Haunted Towns and Their Stupid Names

Picture this scene, dear reader; you and your significant other are getting the first house! As marvelous a fantasy as that is, let's entertain the idea. You and your partner are looking into cities and towns with the best locations, minor traffic, noise pollution, crime, etc., for a place to start a life. Your agent tells you you have some options in a little town called Darkness Falls along the coast.

“What?” you say.

You repeat your question to the understanding real estate agent, who nods with the experience of getting that question asked a lot.

Don’t worry; they exterminated the demons a long time ago. The Agent says with a forced grin, “Plus, all cosmic horror and ghost-related damage is automatically covered by insurance when you buy a property!”

This tiny opening is how I imagine a world when places like Darkness Falls, Silent Hill, Mount Massive Aluslum, Yharnam, and Bright Falls, among others, exist, all places with names that of some degree of stupid or unnatural, feel less like a real place that could exist in our world but are attempting to suggest dread.

The biggest offending I have found outside of kids' horror like Spooksville, which I don’t count cause we are not supposed to take those seriously, is a movie called Darkness Falls.

Much like the very amusing opening, the town haunted by a demonic Tooth Fairy (I am not joking) is called Darkness Falls. No sane person would call a town that unless they were inviting demonic beings that thrive in the dark to take over. Darkness Falls is a prime example of hack writing, utterly unrealistic and distracting to the point of comedy. And the less said about the movie’s overall derivative nature, the better; play Alan Wake if you want a good version of a haunted down with a less stupid name.

When creating haunted locations, it is important to name them in such a way that doesn’t sound like the occupants were begging to be slaughtered by cosmic horrors. One that sounds ominous but not distractingly so. This brings me to a slightly better-named town.

Silent Hill is a beloved resort town that also happens to be a place where people can enter their personalized hells to learn essential life lessons through their nightmares. Silent Hill, the name of a town that is supposed to attract tourists, is on the off-putting side. Can you picture some kids who wanted to go to a place called Silent Hill? Can you picture people going there for a holiday willingly? This always feels like a moderate stretch for me regarding the lore. I don’t picture people hearing Silent Hill's name and not thinking of something ominous and threatening instead of honeymoon material.

This isn’t as bad as, say, Darkness Falls but it is something that sometimes bothers me when I am reading through the SH lore; It's not bad in the greater scheme of things cause the games don’t fixate on the fact people are supposed to want to come to Silent Hill for holidays, but a blind spot in the lore that only nerds like me care about.

Another example of a town with a very stupid name is from Alan Wake, namely Bright Falls. Bright Falls as a name disgusts me; it rolls off the tongue with all the grace and elegance of cacti with attachment issues and makes no sense.

It only fits into the story when you consider the relevance of light and darkness as a motif and theme, but then it just feels arbitrary. It is as if Remedy thought wanted their primary setting to be relevant to the theme but picked the worst one humanly possible.

Another essential factor to consider when naming your haunted location is that it has an easy, convenient, and ideally unassuming name. One that can make the reader think it could happen anywhere and to anyone. Darey from Steven King’s IT is a great example, where the mundane ordinariness of the town is only skin deep, slowly being torn away to reveal the abuse of children and the general evil of life. Towns, houses, and other locations are not born evil; they become bad through their acquired history. The concentration camps of the Holocaust weren’t called burning machines but Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

You don’t call your town Little Hope, a stupid name for a town begging the memories of Salem witch trials to haunt it. A name so on the nose that it makes me cringe that the writers for The Dark Pictures Anthology didn’t laugh it off and leave it on the cutting room floor where it belonged.

A shitty name for a town can rob much of the tension from the story cause you are thinking about how stupid the Little Hope name is when you should be running away from the demon with a noose instead of a tongue. Hill House, for example, sounds like a place people lived in and wanted to live in before all the hauntings happened. I cannot stress the importance of some realism to the name of your hell creation; if it is too obviously spooky, please abandon it and try to come up with something that doesn’t sound too threatening. It will go a long way to make your story threatening.

Please consider reading Black Masquerade: The third entry in the Eight Nightmares Collection, now available at selected retailers.

Acknowledgments

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