Abandoned town is setting for more paranormal chills in Chernobyl Diaries

“Anything that’s unknown, unexplainable, unseen — to me, that’s scarier than actually seeing the monster in front of you.”

Oren Peli should know: The 41-year-old filmmaker born in Israel has cornered the market on invisible-monster movies and TV shows by “making things I think would scare me.”

He wrote, directed and edited the surprise hit Paranormal Activity (2009), which famously cost only $15,000 to make and caught the eye of Steven Spielberg, who championed it. Peli went on to produce Paranormal Activity 2 (2010); Paranormal Activity 3 (2011); Insidious (2011), another surprise hit; and the short-lived series The River (2012).

Now, he’s back with Chernobyl Diaries. The thriller — written by Peli, directed by Bradley Parker and set for release Friday — follows six young vacationers on an extreme-tourism trip to Pripyat, Ukraine, once home to the employees of the fated Chernobyl nuclear-power plant.Pripyat has been a ghost town for more than two decades, and, when the group ends up stranded there, they promptly come to learn — with lots of pain, crying, screaming and death — that real ghosts, or creatures of some kind, inhabit the place.


Peli credits “goofing around on the Internet” for inspiring Chernobyl Diaries. He came across a photo blog by some people who had entered Pripyat and taken pictures.On YouTube, he also discovered videos posted by some who had entered the officially closed area.

“It blew my mind,” Peli said. “Obviously, I’d heard of Chernobyl and knew about the disaster — I lived through it — so that wasn’t news to me. But it had never occurred to me that there was an abandoned town next to it that was evacuated overnight. It made total sense, but I’d just never thought about it.

“There have been a lot of towns that have been abandoned because of economic hardship, where people just picked up their things and left,” he said. “In the case of Pripyat, people weren’t even told that they were going to evacuate the city for good. They were told that they were going to be gone for just a few days.”Because no one had time to pack up their belongings, he noted, they just left things as they were.“It’s almost like a town where the population just vanished overnight. After 25 years of being abandoned, nature started taking over the town, and I don’t think there’s any other place on Earth that’s like that — that’s a relatively modern city where the population just disappeared.Peli described the place as “very scary and very eerie and very sad.”All of which made it an ideal setting for a horror movie.The cast and crew weren’t allowed to shoot in Pripyat, but the cameras rolled in several other creepy locations in eastern Europe — including an abandoned Soviet air-force base and Nazi tunnels in Serbia.

“I also want to emphasize, because there’s been some misinformation, that Chernobyl Diaries is not a found-footage movie,” he said, referring to a genre in which film is presented as having been “discovered.” “The acting is very natural, very realistic,” Peli said. “There was a lot of improvisation. The camerawork is very natural.”

[dispatch.com]