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Film History Mysterious Stories

Scream Time: Ten Fun Horror Films Set In New York City

Horror movies normally go for nameless suburbs, dark woods or remote Victorian-style haunted houses for their scary settings, so it’s a wonderful treat when New York City and its recognizable landmarks get to host a few cinematic monsters.

Ever since King Kong traipsed up the Empire State Building, filmmakers have used the city’s architecture as a way to heighten thrills and even comment on the real-life horrors of urban living. This week the Scream franchise brings its mix of murder mystery and slasher to New York City in Scream VI starring Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega.

The latest film finds Ghostface walking the same streets once terrorized by Friday the 13th’s Jason, the creatures known as C.H.U.D. and a myriad of lesser known maniacs and monsters.

Want to make your own New York City horror film festival? Here are ten of my personal favorite movies set in the big city, from campy treats to genuine frights. Do you have any urban horror favorites? Leave them in the comments.

10 Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

Before Q was a conspiracy theory, it was an ancient beast terrorizing the New York skyline. Chrysler Building architect William Van Alen would be horrified to learn that the graceful tapering top hat of his most famous building becomes home of a loathsome flying dragon and a gigantic nest of eggs.

This movie is one of my all-time favorite camp horror classics, Jaws if the shark were actually just a long, mean pigeon. (Way back in 2007 I wrote about my love of this movie on this website.)

9 The Sentinel (1977)

Horror on the Brooklyn Promenade! A fashion model moves into a historic Brooklyn brownstone only to be tormented by the most peculiar set of neighbors to ever vex the borough. Sure it’s built upon the gateway to Hell, but given the state of real estate today, it might be worth the risk. (We talked a bit about this film in our Ghost Stories of Brooklyn podcast.)

8 Wolfen (1981)

A murder mystery in early 80s New York City that uses both recognizable landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and the rubble of the Lower East Side to great chilling effect.

Something very wolf-like is killing people in gruesome ways, from Battery Park to the Central Park Zoo. There are literally wolves on Wall Street! There are also some definite cringe-worthy moments (using Native American mythology in the most trivial way) but seeing New York as an apocalyptic landscape is eye-opening. Bonus points for the bloody nod to New Amsterdam.

7 House of Wax (1953)

A rich and campy celebration of the city’s once ubiquitous wax museum scene — in particular a glorious nod to the Eden Musée — in a morbid mystery along the dark streets of turn-of-the-century New York. Vincent Price is at his very best as a sculptor with a dark method of creating new exhibitions.

6 Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The world of high-fashion New York, set to soundtrack of disco and Barbra Streisand, is the backdrop for this serial killer thriller starring Faye Dunaway as an extremely macabre photographer who begins seeing horrifying visions. Absurd and sometimes silly, the film nonetheless features an exquisite look at 1970s SoHo. We loved it so much that we recorded a Bowery Boys Movie Club about it.

5 Dark Water (2005)

And now we turn to Roosevelt Island and a remake of a Japanese film, made during the height of the Western fascination with Japanese horror. (Think Ring; in fact Dark Water is a variation on a short story by Koji Suzuki, author of Ring.) Here Jennifer Connelly fights back against a leaky ceiling — haunted, of course — and a ghostly child. I kept wanting the movie to reach back further into the island’s dark history but it’s a fun, little jump-scare fest regardless.

4 Sisters (1972)

Brian De Palma in Staten Island! Plus a very troubled Margot Kidder playing a fashion model and, well, something more. This strange little indie artifact is the first of many tributes to Alfred Hitchcock in De Palma’s career, a murder mystery and a psychosexual terror that may permanently change the way you see the neighborhood of St. George.

From the Rialto Theater premiere in New York, December 1942

3 Cat People

This sinister creeper actually has very little violence or gore, and it’s not even filmed in New York! But director Jacques Tourneur manages to turn Fifth Avenue interiors into shadowy horror landscapes and the brilliant Simone Simon perfectly embodies a glamorous international socialite who might also be the original catwoman. Central Park Zoo is the scene of much of the melodrama but the most terrifying scene is an effective trick of light-and-shadow at an apartment building swimming pool.

2 The Hunger

So dramatic, pretentious and beautiful. Two New Wave vampires (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie) hit the town looking for new victims and eternal youth. When Bowie discovers the downsides of making an evil, immortal pact with the undead, Deneuve turns to Susan Sarandon as her new unholy companion.

Filled with so much eyeliner and a great many shoulder pads, this sexy horror melodrama spawned a million baby goths and still stands as an LGBT midnight classic. It also makes a perfect double feature with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, both movies a celebration of New York City after dark.

BOB WILLOUGHBY/MPTV IMAGES/REEL ART PRESS

1 Rosemary’s Baby

This is the ultimate marriage of story and location and essentially a horror movie about nosy neighbors and a co-op board. You’re certainly familiar with the story — a young woman (Mia Farrow) becomes impregnated under mysterious circumstances in her tony new home at the Dakota Apartments. But even if you don’t care for horror (or for director Roman Polanski), watch it just for the New York City locations, an embodiment of both the chic and unusual.

Also I want you to watch this movie knowing that Dakota resident Lauren Bacall, friends with producer William Castle, was often watching them film the movie here.

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Mysterious Stories Podcasts

Haunted Landmarks of New York : Tourist Terrors in the Big Apple

PODCAST It’s the ninth annual Bowery Boys ghost stories podcast, our seasonal twist on history, focusing on famous tales of the weird and the disturbing at some of New York’s most recognizable locations.

Don’t be frightened! We’re here to guide you through the back alleys … OF TERROR!

In this installment, we take a look at the spectral lore behind some of New York City’s most famous landmarks, buildings with great reputations as iconic architectural marvels and locations for great creativity.

But they’re also filled with ghost stories:

Who are the mysterious sisters in colorful outerwear skating on the icy pond in Central Park? And why are there so many uninvited guests at the Dakota Apartments, one of the first and finest buildings on the Upper West Side?

Meanwhile, at the Chelsea Hotel, all the intense creativity that is associated with this great and important location seems to have left an imprint of the afterworld upon its hallways.

Over at Grand Central Terminal, the Campbell Apartment serves up some cocktails — and a few unnatural encounters with Jazz Age spirits.

Finally, on the Brooklyn Bridge, a tragedy during its construction has left its shadow upon the modern tourist attraction. Who’s that up ahead on the pedestrian pathway?

A little spooky fun — mixed with a lot of interesting history — and a few cheesy sound effects!

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every two weeks. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

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Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you’d like to help out, there are five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.

We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far. And the best is yet to come!

Two women in fashionable skating garments 1889. Perhaps similar to the ensembles worn by Janet and Rosette Van Der Voort during their ghostly figure eights in Central Park.

New York Public Library
New York Public Library

 

A famous image of the Dakota Apartment — all alone on the Upper West Side landscape — with skaters enjoying the frozen pond on a cold winter’s day.
 The_Dakota_1880s

The Dakota photographed in 1890/

Courtesy New York Public Library
Courtesy New York Public Library

 

A haunting illustration by Eliza Greatorex from 1885 showing “The Dakota behind a rock at 72nd Street and Bloomingdale Road.”

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Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

 

The Chelsea Hotel in 1903, one of the premier apartment houses in New York City which eventually became a destination (both short and long-term) for the city’s artistic circles. It also attracted its share of eccentric and even disturbed individuals over the decades.

Internet Book Archvies
Internet Book Archvies

Oh what these floors have seen! The Chelsea in 1936.

Courtesy Berenice Abbott
Courtesy Berenice Abbott

The interiors of the Campbell Apartment, back when it was an actual office. Are the ghosts of former party guests still enjoying the room’s luxurious trappings? More information at this blog post at the Museum of the City of New York. All photos, taking in 1923, by the Wurts Brothers.

Courtesy Museum of City of New York
Courtesy Museum of City of New York

 

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Courtesy Museum of City of New York

 

Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

Workers upon the Brooklyn Bridge, a dangerous work environment where dozens of men were injured over the course of its construction.

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Construction of the approach to the bridge on the New  York side.

MNY146544
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

 

From the New York Times article regarding the unfortunate tragedy on the Brooklyn Bridge. Read the whole article here.

Courtesy New York Times
Courtesy New York Times

The scene at the bridge a few months after the accident — October 1878.

Courtesy New York Times
Courtesy New York Times

 

The picture at top is a reversed negative of the Methodist publishing and mission buildings, corner of Broadway and 11th Street, New York. [source]

Jack Finney’s ‘Time And Again’, preservation by sci-fi

The Dakota Apartment circa the 1890s: If you arranged everything just right, could you go back to it?

The writer Jack Finney, who was born a hundred years ago this week, on October 2, 1911, turned the Dakota Apartments into a time machine in his 1970 novel ‘Time And Again’. He inspired a legion of New York City history lovers (including myself) and a simple (if scientifically absurd) way of traveling in time, technically obtainable by anybody with adroit attention to detail.

Finney was hardly a New York literary figure of note. Born in Wisconsin, Finney moved to New York in the 1940s to work in advertising but detoured in to a successful short-story writer. He had already moved from New York in 1954 when a set of his serialized stories were compiled for the novel The Body Snatchers, which inspired the classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its many derivatives.

Time travel and New York were common themes in his work. In the 1950 tale ‘The Third Level’, a man finds a mysterious concourse at Grand Central Terminal and a train that carries him to the year 1894. Almost two decades later he wrote ‘The Woodrow Wilson Dime’ about a bored advertising executive who enters an alternate New York universe (imagine ‘Mad Men’ as a science fiction.)

But Time And Again, first published in 1970, was his greatest success, a time-shifting novel short on scientific rationale, but large in nostalgia and architectural romance. The plot involves a curious scientific experiment that delivers a man back to the date January 21, 1882, to locate the sender of a mysterious letter that foretells “the destruction by fire of the entire World.”

The key to the novel’s success were its illustrations and photographic reproductions. Pick up an old copy today and you’ll wonder why the smudged, sometimes darkened reprinted photographs would excite anyone. When I first picked it up, probably twenty years ago, that was part of the allure. The book itself had a creaky, dated presentation and a wide-open earnestness about it. It was ideal for burgeoning history lovers, never lecturing its readers. You felt you were joining Finney himself as he excitedly flipped through a stack of old photographs and imagined a reason for stepping into the images.

Perhaps that’s because the science fiction behind it almost blushingly simplistic. Essentially, anyone can go back in time. All you have to do is recreate a situation exactly as it might have been at a selected date, then hypnotize yourself into thinking it into reality.

For this reason, the Dakota Apartments are chosen for the time experiment. Finney certainly chose the location due to the building’s pristine, unchanged condition. (Meanwhile, as he wrote, Roman Polanski would film ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ here, placing the structure into a far darker fantasy context.)

“We know exactly when all the apartments facing the park have stood empty, and for how long,” proclaims a scientist. “Picture one of those upper apartmenets standing empty for two months in the summer of 1894. As it did. Picture our arraging — as we are — to sublet that very apartment for those identical months during the coming summer….I believe it may be possible this summer, just barely possible, you understand, for a man to walk out of that unchanged apartment and into that other summer.”

Simply by bringing a structure and its surroundings into physical replica of the past can one actually get there. Keep in mind when this was written. Pennsylvania Station had been destroyed seven years before the publication of ‘Time And Again’. The New York Landmark Preservation Commision was but a few years old. People were beginning to fight for their neighborhoods and protect aging city relics.

‘Time And Again’ was a manifesto for preservation. In essense, keeping an area locked in a certain place in history created some kind of metaphysical bridge. Or, more easily put, magic.

Having returned to 1882, the main character wanders the city and marvels in wonder. His adventures take him the offices of the New York World, the old City Hall Post Office and Gramercy Park.. The plot, involving jealous lovers and blackmail, incorporates actual historical detail into the adventure, although not in anyway one would consider subtle. For instance, my favorite detail of the book is easily the disembodied arm of the Statue of Liberty, sitting in Madison Square Park years before it was attached its body.

‘Time And Again’ is written with awe while keeping a certain distance. (Finney was no historian.) The story takes place within a snowglobe of New York more than an actual depiction of it. In other words, there are no visits to Five Points or the Lower East Side, for that matter. Later books, like Caleb Carr’s ‘The Alienist’, would take a more technical, tour-guide approach to its descriptions. ‘Time And Again’ is simple in its tintype illustration of old New York but leaving someting to the imagination makes it an inspiring read, even today.

By the way, Finney wrote a sequel called From Time To Time that was published in 1996, a year after his death. The book takes place in 1911, the year of Finney’s birth.

Top picture courtesy NYPL

NYC NOIR: “He has his father’s eyes!”


The Film Forum is in the midst of their five week NYC Noir screening series, featuring some of the best thrillers, mysteries and action films set on the streets of the city. In this blog every Thursday of the series, we’ll feature a bit about one of the films, and encourage you to go check out some of these classic flicks. Past entries of this series can be found here. Showtimes and other movies in the series can be found at the Film Forum’s website.

And killing two birds with one stone — as its also the topic of this week’s podcast — this week we feature a disturbing supernatural thriller Rosemary’s Baby and its primary setting, the Dakota Apartments, located at Central Park West and 72nd Street.

First of all, to correct a slip of the tongue from the podcast. No film has ever been shot in the interior of the Dakota. The exterior has been used in several films, most recently in Vanilla Sky, which may have given Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes the idea to buy a place there. The Dakota was first used in the 1949 Joseph Mankiewicz (All About Eve) directed film noir House of Strangers with Edward G Robinson. It’s safe to say that the Dakota is a perfect place for film noir.

Here are stars Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes just inside the beautiful gated entry of the Dakota. When it was built in the 1880s, horse-drawn carriages rode through the gate to let out their passengers, then parked in the stables nearby. The center of the courtyard features a fountain, which greeted residents before they climbed up one of four seperate staircases to their homes.

By the way, it was while filming at the Dakota that Mia’s husband Frank Sinatra served her divorce papers. Tacky.

The Dakota is believed to have gotten its name from the preferences of developer Edward Clark’s towards the names of new American states (which represented ‘new money’). Others stories suggest that at the time of its construction, the new building was so far north that it would have been like visiting ‘the Dakota territories’. From this picture, that seems plausible:

The Dakota was host to Manhattan’s artistic elite, the home of famous actors, writers and composers. According to the book “Upper West Side Story, a History and Guide” “The early tenants included the piano manufacturer Theodor Steinway and his friend the music publisher Gustave Schirmer, who liked to fill his salon with such brilliant guests as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Herman Melville and Peter Ilyich Tchaikowsky, who came to town in 1891 to donduct the opening night concert at Carnegie Hall.” Latter day tenants included Paul Simon, Connie Chung and Maury Povich, and of course the Dakota’s most famous tenants, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

After Lennon’s murder in front of the Dakota — not far really from the grisly fake murder in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ — the portion of Central Park nearest to the building was christened Strawberry Fields, and mural made of tiles from Pompeii was constructed in honor of the musician. The place has taken on a general purpose of celebrations and mournful gatherings: you’ll find people congregated there for the birthdays of living Beatles, the anniversary of Lennon’s death and even 9/11 memorials.

“Rosemary’s Baby” was filmed in other locations throughout the city, including stretches of Park Avenue above 42nd Street, the Time Life Building, and Tiffany’s. Here’s Polanski with Farrow rehearsing a scene: