At the outset I quickly aimed to write a horror movie. The final script veered toward horror/thriller, but the core elements are still rooted in horror. I won’t get into plot or story here, but as I’ve mentioned before a couple times what I could do dictated what I set out to do (again all indie film sorta starts from here).

With the land, and specifically the woods, I figured a play on a ‘cabin in the woods’ style horror would allow me to play with action and setting to satisfy myself. Along with that the isolation scenario would keep cast and crew elements down.

Prior to writing a reasonable guess on my part was that I could build the main set or two, location scout all around the property for diverse and interesting scenery and make it so that every place we shot was within a two minute drive of the production base and every other set.

I’ve got scary craggy rock formations, dank swampy looking ponds, sheer cliff faces and generally spooky woods. So anything I might want to do inside the genre setting would be doable, and wouldn’t box me in too much during the writing. Moreover, since I knew a lot of the places that might suite me in this genre I could write specifically to them. Sort of like knowing what tools are available when I get in my story’s particular sandbox. This should help production-wise since there is no after the fact location scouting, I know where a number of scenes are going to shoot. It also helps in planning with the DP and other folks who can go out and see everything weeks or months beforehand.

I could have written a sci-fi epic and spent the next three years building nice spaceship sets in empty barns, which could easily work like sound-stages. But then there would be other costs to really make that sort of flick pay off. Even a minimalist sci-fi like Moon would be harder for me to pull off than the horror movie I wrote for the project.