveyard!
Redrum, Ya'll!
Redrum, Ya'll!
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