asylum architecture
5 titles
Horror films set in asylums and psychiatric hospitals, and the real buildings they were filmed in.
The oldest film here has no real building. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Francis recalls the horrible experiences he and his fiancée went through, including a visit to an exhibit where a mysterious doctor wakes a sleepwalker. It was shot in a small studio, with the town painted on canvas, the walls and doors set out of square and shadows painted onto the sets, to make it look like a nightmare.
The next film borrowed a building that was never a hospital. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), a psychiatrist helps teenagers at a mental hospital fight Freddy Krueger, who attacks them in their dreams. From outside, that hospital is Royce Hall, the concert hall at UCLA, built in 1929 in the Lombard Romanesque style.
The other three were real hospitals. Session 9 (2001) was shot at Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts, and it is about a crew cleaning asbestos out of an abandoned mental hospital whose horrific past seems to be coming back. Danvers was built in the Gothic Revival style to the Kirkbride Plan, which the Philadelphia doctor Thomas Story Kirkbride published in 1854. He staggered the wings so each got sunlight and fresh air, with landscaped grounds around them, because he believed the building itself helped treat the patient. Danvers opened in 1878 and closed in 1992, and most of it was torn down from 2006.
In Shutter Island (2010), U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates a patient's disappearance from a hospital for the criminally insane. Scenes were shot at Medfield State Hospital, which opened fourteen years after Danvers as a campus of cottages where patients lived in small groups, in a mix of Greek Revival, Queen Anne and Beaux Arts styles.
Grave Encounters (2011) follows a ghost-hunting TV crew who lock themselves in an abandoned psychiatric hospital for the night and find themselves lost in endless hallways. The newest film here was shot at Riverview in Coquitlam, British Columbia, a campus of large brick buildings that opened in 1913 and closed in 2012.
