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As longtime locals and film obsessives, we’ll admit our bias up front: the Bay Area puts on a masterclass in horror atmosphere.
Alongside the postcard views is a landscape engineered for suspense. Thick fog strips visibility to zero without warning. Hilly terrain turns every curve into a blind leap. And hanging over it all is the eerie geography of being at the edge of the continent — on the precipice of the deep, freezing Pacific.
That’s why we put together this list of our favorite scary movies filmed in the Bay Area. Spend spooky season with local thrills you may not know.
The Fog (1980)
Plot summary from IMDB: Local legend tells of a ship lured onto the rocks of Antonio Bay being enveloped by a supernatural cloud as it sank; the myth says that when this mysterious fog returns, the victims will rise up from the depths seeking vengeance.
Why we love it: Peep scenic North Bay locations like Stinson Beach and Point Reyes in this oft-overlooked John Carpenter film made on the heels of his smash hit, Halloween. In the film, the Point Reyes Lighthouse was chosen as the headquarters of K.A.B. radio, a central location in the film. It happens to be one of the windiest and foggiest places in North America — so the ambiance for this horror film was ready-made.
“It’s a cozy classic as well,” KQED’s Carly Severn said. “It’s just so evocative of the fall to me. I always regarded this movie as an oddball curio, but now it’s become one of my very favorite horror movies.”
Plus, we love to see our eternal weather pattern cast in a spooky light.
“Fog has gotten too cute,” said Peter Hartlaub, culture critic with the San Francisco Chronicle. “There’s Karl the Fog. We’re wearing all these little foggy T-shirts. Fog should be horrifying. Bring horrifying fog back.”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Plot summary from IMDB: When strange seeds drift to Earth from space, mysterious pods begin to grow and invade San Francisco, replicating the city’s residents one body at a time.
Why we love it: If you want a horror film with a strong sense of San Francisco, this one is tough to beat. “One of the best uses of locations,” Hartlaub said. “City Hall is involved. The waterfront’s involved. The Civic Center. The Painted Ladies.”
Nearly every scene feels like San Francisco — even the interior shots. Plus, the old-school special effects are straight up creepy in a way CGI just can’t touch.
“I’ve watched it probably 10 times. I think it’s one of the best San Francisco films, maybe the most underrated,” Hartlaub said.
The Birds (1963)
Plot summary from IMDB: A wealthy San Francisco socialite follows a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn toward the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people.
Why we love it: Look, it just doesn’t get more “classic Bay Area horror film” than The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock is one of cinema’s greatest, and he delivers in this nature-strikes-back film. The movie starts in Union Square in downtown San Francisco, but spends most of its time in the North Bay.
“Tippi Hedren’s costumes are just a star in this because she’s wearing the same green blazer and green pencil skirt,” Hartlaub said. “She falls for a guy, follows him out to Bodega Bay with a bird and then the rest of the birds in the world turn on them.”
The Lost Boys (1987)
Plot summary from IMDB: When a recently divorced mother and her two teenage boys move to a coastal town to stay with her father, it doesn’t take long for the brothers to realize the area is a haven for something much more sinister than party-going surfers.
Why we love it: Santa Cruz may technically be beyond the nine-county Bay Area, but spiritually it feels the part. The Santa Cruz Boardwalk and surrounding area are core to the film and help underscore the film’s 1980s teenage nostalgia. Atlantis Fantasyworld Comic Book Shop plays a central role, too. Every once in a while they’ll show it on the beach in Santa Cruz, which is absolutely the most primo way to watch it.
“I feel like the torture of being young forever is the horror in this film. The torture of being a teenager forever, the torture not fitting in in a new town,” Hartlaub said. “There’s cliques, there’s peer pressure, there’s Chinese food that turns into maggots.”
Chilling!
Zodiac (2007)
Plot summary from IMDB: Between 1968 and 1983, a San Francisco cartoonist becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified individual who terrorizes Northern California with a killing spree.
Why we love it: It’s not just one of the best scary movies set in the Bay Area; we’d argue it’s one of the best Bay Area movies, period. It should be on anybody’s watch list who has moved to San Francisco because it’s based on a true story — so you’ll learn some local history too!
In the film, you’ll spot familiar sites like Original Joe’s, San Francisco City Hall, Lake Berryessa and ACT Theatre. The San Francisco Chronicle newsroom scenes were shot on a soundstage in Hollywood, but the set is so darn close to reality, we’ll count it.
“How the movie manages the passage of time is so interesting,” Severn said. “Because that’s the whole point, that time keeps slipping away from these people that are investigating the Zodiac murders.”
Though decades have passed since the real-life murders took place, The San Francisco Chronicle still has a reporter assigned to updates on the Zodiac killer.
“It’s not their full-time job, but the Zodiac is always somebody’s job,” Hartlaub said. “It was [reporter] Kevin Fagan’s for decades, and he thinks that this thing could get solved. I mean, as DNA technology gets better, the tips keep coming in … it’s not over.”
Pacific Heights (1990)
Plot summary from IMDB: Drake and Patty purchase a San Francisco Victorian hoping to fund their future through rental income. Their stability collapses when Carter Hayes occupies the studio, weaponizing tenant laws to drain their finances and sanity.
Why we love it: OK, this film should have been called “Potrero Hill” because that’s where it was nearly entirely filmed. “And it dares to suggest that the real monster is tenant rights laws,” Hartlaub said. But we’ll overlook both those details because there are so many other things to love about this film.
Director John Schlesinger clearly drew inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Vertigo because there are callbacks throughout the film — including casting Melanie Griffith, the daughter of The Birds’ star Tippi Hedren. And Hedren makes a brief wordless cameo herself.
“Much like David Fincher’s The Game, it takes place right before the city really shifted from the old money to the tech money,” Hartlaub said. “So you get this slice of the city that kind of isn’t totally there anymore.”
Burnt Offerings (1976)
Plot summary from IMDB: A family moves into a large old mansion in the countryside which seems to have a mysterious and sinister power over its new residents.
Why we love it: It was filmed in and around the Dunsmuir House in the Oakland Hills, a large neoclassical mansion that dates back to 1899. The house is a gem of real estate in the Bay Area in many ways, though it has fallen into disrepair in recent decades. Grassroots efforts are underway to try to urge the City of Oakland to take action.
Burnt Offerings is a scary house movie, but not in the haunted sense you might expect. There are no ghosts, creaking doors or jump scares. This film is all about the sinister way the people who live inside the house start acting.
“In the first five or 10 minutes, they set up that this family loves each other; they banter with each other,” Severn said. “And then seeing how the house starts to affect them. It just kind of gets under your skin.”
This one also has an awesome cast, including Oliver Reed and Bette Davis in her final role.
Contagion (2011)
Plot summary from IMDB: Healthcare professionals, government officials and everyday people find themselves in the midst of a pandemic as the CDC works to find a cure.
Why we love it: San Francisco features heavily in this thriller that had us all wondering during the COVID-19 pandemic: “Did they know this was coming?” Locals will spot scenes set in North Beach, outside Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and inside Candlestick Park (RIP!).
This recommendation came from Bay Curious listener Kai Ando, who had this to say about it: “Because I watched it during the COVID pandemic and because it was set in the Bay … I think it stuck with me pretty deeply and even afterwards.”
Did we leave out one of your favorites? Let us know by emailing [email protected].
Episode transcript
Olivia Allen-Price: If you’ve been following Bay Curious over the years, you may have detected by now that Halloween is my favorite holiday, and it’s not even close. I think part of my obsession is the changing of the season, of course, from the go-go-go of summer to the, you know, cup of tea vibes we get in early fall. And I feel like during trick-or-treating, the streets of our neighborhoods come alive like no other time of year, all packed with excited kids, adults laughing with each other. And teenagers in the shadows doing whatever it is teenagers do. And of course, the costumes. Now I love an elaborate something that takes weeks of planning, multiple trips to the craft store and several late nights to come together. But to get into the spirit this year, I am feeling called to the couch. It’s been a busy summer and I’m ready to just sit and chill a little bit and watch some scary movies. As is my inclination, perhaps obsession, I figure I may as well make them Bay Area scary movies.
So as I was creating my watch list, I decided to call my two most trusted friends when it comes to all things Bay Area film and ask them, “What should we be watching this spooky season?” So here to offer their top recommendations are Carly Severn, KQED’s senior editor of Audience News. Hey, Carly.
Carly Severn: Hello Olivia, the calls are coming from inside the house.
Olivia Allen-Price: Ahhh, they are. Spoiler alert, we’re all sitting around one table. And Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle’s Culture Critic. Welcome, Peter.
Peter Hartlaub: I am so glad to be back with you all.
Olivia Allen-Price: Yay! I’m glad you’re saying ‘glad to be back’ because this is getting the gang back together because a few years ago, this same trio, we made an episode around Christmas time with your recommendations for Bay Area movies at the request of a listener, but today we’re back with a spooky twist on the theme and I couldn’t be more excited.
Carly Severn: Oh we’re like the killer that just won’t die.
Olivia Allen-Price: Before we get into your recs, I want to establish your credentials as people who know scary things. So I’ve got a quick list of warm up questions, and I’m looking for quick and punchy answers here. Are you ready?
Carly Severn: Ready.
Peter Hartlaub: I’m ready.
Olivia Allen-Price: All right, Carly, starting with you. Best Halloween candy?
Carly Severn: Mini Twix or Mini Snickers, no question.
Olivia Allen-Price: Mini?
Carly Severn: I love a little fun size because then you can eat 5,000 of them.
Olivia Allen-Price: Wonderful. Peter, favorite Halloween candy?
Peter Hartlaub: Fun-size Heath bar. And here’s the thing, the people giving away the full-size candy bar often are so wealthy you have to walk way up the path and you’re getting less candy overall so hot tip the fun size is OK.
Olivia Allen-Price: All right, what about worst Halloween candy? What do you get and you just groan?
Carly Severn: What’s that corn thing?
Olivia Allen-Price: Candy corn?
Carly Severn: Yeah. Candy corn, yeah. Horrible. Get it off the planet.
Olivia Allen-Price: Oh my God, I love candy corn. I’m sorry. This recording is over.
Carly Severn: I’ll see myself out.
Peter Hartlaub: This is like black licorice. This is a very, very controversial one. I’m going with those black and orange wrapped up little peanut butter toffee things that always end up in the bottom of your kid’s Halloween bag after you’ve stolen all of the rest of their candy.
Olivia Allen-Price: It’s interesting that toffee shows up in both your favorite and least favorite candies though.
Peter Hartlaub: Yes, there’s good and bad toffee.
Olivia Allen-Price: All right, what about the place in the Bay Area you would be most afraid to spend the night by yourself?
Carly Severn: I had to think about this, because I think there’s some haunted hotel rooms, but I think I’d kind of be into that in a sort of 1408 way. So I decided Golden Gate Park, because the lighting there is not good, and what if I cannot find my way out?
Olivia Allen-Price: OK, so you’re afraid of getting lost?
Carly Severn: I am.
Peter Hartlaub: Peter, what about you? I’m afraid of heights, so the top of Sutro Tower, which in addition to being super scary from a heights point of view, has a haunted elevator going up. I’ve been on it. It’s … we don’t wanna talk about it.
Olivia Allen-Price: All right, and what about … oh, this is my favorite question actually, the favorite costume you’ve ever worn. I’m going to Peter first for this one.
Peter Hartlaub: I made a Gandalf costume for my son that had a light up staff and I loved it so much that I altered it and wore it myself two years later.
Olivia Allen-Price: Nice. How old was he at the time?
Peter Hartlaub: He was seven and didn’t know who Gandalf was. This was strictly performative parenting, but I did have him slamming it on the ground and saying, ‘you shall not pass.’ Really entertaining.
Carly Severn: The parental equivalent of making your kid wear the Ramones t-shirt.
Peter Hartlaub: Very much so, yeah.
Olivia Allen-Price: I feel personally attacked by that. Carly, what about you?
Carly Severn: I made a really good Shelley Duvall from The Shining, but I think a couple of years previous I was Pris, the Daryl Hannah robot character from Blade Runner, and I looked fine, I’m just going to say.
Olivia Allen-Price: Not to humble brag but
Carly Severn: No, no, it’s a long time and you can boast about yourself if it’s a long time ago.
Olivia Allen-Price: What do you think makes the Bay Area such a good background for a horror film?
Peter Hartlaub: I think there are two things that elevate the Bay Area over a lot of other cities. The climate and the topography. And with climate, the fog, what is scarier than that? What could come through the fog? Constantly changing unpredictable weather I think is scarier than being in Los Angeles and oh, it’s 70 degrees again. Topography, you’re going over the hill. What’s gonna be over that hill? It’s kind of, there’s this living element to … Exploring a city and not knowing what’s going to be around the next curve, not knowing what’s gonna be over the next hill and I think those two things sort of like become characters in some of these films that we’re going to discuss today.
Carly Severn: Completely agree. And I think a lot about this patch of the West Coast as well, that it can have that end of the line feeling. You have gone as far west as you can and now there is just a great expanse of nothing, the Pacific Ocean. There’s also a history as well. The Golden State literally built on wealth accumulated during the gold rush. And you always wonder, like, what’s behind that? Too good to be true. What are the real stories behind that, what are the darker hidden histories behind that? And that’s something that- I think a lot of Bay Area-set horror movies, either directly or indirectly, are also wrestling.
Music transition
Olivia Allen-Price: So let’s get onto the main business for today, your scary movie recommendations. Now, I had each of you come with three recommendations, and then we also have one from a Bay Curious listener who responded to a call out. So let us delay no longer and get to it. Peter, I’m gonna start with you. What is the first movie you would recommend?
Peter Hartlaub: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. So The Birds is a 1963 film starring Tippi Hedren as a little bit of a socialite, starts in Union Square at a Union Square pet shop. I’m trying to figure out where it was. I think it’s where the Disney store is now. Tippi Hedren’s costumes are just a star in this because she’s wearing the same green blazer and green kind of pencil skirt, falls for a guy, follows him out to Bodega Bay with a bird and then the rest of the birds in the world turn on them, quickly turns into a horror film.
The Birds clip: I want you to go as quietly as possible. Do not make a sound until I tell you to run. Then run as quickly as you can. Now does everybody understand? Yes, sir. All right, John, you lead the way.
Peter Hartlaub: Where everyone from school children to people in a diner are trying to survive this attack of all the birds in the world.
Carly Severn: All right, Carly, what is your first recommendation? My first recommendation is The Fog by John Carpenter, which is about a town on the Northern California coast that is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary. And 100 years ago, something happened off the waters of this town that the town would rather forget, and the sins of the past come back to haunt them.
The Fog clip: Where’s the fog now? Well, it should be right outside my door now. Well, there’s something different about this fog. Dan, stay away from the door!
Carly Severn: I always kind of regarded this movie as like a kind of oddball curio, but now it’s become one of my very favorite horror movies. It’s absolutely in the yearly rotation. This movie was made on the heels of Halloween, like John Carpenter’s Halloween, so that was a huge success and just was a bit of a whoop when it came out. Everyone was just like, well, scary fog, what’s going on? It is set in the fictional California coastal town of Antonio Bay, but that is actually the Stinson Beach, Point Reyes area. So there is so much wonderful local photography, places that you can just go to and be like, yes, one-to-one, I match that with the fog. The lighthouse is probably the one that everyone thinks about automatically. It’s called Spivey Point in the movie, but that’s actually the Point Reyes lighthouse. And there’s also incredible shots of Point Reyes station in Olayma. And there was a point I love in the movie when there’s just been a big scare in a morgue. And night starts to fall and you’re like, oh no, it’s all gonna kick off. And as kind of a bridge into the nightfall, there are these gorgeous dusky shots of like that part of the coastline, there’s like forests, it’s just incredible.
Peter Hartlaub: And horrifying. I’m always shocked that this movie isn’t mentioned more among carpenters, oeuvres, among horror movies. It’s scary, and it’s local.
Carly Severn: It’s so scary and it’s a cozy classic as well, it’s just so evocative of the fall to me and ugh.
Peter Hartlaub: Fog has gotten too cute. We’ve got Carl the Fog, we’re like wearing all these little foggy t-shirts. Fog should be horrifying. Bring horrifying fog back.
Carly Severn: What a movie, everyone should see it.
Olivia Allen-Price: And who doesn’t want to watch fog while you’re curled up under a blanket? Ok, The Fog. Going on the list. Peter, you have another offering for us.
Peter Hartlaub: Yeah, The Lost Boys, 1987.
The Lost Boys clip: You’ll never grow old, Michael. And you’ll never die. Be one of us.
Peter Hartlaub: Joel Schumacher, who really got started with his 80s movies, with St. Elmo’s Fire, two bad Batman movies, and right in between, he kind of reinvented the vampire film to make it kind of a Peter Pan thing, really focused on teenage angst. We’ve got Kiefer Sutherland, we’ve got both Corey’s, Haim and Feldman, and they’re in Santa Cruz. They’re in a small town. New kids in town realize that this town might have some vampires in them, bond with some dorky vampire hunters. Go to the beach boardwalk, go to Atlantis Fantasy World, the comic book store. And I feel like the torture of being young forever is the horror in this film. The torture of a teenager forever, the torture not fitting in in a new town. There’s cliques, there’s peer pressure … Um, there’s a Chinese food that turns into maggots.
Lost Boys clip: Guess first, how about those maggots?
Peter Hartlaub: You Jamie Gertz is the love interest. Just a completely 80s, over the top, fantastic to watch with as many people as possible. Every once in a while, they’ll show it on the beach in Santa Cruz. I think that’s the best time to do it. But I just love this film, and it has aged in this way that Joel Schumacher was an adult in the 80s. He wasn’t a kid, but he really, really seemed to love that teen culture because he really captured it well. And it’s like going back to a place I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to, but, uh, enjoyable film.
Carly Severn: Great music.
Olivia Allen-Price: Excellent music.
Carly Severn: I love it. It’s got that like, the kids have got to take on the vampires because no one else will DNA with Fright Night as well, which is nice.
Olivia Allen-Price: So you can pick your monster and the era. Birds in the 60s. Fog in the 70s/80s era. Or Vampires in the 1980s…
What about the 90s? We got a movie recommendation from a listener slash KQED colleague that fits the bill … Let’s hear it.
Gabe Meline: Hey, it’s Gabe Meline, senior editor of Arts and Culture at KQED. Let’s talk about Scream, the classic high school slasher movie that’s a meta-commentary on every other horror movie before it. Scream was filmed in the North Bay. Healdsburg, Sonoma, Tomales, and what I like about it, also filmed in my hometown of Santa Rosa. In fact, in the end credits, you will see a curious note. It reads, no thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa City School District Governing Board. That’s because director Wes Craven originally had an agreement to shoot the high school scenes at Santa Rosa High School. That is, until pearl-clutching parents caught word that a horror movie was being filmed at their kid’s school, and they got the ear of the school board, who called for a delay in filming. Wes Cravin threatened to, quote, sue their asses, a quote that appeared on the front page of the local paper, and he went out to Sonoma to film the high-school scenes at the Sonoma Community Center. Every time that credit comes up, students from Santa Rosa High School always roll their eyes and laugh to themselves about what could have been.
Olivia Allen-Price: We will be back in just a minute with more recommendations from Carly Severn and Peter Hartlaub, but first a brief intermission. Stay with us.
We’re back talking scary Bay Area movies. One listener, Kai Ando from Foster City, had this recommendation for us…
Kai Ando: 2011’s Contagion it’s the movie I think a lot of us saw during the COVID pandemic because of the eerie similarities that the plot had with the reality that we were all living in during
Contagion Clip: pandemic. The average person touches their face three to five times every waking minute. In between, we’re touching doorknobs, water fountains, and each other.
Kai Ando: Jude Law’s character lives in San Francisco as a conspiracy theorist, I believe, who spreads misinformation and panic. I specifically remember his character walking around this trashed barren landscape of a San Francisco street in full hazmat suits.
Olivia Allen-Price: Peter, Carly, any thoughts on Contagion?
Peter Hartlaub: Filmed in the Chronicle newsroom and speaking of hazmat suits, the desk, Benny Evangelista’s desk was specifically chosen because it was so messy, which is very much, usually in journalism movies I get angry because everybody’s desks are too clean, but they leaned into it. Our newsroom is as messy as those streets when the garbage stops getting collected. Great film.
Carly Severn: Contagion, good movie, it’s Stephen Soderbergh, right?
Peter Hartlaub: Stephen Soderbergh, you have to have an experienced director, and spoiler for a 2011 movie, kill Gwyneth Paltrow off in like the first 12 seconds.
Carly Severn: That’s their psycho moment as well, where it’s like, oh, you thought Gwyneth was going to be in this movie? Guess again.
Peter Hartlaub: Yeah, I guess again.
Olivia Allen-Price: We just need to hear it for the publicity.
Carly Severn: My next movie I want to recommend is called Burnt Offerings, which is 1976, and it is filmed in and around the Dunsmuir House in the Oakland Hills, which a big old neoclassical, this sprawling mansion and grounds that was built in I think 1899. And this movie’s great. I’d seen it once, I re-watched it for this and I think it’s genuinely great now. It’s got this killer cast, it’s got Oliver Reed, it has got Karen Black, Bette Davis in I believe her last ever movie role. It is one of those lovely family moves into a clearly quite scary house and stuff starts happening to them. And it’s so upsetting because they set up the family so well in the first five or ten minutes that this family loves each other, they banter with each other. And then seeing what happens and how the house starts to affect them is, it’s, yeah, it just kind of gets under your skin.
Carly Severn: There’s this iconic scene in the house’s pool … where Oliver Reed is playing with his son, but it keeps getting rougher and rougher until he’s basically drowning him. Meanwhile his aunt, Bette Davis’ character, is anxiously watching from land, not quite sure how to intervene.
Burnt Offerings clip: All right now, you two. That’s quite enough.
Carly Severn: It’s not a haunted house movie, there’s no possessions, there is no, did you hear that sound? A lot of it is filmed in the daylight. It’s all about the effect that the house has on this family and what it starts making them do and the location itself. It was featured in another classic 1980s horror movie, Phantasm. It’s so evocative the fact that it’s really dilapidated as part of the point when they arrive and the house starts to kind of regenerate themselves as it’s feeding off literally you know the fresh blood of the family. If you haven’t seen it, really check it out. It’s pretty great. Oliver Reed is one big ham sandwich, which is how I like my Oliver Reed. Bette Davis is great and really sparky and what happens to her character is again quite genuinely upsetting. Yeah, this movie rules. Everyone should see it.
Olivia Allen-Price: I should mention here Bay Curious has done an episode on the Dunsmuir House — worth a listen if you want to learn more. Unfortunately right now the house is closed to the public because, quite honestly, it’s in rough shape.
Carly Severn: When I saw the beginning of the movie, when it looks so dilapidated, that’s kind of like where it’s going now, unfortunately. I think a lot of people are sounding the alarm in the local community about this place being allowed to slip into disrepair.
Olivia Allen-Price: All right. Peter, what do you have next for us?
Peter Hartlaub: Pacific Heights, 1990 movie, which I like to call Petrero Hill because not a single frame of it is filmed in Pacific Heights. It’s actually the house in Pacific Heights is about three blocks from where we’re sitting in Potrero Hill. 1990 film that dares to suggest that the real monster is tenant rights laws. Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith are moving into what looks like a fixer upper Victorian in Pacific Heights, a lot of things wrong with that, $750,000 and they’re going to rent a studio and a one bedroom and just try to make the narrow margins of home ownership and San Francisco work.
Olivia Allen-Price: Terrifying
Peter Hartlaub: Terrifying.
Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah my spine is tingling
Peter Hartlaub: Michael Keaton pulls up in a Porsche and just seals himself in a room and just becomes the tenant from hell, cockroaches are involved, multiple identities are involved and Michael Keaton is so good in this. We’ve got to remember this is right after Batman. This is in his Mr. Mom era. He was not doing these, you know villainous roles and kind of what sort of a B movie and he is so good in this. He is so evil. He’s done things like this since, but at the time this was a real shock. And John Schlesinger is the director. He directed Midnight Cowboy Marathon Man. He’s kind of slumming it in this film, but you get the feeling he just wanted to do a Hitchcock film and it feels a little bit like a lost B movie Hitchcock film in all the best ways.
Carly Severn: Do you think casting Melanie Griffith is a nod to that since Tippi Hedren is her mom?
Peter Hartlaub: Oh, yes. And Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith’s mother, has a short cameo in this film that I’m not even sure if it’s credited, but she’s in it very, very briefly. So, no, very clearly this director was a big Hitchcock fan and probably a big The Birds and Vertigo fan because there’s feelings throughout.
Carly Severn: Peter, I’m so glad you brought Pacific Heights because we don’t talk about Pacific Heights enough as a society. It’s such a relic of a specific time. Michael Keaton is my guy. One of my very first crushes, I think, as Batman. And yeah, this movie is just really fun and like very San Francisco centric.
Peter Hartlaub: Much like the game, David Fincher’s The Game, it takes place right before the city really shifted from kind of the old money to the tech money. So you get this slice of the city that kind of isn’t totally there anymore.
Olivia Allen-Price: All right, Carly, well onto your third and final recommendation.
Carly Severn: OK, so I know we discussed this movie on our previous movie podcast. I just have to bring it again. It’s Zodiac. I think it’s the scariest movie ever set and filmed in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. It is based on the true story of the still unsolved Zodiac murders in the 60s and 70s. This movie is just fantastic. I could watch it I think every year for the rest of my life. It was David Fincher. Well, Lake Berryessa scene, which recreates one of the murders, it is one of the very few scenes I just am unable to watch. I will always go and do something else. I will walk away from the screen and go and make like a cup of tea or use the bathroom. I physically cannot watch that scene. And I love my horror movies and that one just gets under my skin. It is too upsetting. And it’s all in broad daylight as well. Just a real example of broad daylight horror. Yeah, and just all these other little locations sprinkled throughout. There’s Geary outside, I think it’s the Tony Rembey Theater, ACT Theater, where the Zodiac Killer hails the cab that he then gets into that takes him to the intersection of Washington and Cherry Streets where another murder takes place. But I got to say my favorite location for this movie is not actually real. It is the gorgeous CGI rendering, the time lapse of the Transamerica pyramid being built to the sound of Marvin Gaye’s inner city blues.
Peter Hartlaub: It’s such a great scene. The visual effects are seamless there. Yeah, I mean, you listen to a song on the Zodiac soundtrack and it brings you back there. That’s a special, special kind of soundtrack.
Carly Severn: How that movie just manages the passage of time as well. Because that’s the whole point, that time keeps slipping away from these people that are investigating the Zodiac murders and eventually just, they run out of time. It’s too late. The chief suspect is dead. Yeah, what a movie. If you haven’t seen Zodiac, just come watch it.
Olivia Allen-Price: And any update on the Zodiac killer?
Peter Hartlaub: I know you guys are still working on it, right? So we have a Zodiac beat writer. It’s not their full-time job, but the Zodiac is always somebody’s job. It was Kevin Fagan’s for decades, and then now it’s been passed on to a couple other people. Kevin thinks that this thing could get solved. I mean, as DNA technology gets better, the tips keep coming in, of course. It’s not over. And people, when they did tours of the 901 Mission Chronicle site, would always say, I wanna see the Zodiac stuff. And my answer was always, it’s an active case. All of the stuff that the Zodiac sent is still at the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. This case is not solved. So, yeah, amazing piece of our history that continues.
Olivia Allen-Price: OK, so we did say at the top you each could bring three, but there was one more that just can’t be left out. Initially we thought we’d leave it out because we talked about it before, but it just can’t be helped…
Peter Hartlaub: Yeah and this would be number one on the list if we hadn’t talked about it before. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is just so stellar. One of the best uses of locations in San Francisco. Terrifying. City Hall is involved. The waterfront’s involved. The Civic Center. Painted Ladies, but you don’t even know that they are the Painted Ladies. It’s one of the ones on the end just a very terrifying film of the city getting taken over, but are you paranoid or is it really happening? And I’ve watched it probably 10 times. I think it’s one of the best San Francisco films, maybe the most underrated.
Olivia Allen-Price: Well, and I love that all these recommendations, because they are set in the Bay Area, to me that makes them more real, more believable somehow, because you’re not just watching something that takes place in an abstract city that you’ve maybe never been to, or you don’t even know what it is, maybe it doesn’t even have a name, but when you’re seeing these places on film that you recognize that you’re been to somehow it makes everything else that’s painted on top of those backgrounds feel more real which is scary.
Carly Severn: Super special to watch as well there’s just something about that like tactility which as a viewer let your brain just goes it just feels great
Olivia Allen-Price: These are some fantastic recommendations I cannot wait to tuck in and watch them. Just to recap, we talked about The Birds, The Fog, Lost Boys, Scream, Contagion, Burnt Offerings, Pacific Heights, Zodiac and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You’ve got 5 weeks until Halloween, how many can you see? Peter Hartlob, Culture Critic with the San Francisco Chronicle. What’s the best way that people can kind of keep up with what you’re doing?
Peter Hartlaub: Subscribe to The Chronicle or whatever station or publication that you love, but I’m in The Chronicle all the time.
Olivia Allen-Price: Carly Severn, senior editor of audience news here at KQED. What about you? You got some spooky stuff going on?
Carly Severn: We do. Our desk does explainers and guides. You can see it all at KQED.org slash explainers. And while we do a lot of serious stuff, we also like to have fun too. So we have a lot of spooky season explainers, and guides coming up, including a guide to the North Bay’s historic cemeteries that you can replicate the tour, a guide to immersive experiences around the Bay Area. And for all you history nerds, we have a guide to the Spooky Feeling History Tours you can embark on too.
Olivia Allen-Price: Thank you both so much. This has been such a fun morning and I can’t wait to watch some of these films.
Carly Severn: Thanks, Olivia.
Peter Hartlaub: Thank you for having us.
Olivia Allen-Price: Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Our show is produced by, and me, Olivia Allen-Price. We get extra support from, and everyone on team KQED. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Have a spooky one.
