Location: Outside + Inspiration

I started off by looking at locations used in many different supernatural horrors. I researched into different supernatural horrors and the typical locations used. These are them:

• The woods
• Basements
• Old family homes
• Mental hospitals / insane asylum 
• Abandoned buildings

The Conjuring

This is the old family home from The Conjuring, in the film it is haunted by many different spirits/entities. If we are to make a ghost film, then a haunted house would be a conventional route to go down.

Session 9

The film Session 9 is set in an abandoned mental hospital. Although it has supernatural twists, it is also a psychological horror film and so it plays tricks on the mind. The use of tunnels is also explored in this film and a major part is finding old tapes in the hospital. This is a great location as it has lots of negative connotations behind it. And naturally, people would assume many troubled people lived and died here, making it that bit spookier.

The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project is mainly filmed in the woods as well as a creepy old house they find towards the end. This film was hugely successful and one of the first to use the documentary-style, which has become very popular in supernatural horror. It helps add to the realism of the movie. They use the location to their advantage - they attach a spooky story to it which instantly makes the audience feel like something bad is definitely going to happen. They also create fear by doing simple things like shown in this picture - making "witch" symbols out of twigs which is something that we could consider if we were to shoot in the woods.

Grave Encounters

This is a screen cap from the film 'Grave Encounters'. They investigate an abandoned asylum as part of a ghost hunting show. Again, this film is shot in the documentary-style as mentioned above.

After looking at these conventional supernatural locations I decided to venture around my local area to see if anything similar was near-by... I went to

• Bexley Woods
• A Church in Bexley
• Abandoned garage type area in Bexley

Here's what I found...

The woods

The Church

The Abandoned Place

Evaluation 

I think that the last location I looked at is the most convincing and scary-looking. It is also easy to access and not far away. However, although the area is public, this particular bit may be privately owned and so we might have to seek permission to film there. On a plus side, the location looks like it could have some history which we could build into our plot for our own opening. 

The woods location doesn't seem scary enough in daylight but I know that at night the trees and darkness can play tricks on you, so it might be interesting to look into that further. However, woods are quite cliché and we don't just want to end up copying The Blair Witch Project. It is public though and so we would not have difficulty filming there - except of course if the public were around when we are filming!
The church is quite large and impressive so we could use it for out-side shots if we want, it also has stained-glass windows which add an eerie effect and make it seem particularly religious. If we decide to use religious elements, like demons and possession, we could look into filming the church.