Catalog
The Exorcist is set in Georgetown, Washington DC, and opens in the ruins of Hatra in northern Iraq. The real Exorcist Steps, Healy Hall and Lauinger Library are on the Georgetown campus, and a hospital on Roosevelt Island stood in for a Washington scene. The route follows the film from Merrin's dig at Hatra to the MacNeil house and the stairs where Father Karras falls.
Trainspotting is set in Leith, Edinburgh, but was filmed almost entirely in Glasgow: only the opening chase down Princes Street and Calton Road was shot in the capital. Rouken Glen Park, Jordanhill School and a pub on Queen Margaret Drive fill in for Edinburgh, and Corrour station supplies the film's "great outdoors" scene. The route follows Renton and his friends from Leith through the chase, the park, the bar and the school to a remote Highland platform. Where a location guide's pub or a bridge name is uncertain, the stop says so.
The Shining's Overlook Hotel was born at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, and Kubrick's film shows Timberline Lodge on Oregon's Mount Hood as its front, after an opening drive past Montana's Saint Mary Lake. The route covers the Stanley, the Glacier National Park opening drive, Timberline Lodge, the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite that inspired the interiors, and Elstree Studios in England, where the Overlook was built. The Overlook itself is fictional: each pin marks a real place that inspired, played or housed it.
A Nightmare on Elm Street sets Springwood, Ohio, on a leafy Los Angeles street: Nancy Thompson's house at 1428 North Genesee Avenue, Glen's across the road, John Marshall High School as the protagonists' school and a shuttered 1927 jail standing in for the police station. Wes Craven shot the film in 32 days on about $1.1 million, and the two houses still look very much as they did in 1984. The route follows the film from Nancy's bad morning at school through the police station, Rod's funeral, the sleep clinic and Glen's last night, and ends at the house where Nancy turns the nightmare around. Two stops are private homes and the school is a working campus, so most of it is seen from the street.
Scream's Woodsboro is a fictional California town, but the 1996 film was shot in Glen Ellen, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Sonoma and Tomales. This route follows eight of those places in story order, from Casey Becker's house and Sidney Prescott's bedroom to the school, the town square, the video store and the Tomales house where the killers are unmasked. Several stops are private houses, so see them from the street; the square and the community center are the public ones.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was filmed around Austin in the summer of 1973, and its main sites can still be visited: Bagdad Cemetery in Leander, the Last Chance Gas Station in Bastrop, and the Quick Hill farmhouse, now Hooper's restaurant in Kingsland. This route follows the film from the grave-robbing opening to Sally's escape on a Round Rock road, then ends inside the house where Leatherface's family sat down to dinner. Tobe Hooper shot the $140,000 film on 16mm over 13 days, using a real farmhouse, a working gas station and a country cemetery instead of sets. Temperatures reached 110°F during the shoot.
Friday the 13th (1980) was filmed at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Hardwick, New Jersey, with Blairstown's Main Street, the Moravian Cemetery in Hope and the Blairstown Diner standing in for the town and countryside around Camp Crystal Lake. The film was shot in and around Hardwick, Blairstown and Hope in autumn 1979, mostly at a working Boy Scout camp on Sand Pond. This route follows Annie's hitchhike into town, the counselors' night at camp, Steve Christy's evening at the diner and Alice's final struggle on the lakeshore.
Nine years after a night in Vienna, Jesse is on a book tour in Europe when Céline walks into his reading in a Paris bookshop. He has an hour before his flight, and they spend it wandering the city. Richard Linklater's 2004 film plays in real time: the story lasts about as long as the film, roughly eighty minutes. It was shot in 15 days across Paris, and its locations jump about more than the dialogue admits. This route follows the film's order from the Left Bank bookshop through the Marais and the east of the city to the Seine and a gated courtyard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Peter Jackson shot all three Lord of the Rings films at once, in 438 days between October 1999 and December 2000, at more than 150 locations across New Zealand's North and South Islands. Farmland became the Shire, a regional park became Rivendell, a lonely hill in Canterbury became the capital of Rohan, and a volcano in Tongariro National Park stood in for Mount Doom. This route follows Frodo's story through eight of those places, most of them easy to visit. Some sets were rebuilt for visitors; others were removed and the land returned to how it was. The mountains of Tongariro are sacred to local Māori, so please admire the summits from below.