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Nightfall in the Lot
With my latest model «Nightfall in the Lot» I return one more time to the literary world of Stephen King, one of the few authors who have faithfully accompanied me since my teenage days. After «Welcome to Derry» this project represents the second part of a planned King trilogy and is based on one of his very early and, in my opinion, most intense novels: «'Salem's Lot».
The original script is among the few still highly praised classics of the vampire genre. Inspired by Bram Stoker's classic novel, this mind game deals with the issue what would have happened if a certain Count hadn't set up his tent (or opened his antique shop...) in old dusty Victorian England, but in a sleepy small American town – in Jerusalem's Lot. And so evil finds its way into the said town when one day two strangers move into the mysterious old Marsten House on the hill above the city.
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What still enchants me about «'Salem's Lot» after so many years is its melancholic autumnal mood and its elegantly woven, fragmentarily narrative perspective. In almost lyrical visual language, King constructs his seemingly simple story about the creeping decline of a city on the example of numerous individual fates:
We experience the fall of Jerusalem's Lot from the different perspectives of its inhabitants while at the same we get insight into the hidden secrets of the city. Against the background of impending doom, the author paints almost by the way his merciless portrait of a deceptive small town idyll full of hidden violence, corruption and malice. What remains in the end is a multi-faceted and autumnal bloody-colored farewell song on a city where evil was present long before its doom.
It is this complexity of the story that I wanted to reflect in my realization of the novel. So I used a constructional idea that I had previously fancied – the principle of a rotating world. This is why my Jerusalem Lot is set upon a rotating disk. Each little twist offers the viewer new perspectives and insights into other parts of the city, into other stories and aspects of its downfall. Only one view stays the same from every angle in the city: the view of the Marsten House, that legendary old estate that oozes out all evil but the viewer never approaches it (as almost no inhabitant of the novel ever does).
While the scenes of the – in literal sense – many-sided city are constantly changing, the Marsten House is the only element of the setting that soars above the city, immovable on a mountain top and right in the center to spy down on every corner of the town. At the same time, the viewer is left in the dark about its record, its secrets and the processes within the walls. The only visible effects is a creeping invasion of the city streets, going out from there and which (turning the scenery) all seem to be aimed at the ominous center.
My presentation displays physically what the inhabitants of Jerusalem's Lot seem to grasp intuitively in the story:
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Everything is focused on the Marsten House, everything leads back to it.
Of course, there is a lot more to say about the development of the project, my visual approach as well as the contentual and technical details. However, since this would lead too far at this point, I want to invite all interested readers to take a look at the WIP documentary.
Everyone else I welcome now to the gallery of «Nightfall in the Lot».