Horror: Zombie - Settings (deeper research)

Although I have already briefly covered settings, I have decided to do further research into it relating to the genre of our film and what effect the setting can have on the overall impression of our sequence.

Horror and zombie films are usually set in places that trigger fear and in places that you would most likely associate for the dead to be, A convention to the zombie genre is that the starting events happen at night as this is the scariest time of day.

Abandoned/Quiet locations

There are many different places a zombie movie could be set including isolated places and small communities which would offer more opportunities to create a sense of isolation and can cause trouble for the characters in the movie. These settings also are extremely hard to escape from and therefore it leads to having to hold out until help arrives, which is a common idea for a lot of zombie films, although the outcome is not always good. An example of one of the more isolated settings would be the cabin from Evil Dead.

Cabin in the woods from "The Evil Dead"

Another conventional setting is abandoned houses as it is an unknown environment for characters and the audience so this creates tension for the viewer. There is also the setting of a church, this is a good setting as it is a place considered to be safe and when it isn't it can be seen as ironic to the audience and it may go against their expectations which creates the element of surprise.



An example of a church used as a setting would be in the film '28 days later' in which the lead character must kill a priest in order to survive. The church itself looks very dusty and this reflects the lack of maintenance it has received since the start of the epidemic.

Churches make good settings for zombie films.

Other typical setting include places like sewers and graveyards because these are not places people would like to be around. Furthermore, graveyards contain a lot of dead bodies and therefore this is an ideal starting point for the dead to be raised from.

Public locations

These kind of locations can be seen as more frightening to the viewer as it connotes to a sense of 'Anytime, anywhere' which means that no place is truly safe from the apocalypse which can be seen as quite distressing to the viewer. The advantage of this is that a wider setting allows for more dynamic shots and it allows the director to tamper with visual sights for the audience to appreciate, as well as varying locations to prevent boredom. An example of this would be the following shot from 'I am legend'.

 Public locations can range anywhere from the city, to hospitals, to shopping malls. The issue for characters in public places is that there are a lot more threats, from zombies to other people and this creates an every man for themselves atmosphere. The structures of these settings tend to be fragile as this creates a more hostile environment for the characters within the film.

In 'Dawn of the Dead', the setting is a shopping mall.

These settings are similar to abandoned locations with the fact that they are both hard to escape from, but in the case of more public settings the issue is with the dense population of the dead rather than navigating from an abandoned environment.

Conclusion

In conclusion, taking into consideration the difficulty of filming in a public location on a low budget,  I believe a more isolated location would suit better for our sequence, this is because it still has aspects that can create fear for the viewer while also maintaining ease when filming, by this I mean no members of the public can disrupt the shots or scenes we take. Another reason for this is that the use of an abandoned or quieter setting follows the more traditional aspects of settings in zombie films, more of the higher rated classics take place in abandoned environments, such as evil dead and even night of the living dead, another aspect we can take from these settings is that we must create an abandoned feeling to the environment, which may include designing the environment in order for it to look unmaintained.