The United States is a big place, encompassing about 1,650 miles of space between the Canadian and Mexican borders. As such, location scouts rarely have to go very far to find an environment for a horror picture. Desert or snowcapped mountains, volcanoes, cities, or farms, the US can act as a surrogate for just about every location on Earth. There’s even a rainforest off the mainland in Puerto Rico.
George A. Romero
Of course, different states have different resources available to horror productions. California, the home of LA and Hollywood, is the obvious example. The CableTV website reports 163 “deaths” in the Sunshine State from just 17 movies, including The Fog, The Shining, Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal The Birds, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, an oddly satisfying watch even after all these years.
However, California doesn’t come close to Pennsylvania’s fictional death toll of 615 from six movies. As this fictional catastrophe can mainly be laid at George A. Romero’s feet (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, etc.), that seems like cheating. Zombies are already dead, after all. New York falls neatly between CA and PA, with 254 deceased actors, before the numbers drop off sharply.
Fourth place is arguably where things get interesting. Maine, while it only has 60 horror movie deaths from six films, most of them have one thing in common – Stephen King. The veteran storyteller bases many of his books in the Northeast, especially Lewiston, and in the vicinity of Portland, where he was born in 1947. This means that The Mist, Carrie, IT, Pet Semetary, and Cujo, among others, were either set or filmed in Maine.
Jason Vorhees
As the oldest part of the United States (from a European perspective, at least), the Northeast was bound to end up with a solid connection to media. One of its more recent contributions to entertainment has been its support for online casino NJ, an industry that includes the operator Playstar. Horror-themed slots like Halloween Jack, Lightening Horseman, and the vampire game Blood Suckers have found a home here.
New Jersey is renowned for its appearance in the Friday the 13th series of movies. The franchise that brought us Jason Vorhees and his mother was shot in NJ back in 1979, despite part of the production (casting) taking part in New York.
So, continuing with our list from earlier, the northeastern states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island got 13 and 12 kills from just a single film apiece.
The Northeast is by far the bloodiest state in America by a ratio of about 4:1 – but why? There’s much to be said for the cooler climate and architectural stylings of places like New England and the wider New York area, something that’s used to good effect in The Amityville Horror (Long Island). In this case, the looming house and forbidding weather are used as the main character, appearing in the film’s marketing materials.
Anything can be spooky, though. The 2010 movie Rubber was about a murderous tire rampaging across California. It seems that the horror genre has crazies behind the camera too.
