‘Chernobyl Diaries’ a thrilling historical horror
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After scaring up impressive box-office receipts with haunted houses, Oren Peli set his latest horror film in one of the most infamous ghost towns in the world.
“Chernobyl Diaries,” which hit Green Bay theaters Friday, is produced by the “Paranormal Activity” filmmaker and directed by first-timer Bradley Parker, who mine the real-life horror of the 1986 nuclear meltdown in the Soviet Union. A group of “extreme” tourists is put through the wringer when they visit the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat, Kyiv, decades after the infamous accident.
The tourists have to face irradiated, mutated things that are still left after the incident, and they’re not happy to have guests.
It’s one of a few upcoming films of Peli’s that steps away from the haunted-house trope and toward more historical horror: He’s producing the Rob Zombie movie “The Lords of Salem,” which ties into the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and is expected in theaters later this year, and writing and directing the sci-fi thriller “Area 51,” having to do with the secretive military base of UFO lore. (No Halloween is the same without a “Paranormal Activity,” though: The fourth installment arrives Oct. 19.)
“I don’t know if I would say that I’m specifically a history buff,” Peli says. “I do find a lot of things fascinating, especially anything that’s bizarre or mysterious and unknown and we don’t have all the answers for.”
Peli was a teenager growing up in Israel when, on April 26, 1986, an explosion at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl released vast amounts of radiation all over the Northern Hemisphere, making it the worst nuclear disaster in world history.
His interest in it rose again recently, though, when he read that people could hire tour guides in Kyiv who would take day trips to Pripyat, where most of the plant workers and their families lived. He looked at tourists’ YouTube videos and online photo galleries.
“People basically didn’t have a chance to pick up their belongings,” Peli says of the Pripyat evacuation. “They all just vanished overnight, and there’s not a place like that on Earth. It’s so creepy and eerie and fascinating — maybe it’d make a great setting for a horror movie.”
Peli is the master of the “slow-burn” horror film, Parker says, but with “Chernobyl Diaries,” they went for a more constant terror, like in “Jaws,” “where you’re alone at sea, totally isolated, and there’s this invisible threat out there that can get you at any time.”
“Even if you look at the ‘Paranormal Activity’ movies, at the end of the movie, things get really crazy and nutty, but they all start in a very mundane situation that people can relate to, and that’s also to some degree what we tried to do in ‘Chernobyl Diaries,'” Peli says.
“I am usually drawn to things that feel like, yeah, that’s the kind of thing that could possibly happen. And slowly things get worse and worse.”