This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
From You Know That Thing Where:
Tulling: I got to wondering about the Deep South setting. Isn't there a kind of northeastern US counterpart to this kind of millieu, a kind of Gothic New England often used in the Cthulhu mythos stories and some types of horror (I do not read Stephen King, and have only seen one film adaptation of Christine long ago, but I got the impression that he has used this kind of setting.), like The Blair Witch Project and Sleepy Hollow. Popular interpretations of The Crucible might also count? In the case of the horror kind, one important difference from Deep South is that evil and corruption is more often shown as being supernatural in origin.
Tzintzuntzan: I'd call it Lovecraft Country, since nearly all of the original Cthulhu Mythos stories took place in this ancient dark small-town New England world. There's another big difference between the two. Lovecraft Country is for horror stories only; things can happen on TV in New England that are not Lovecraft Country. But if there's a story set in the South, not written by Southerners, and on TV, it will almost always be in the TV-style Deep South.
Ununnilium: Definitely voting for Lovecraft Country. Note that many of Stephen King's stories take place here.
Whogus The Whatsler: "The cheap trick of using a blue filter"...are you insulting Emmanuel Lubezki? One of the three or four greatest living cinematographers? Who ought to have won an Academy Award for his gorgeous work on Sleepy Hollow? Ooh, you...get over here...we's gonna have words...
Tulling: It is a cheap trick to suggest a particular mood, in case "melancholy", "foreboding" and related states by applying a camera filter. It is a shortcut much used in cinemathography, but one that should be unecessary if proper care has been taken to establish the mood of the scene. Something horrible and scary or whatnot should be just as much so in more natural colours, should it not? Note that I have no objections to the rest of the camera work, and Sleepy Hollow is indeed a very pretty film to look at. I just wish they had avoided that "visual cliche".
LTR - I'll agree, FWIW. It's been so overused that it no longer creates a gritty washed out and desolate feel to the work, but rather brings groans of "Oh great, another person trying to be moody and gritty." At least for me.
Seth: Cinematography is supposed to be a short cut to set a mood. I suggest taking out the cheap trick section its unnecessarily hostile and the camera work in sleepy hollow was pretty good.
BT The P: I say this from experience, it is freakishly hard to make something look scary under good light conditions. A headless sword-swinging corpse on horseback loses a lot of its punch in broad daylight with yellow and green overtones. It'd probably still be scary, but not as scary as it could potentially be, and I hate to see a good monster get sold short by standing in the light.
Kendra Kirai: I think it should be noted somewhere (Even if just here), that the possible, if not probable, reason for using New England is that it's the oldest area of America while still having a fairly sizable amount of forests and other wilderness. Nothing says creepy like 250-plus-year-old mansions deep in woods that haven't seen significant human presence in over a hundred years. It's simply not the same for it to be a virginia plantation house, even if the fields have been left for decades, or a villa in the south west united states. About the only thing creepier with something set or filmed in North America is an arctic research station, deep in the middle of the months of night, during a snowstorm.
...Well, except for Michael Jackson's Neverland Estate.
....Or Skywalker Ranch.
Maggoty Anne: Sleepy Hollow is set in upstate New York, which is perfectly acceptable for this trope. But the entire thing is done with British accents. Would that be relevent?
