Celluloid nightmares
Lots of scary movies have emerged from the Bay Area fog
When Philip Kaufman was offered a chance to remake “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” he initially hesitated. Simply copying the 1956 horror classic about a small town overrun by an alien invasion was of little interest to him.
Then Kaufman got the idea of transplanting the story to a city, specifically San Francisco, his home since the 1960s. “It was a way of saying that even in the best city with the greatest individuality, there can be elements of urban paranoia, of things creeping up on you that get more and more magnified,” Kaufman said in a recent interview.
“This foggy city was sort of fertile ground for spores from outer space to come and proliferate.” Philip Kaufman, director
Other star directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Francis Ford Coppola have been lured to San Francisco and the surrounding region to make movies to frighten their audience. For those of you who need a share of old-fashioned scares to get through Halloween, here are all manner of horror films — disaster, traditional thrillers, psychological ones, high and low budget — set in your own backyard.
Kaufman’s 1978 version, considered among the best remakes, blends traditional horror — San Francisco citizens methodically replaced by look-alike pod people unable to display emotion — with a broader psychological underpinning. The film can be viewed as a reproach to Erhard Seminar Training or est, a program headquartered in San Francisco that sought to transform its followers by controversial methods.
“The Jonestown thing took place around then, too,” Kaufman recalled, referring to the
cult whose members committed mass suicide and murder in 1978. “I was talking about all those movements. There were so many of them. This is the city of movements going back to the beatniks and hippies.”
Visually opulent, “Invasion” is set in 25 locations all over San Francisco, transforming the city into another character in the narrative. Even the most routine sites are given a creepy gloss. The distressed protagonists race around in a car with a broken windshield creating splintered, distorted views of the city. The weather helps promote a menacing mood.
“This foggy city was sort of fertile ground for spores from outer space to come and proliferate,” said Kaufman, who has the pods germinate at Pier 70, more industrialized then than now.
Several scenes were shot in the Tenderloin, which was “a little scary to begin with” at the time, Kaufman said. The Transamerica Pyramid appears often, an in-joke because the structure was owned in the ’70s by United Artists, the studio backing “Invasion.” “The joke was that this sort of oddlooking lurking building is pod central.”
It is hard to recall another mainstream horror film with known actors (Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy) shot entire-
ly in San Francisco. The reason for this is twofold, believes Peter L. Stein, senior Frameline programmer and former executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
“San Francisco has historically been a very expensive city to shoot in, and horror films tend to be low budget because they have niche audiences. So maybe that explains why most horror movies seem to be set on a farm or in the suburbs,” he said.
However, numerous movies are set around here that feature a more sophisticated brand of horror. Instead of creatures from beyond, these films feature recognizable human beings forced to deal with inner demons and outer threats. The city is used in subtle ways to magnify their terror.
The gold standard is Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), whose protagonist, Scottie (James Stewart), has acrophobia. As Hitchcock scholars point out, his sense of irony is at play when he situates Scottie in an apartment on top of a steep hill a block east of the winding part of Lombard. (In his 1977 parody “High Anxiety,” Mel Brooks pokes gentle fun at Scottie by creating his own vertigo-