Transforming Locations Into Characters
How to Personify the Locations of Your Story
One time I was at a screenwriting meetup and this very interesting man shared a script for us to critique. Usually, we read shorts that fit into one particular genre or another, but this one completely threw us off. Literally, it was one character walking around and admiring various parts of the city. That was it. End of story.
I didn’t have any notes because what could I have critiqued? It wasn’t poorly written. It was just…Nothing. Or so, it seemed. Curious, we inquired about the story’s theme and his response was, “Oh, there isn’t a theme. This is a derive.” Now we were even more puzzled.
Apparently derive is French for, “drift” and is really just a philosophical experience people seek out in an unplanned journey through a landscape or some sort of urban environment by dropping their everyday relations with the world and letting themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find.
In other words, some people like to walk around with a camera and experience interesting locations. It sounds pointless, but it’s actually a fascinating way to study how environments shape our behaviors and emotions because it forces you to focus on the space itself and how it connects to the way we feel.
I was too lazy to film a derive, but thought it would be interesting to apply this mindset while studying backgrounds in my favorite movies. And in doing this, I found that a lot of them were adding elements to personify their locations in ways that reflected the overall, “feel” of the movie. It made me wonder…How did they manage to turn a location into a meaningful character?
Well, after careful examination of God knows how many movies, I found three common strategies that I’d like to share, which will hopefully shed some clarity on how to do this as it’s not often discussed, let alone apparent.
Create An Atmosphere That Evokes a Personality
A location’s atmosphere is like a first impression based on how someone presents themselves. We judge books by their covers all the time because we have an innate desire to figure out our surroundings as quickly as possible in order to avoid danger. And the quickest way to do this is to use past experiences (i.e. movies we watched, personal experiences, etc.) to draw immediate conclusions, whether they’re true or not.
This is profiling, which can undoubtedly make an ass out of a lot of people. But as writers, you can take advantage of this human flaw and feature to design your locations in a way that evokes its “personality” because just as much as we profile people, we also profile locations. That means you can and should use design, lighting, and tone to give your audience an impression of your location’s character.
Take the movie, Event Horizon, a very powerful but overlooked sci-fi horror from 1997. The story takes place on a ghost ship that disappeared seven years ago while conducting an experiment for faster-than-light travel. It follows a salvage crew tasked with visiting the ship that suddenly reappeared outside of Neptune. What’s particularly notable about this story is how the location was presented.
The exterior showed a long and massive, brutalist-inspired ship that was rough with all sorts of struts hanging off of it, leading it to resemble a kind of metallic space dragon. It was certainly not inviting like the USS Enterprise, which was smoother and more circular in design.
When the crew finally boarded the ship, it was made even clearer how hostile it was. The place was cold, dark, and empty with tools and other personal articles floating around as if a huge struggle had taken place. The mid-section showed a long metallic hallway with ribs along the edges as if they were walking inside of a snake.
The entrance to the gravity drive required them to walk through a centrifuge that resembled a meat grinder.
And in the navigation bridge, an absolute gore fest was caked all over the wall, indicating that something very bad had happened.
The creators made it this way, specifically, because the main antagonist of the movie is the ship, itself. That is the monster and therefore, they needed to create an atmosphere that could give this first impression of the location.
The personification of locations is very evident in horror movies with haunted houses, or in this case, a haunted spaceship. But you can also see this in other genres. For instance, in the comedy movie Clerks, the story more-or-less takes place in one location, the Quick Stop, which is cluttered, homely, and broken down.
The location evoked the traits of a friend who’s fun, off-beat, and dysfunctional, but also someone who is impeding growth. That was done intentionally.
Sure, using a mom-and-pop location also kept the cost low, but still. They could have made the place cleaner and more slick but chose the opposite since they wanted the location to be an antagonist to Daunte, a man who feels stuck trying to figure out what to do with his life.
That’s why he was drawn to the bullshit that came with the store, which prevented him from living his life throughout the movie. The store was his toxic friend that he needed to sever ties with but couldn’t because they’d just been together for too long. This is satisfyingly parallel to the relationship between Daunte and Randall. That’s why Kevin Smith did this because he wanted to use the location as a character, in and of itself, to accentuate this dynamic.
Now, what’s really cool about personifying a location is that you can also design them to misdirect people. In The Shining, we see a family move into a massive fancy resort because the father got a job as a caretaker for the winter. Unlike a creepy haunted house, this place was clean, well-organized, and very inviting, albeit, old.
But over time a bunch of scary things begin happening, and suddenly that beautiful resort starts to resemble a dangerous serial killer. The squeaky-clean design of the place takes on an ominous tone as the juxtaposition between the aesthetics and the sinister things taking place sends us mixed messages. It fosters a real sense of unease, just as how someone might feel upon realizing that they’re sitting next to Ted Bundy. You get this feeling of, “I don’t know what this place is going to do.”, which is powerful.
So treat the design of your locations like you treat the design of your characters. Every choice should say something that relates back to the story, whether you’re trying to personify the space or not. But what if you’re writing a story that practically requires you to turn your location into a character? How do you move beyond the atmospheric tone?
Give Your Location An Unforgettable “Face”
Think back to 2020 when everyone was wearing masks and all you could see were eyes. There were a lot of awkward moments because we had a hard time reading people’s faces, which is a crucial feature for understanding one another. That’s part of the reason why flame wars exist online because we never see facial expressions, making it harder to “figure someone out”.
In a real way, the face is like the name tag of our identity and feelings. Without one, we don’t get the full picture. So when personifying a location, you should provide it with a central feature that’s unique and can act like the “face” of the place.
One of the best examples of this is from the classic movie, Amityville Horror, made in 1979. I remember browsing through Blockbuster when I was a kid and stumbling across the movie cover.
Before I even watched it I was terrified just because of the windows at the top of the house, which made it look like a giant pair of demonic eyes staring down at you. They could have picked a house with any design, but it had to be this one specifically because those windows made the place feel strange and off-beat.
It felt a lot like running into that creepy person who hasn’t done anything to warrant fear, but somehow, based on the body language, the expressions, the eyes, and so on you feel this eerie sense of dread that can’t be shaken off. The director knew that this addition to the film would make it a memorable piece and it certainly did because many still remember the movie to this day. The “eyes of the house” seared this story into their memory for decades because they looked so terrifying.
Another example of utilizing facial features to strengthen the personification of a location is from the cheesiest most amazing 90s film Kurt Russell had ever done. Forget about Escape from L.A. I’m talking about a little-known movie called, Captain Ron. For those who haven’t seen it, but love watching stupid 90s movies that didn’t age well, watch this comedy because it’s a true masterpiece in this category.
What’s really fascinating is the boat that was used in this story. Specifically its features at the stern. The top shows a broken sail with old palm leaves lying on top of it. Below the railing you see the word “Wanderer” arched in big lettering. And below that are a set of three windows slightly arched along with a pair of ribboned placards that form a set of lips. Combined with the windows and words strewn at the top, it appears like a goofy-looking face with a unibrow.
This goes hand-in-hand with Captain Ron and his personality. He’s a laid-back goofball who always gets into trouble. But he’s also an underdog and underestimated when the pressure is on, just like the boat. And just like Captain Ron, this boat has an unforgettable face.
In conjunction with its other features, a soul is born, making it stand out compared to the other perfectly clean white boats in the movie. It’s exactly like Captain Ron when he stands in a crowd. Because of how they designed the ship and its “face”, it made us feel like they were riding on something more than just an inanimate object. It was as if it were some fantasy creature instead of a boat.
So face and aesthetic features seem to be critical when it comes to personifying a location. But there’s still one missing ingredient.
Have Your Location Interact With the Characters and Vise-Versa
Without this, you don’t have a location resembling a character. You just have a mannequin. That’s why you need your location to respond to the characters in a way that feels right for your particular story.
Going back to the example from Event Horizon, if you watch the movie you’ll see many instances where the ship responds to the characters, like when the gravity drive opens in the beginning, pulling one of the characters into the gateway. This leads to a massive shockwave that damages their ship.
Or when all the characters begin to hallucinate their deeply personal pasts, which forces them to confront their inner demons. Then, of course, there are all the classic scary noises and mechanical failures that occur throughout the film, which undoubtedly lead to a bunch of jumpy scenes.
In the movie, Captain Ron, we see a similar strategy, only instead of creepy interactions, it’s funny slapstick interactions between the characters and the boat. For instance, when the family first encounters the boat the siblings get into an argument leading the sister to push the brother into the water. When the parents find out, the father throws the lifebuoy out to the brother, but as soon as it hits the water, the whole thing sinks.
Then later on, they crank the boat up for the first time, which causes a huge plume of smoke to hit the daughter who happens to be sitting near the exhaust.
Of course, the boat didn’t do anything supernatural like on Event Horizon, but there was still an interaction with the characters that really cemented the boat’s personality as being this “unreliable fuckup”.
Perhaps one of the best movies that exemplifies this interaction between the characters and a location is from the movie, There Will Be Blood. It mostly takes place at this oil field that was discovered by the main character, Daniel Plainview. Inherently it’s dangerous and uninviting because the place is far out in the middle of the desert, but if Paul Thomas Anderson only made the place look uninviting, then we wouldn’t have gotten this “villainous character” feeling from the place.
This is why at the beginning of the story we see Plainview’s partner getting killed by a wooden structure that collapsed above them while digging a hole to find oil. It’s also why we saw the accident at the rig, which killed another worker. Then there was the incident that made his adopted son deaf, who mind you, was the son of Plainview’s partner who died at the beginning of the story. Even the main character, himself, grows mad to the point of committing murder, twice!
So you see. The location couldn’t just look dangerous. It had to actually be dangerous and lead the main character to go crazy in order to fully evoke the personality of the space, which like all the other examples, reflected the inner parts of the protagonist. If the director simply placed the characters in the location and had a bunch of drama unfold without including the space, then we wouldn’t have felt this personification as intensely, let alone the development of the main character.
Conclusion
There might be more elements that go into personifying a location, but establishing an atmospheric tone, providing a face or a distinct feature within the space that sets it apart, and having the locations interact or respond to the characters in some way, seems to be the main ingredients for pulling this off.
However, it’s important to note that personifying your space isn’t necessary for every story. Movies with multiple locations in ordinary places generally don’t need to do this, though they may still want to consider the atmospheric tone for each spot. The stories that generally focus on giving their space a personality are ones that take place in a single location, particularly horror movies. But as I demonstrated in the examples, you can easily do this in any other genre. Just make sure it fits with your story. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to make it work and add in a bunch of unnecessary elements and scenes that will make your story worse. So be careful!
Anywho, hope this was helpful, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!
Story Prism
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Excellent article thanks!