Zero-budget filmmaking scavenged locations from friends and abandoned sites.

Evidence

Somehow, Smith filled carloads of fanciful horror movie archetypes (the Werewolf, the Yellow Hag, the Black Spider, the White Bat, the Mermaid, the Watermelon Man) driving through New Jersey and Queens, looking for locations. The Roman bath scene with comatose creatures in pink gowns lounging, as if after the ball, around the faux classical sculptures guarding an imposing swimming pool was shot in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, at John Eberhardt’s extravagantly rococo Belvedere Guest House. The perfect field of goldenrod required for the Yellow Sequence turned out to be an abandoned junkyard beneath the Throgs Neck Bridge where Francis Francine mimed dying as Tiny Tim perched on the rusty roof of an abandoned car plucking his plastic ukulele. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 454

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The junkyard-as-goldenrod-field is a found-object aesthetic directly relevant to the reader’s ‘trees as infrastructure’ article — repurposing what already exists rather than building new.