Imagined Worlds Writeup

The setting is paramount for any form of decent storytelling, giving backstory and details not only to the world being portrayed, but the characters that belong to, and live in that world. This carries over into a myriad of medium and genres in the entertainment industry which involves fictional locations as the basis for a story. The type of story it is, or who it adheres to, reflects how transformative the storytellers need to be when developing, photo-bashing and designing the world.

George Lucas created a vast complex universe for Star Wars. Each planet is its own imagined world, a new interpretation of how life should act, feel and look loosely based on its relation to the plot and its characters. One of the best, the more notorious examples is how the planet of Tatooine is presented in A New Hope. The made-up desert planet is relevant to the protagonist and his journey since it’s his home planet and is used to emphasize the Luke Skywalker came from a rough home with minimal promise and opportunity on the farm he lived on. Lucas conveys the planet’s hostilities through its hostile alien lifeforms, scavengers and bandits, sandstorms, binary star heatwaves and, most iconically: the Tusken Raiders.

The Tusken Raiders (also known as the Ghorfas) are described and characterized as a nomadic, warrior race that lives, travel and raid in tribes. Just like how the Planet Tatooine itself was influenced by deserts, settlements, towns, and cities in Morocco and Tunisia (which ended up being shooting locations for the film, including Tozeur, Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Hadada), the Tusken Raiders were inspired by desert-based middle eastern Arabic people known as “The Bedouin” or “Bedu”. 

Moving on from old movies (1977) to modern television (2016~2019) whilst keeping the science fiction genre, Stranger Things is a U.S Netflix original series made, written and directed by the Duffer Brothers, a Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen. The surface-level setting is merely a throwback to 1980s America, more specifically the state of Indiana and the nuclear families that reside there. However, there’s a dark, gloomy alternate dimension dubbed The Upside Down where all life that lives there is dominated by “an enormous superorganism” that brings about chaos for the protagonists’ fictional home town of Hawkins as the plot progresses and thickens.

Being a modern, more recent piece of media means there are more pop culture and media to poke fun at, make reference to and use as inspiration. The Duffer Brothers deem their two main inspirations for The Upside Down to be the Alien Franchise (1979~) and Silent Hill (1999), both praised and successful for providing very different chilling horror experiences. Looking at the visuals from Stranger Things, Alien and Silent Hill, you can’t help but draw very subtle correlations between what’s been coined the inspiration and the final product. Two examples I found were the thick fog in Silent Hill and the biomass roots from Alien.

I imagine the thought process for the Duffer Brothers was to pick apart media that manages to scare the viewer without resorting to cheap, effortless jumpscares that have unfortunately become commonplace in modern horror, essentially putting themselves in the mindset of consumers to better understand what must’ve been so unnerving or chilling at the time.

In fairness, the reason why most of the land outside Silent Hill Ranch is obscured in fog is because the Playstation and Xbox systems the game were released on didn’t have the capacity to render over long distances so they essentially only need to focus their efforts on the foreground details. Regardless, the unknowing of what could have been lurking, following and stalking the player and, as a result, could attack at moment’s notice, is what makes the player so uneasy and the game so psychological and unique with its horror.

In summary, to tell a compelling story with rich, though-provoking stories