Abandoned Towns: Best settings for Paranormal Movies

A lot of towns that have been abandoned maybe because of the economic poverty taken in their place and people just picked up their things and left. Bringing the fact that most of the abandoned towns are the shelter of some ghosts, it then follows that these towns are a good setting for a horror movie. Chernobyl Diaries is an example.

Chernobyl Diaries is an American horror movie of 2012, co-produced and directed by Bradley Parker and starring Jesse McCartney, Jonathan Sadowski, Devin Kelly, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Nathan Phillips, Ingrid Bolso Berdal and Dimitri Diatchenko. It is an original story from Oren Peli, who also created the thriller of Paranormal Activity. The film follows a group of six young vacationers who, looking to go off the beaten path, hire an “extreme” tour guide. Ignoring warnings, he takes them into the city of Pripyat, the former home to the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, but a deserted town since the disaster more than 25 years ago. After a brief exploration of the abandoned city, however, the group soon finds themselves stranded, only to discover that they are not alone.

According to Peli, Pripyat was an abandoned house where in all the people were evacuated to the city for good. “It is almost like a town where the population just vanished overnight. After 25 years of being abandoned, nature started taking over the town, and I don’t think there’s any other place on Earth that’s like that — that’s a relatively modern city where the population just disappeared”, he added. Peli came across a photo blog by people who had entered Pripyat and on YouTube he found there several videos of person who entered the officially closed area, to whom he credits the most.

Since the cast and crew were not allowed to shoot in Pripyat, there idea was to roll the cameras in several other creepy locations in Eastern Europe, including an abandoned Soviet air-force base and Nazi tunnels in Serbia. Because there’s been some misinformation rumored, peli want to emphasize that this movie, Chernobyl Diaries, is not a found-footage movie, referring to a genre in which film is presented as having been discovered. The camerawork is very natural and there was a lot of improvisation. “The acting is very natural, very realistic,” Peli added.