Lifelong Pacific Northwest residents like myself tend to sparkle like humanist vampires with pride when the pop culture spotlight shines on our little corner of the country.
The early nineties were the high-water mark for this, thanks to grunge, Frasier, and one of the most iconic romantic comedies of all time, taking place in Seattle, not to mention Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure shooting, at least in part, in the surrounding areas. That all waned for a while with a few notable exceptions like 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Ring (2002), and the Twilight movies (2008-2012), but in the 2020s, horror in particular has rekindled its love for The Emerald City. It is also clear, undoubtedly due to cost and the complicated logistics of film production, that these films, though set in Seattle, are not filmed there beyond a few establishing shots. So, though my insomniac brain finds solace in movies like Malignant (2021), M3GAN (2022), Final Destination Bloodlines (2025), and Heart Eyes (2025), as someone familiar with the real setting, I know that I am indeed sleepless in Fake Seattle.
I’m really not upset about this at all. Fake Seattle and the surrounding areas are nothing new. Two of my favorites take place in this netherworld. The Changeling (1980) steals a few shots in and around the city, but like the other favorite, First Blood (1982), was mostly filmed in Vancouver and Surrey, British Columbia. In the late 80s and early 90s, quite a few movies were actually shot on location in Washington State, like Harry and the Hendersons (1987), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992), and of course, Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Seattle, the real Seattle, is a wonderfully romantic city, filled with history, quirk, and character. I can see why Nora Ephron chose it as the key setting for her film and why filmmakers today are choosing it once again.
Some of the settings in these films are real places, some are not, but I wish they were. Still others are somewhere in between, not technically real, but have a real Seattle area analog. So, join me for a quick tour through the 2020s horror of Fake Seattle.
For many of us, the inspired, swing-for-the-fences lunacy of James Wan’s Malignant was exactly what the doctor ordered after over a year of a global pandemic and the resulting social distancing and lockdowns. I have to give Wan and company a lot of credit for capturing the feel of the Seattle area despite the film being shot almost entirely in Los Angeles. Sure, there are the requisite establishing shots of the city skyline from Puget Sound, which of course includes the Space Needle, some exquisite aerial night shots of the city, and a very quick drive-by of the Pike Place market’s giant red neon “Public Market” sign, but almost everything else is shot in the Hollywood area.
Despite this, the skies are often overcast, the trees and plants are very green, and the neighborhood houses are believably northwest. The only real tipoff that Malignant is not shot in the Seattle area is a few stray palm trees here and there. It’s not that the Northwest is completely devoid of palm trees, but they are usually sad-looking, greenhouse-grown, and planted around places like used car lots. This will be a running theme throughout this piece.
Maybe the coolest real Seattle element in Malignant is the Seattle Underground. The portion that is accessible to the public is located in a historic area of downtown Seattle, of sometimes dubious reputation, called Pioneer Square. I have to admit that the first time I saw the movie, I was almost certain that the filmmakers had been allowed to shoot in the real location. Though I’ll admit I haven’t been there in over a decade, the way it looks in the film is exactly as I remember it, and the information that the tour guide gives before being abducted by Gabriel is all true. It turns out, however, that the Underground in the film is a set, but I must say that production designer Desma Murphy and team certainly did their homework and nailed the look and feel of that place.
James Wan and screenwriter Akela Cooper must have had Seattle on the brain as they set their next collaboration in the city as well. Directed by Gerard Johnstone, M3GAN was a big hit upon release, and the title character has become a Seattle icon, particularly in its LGBTQ+ community. Like Malignant, the film features a few establishing shots in Seattle, but the bulk of the film was shot elsewhere, in this case, Auckland, New Zealand. The exterior of the Funki Toys building is the Columbia Center Tower, the tallest building in Seattle. The Columbia Center is primarily an office building with a few floors of retail space, a restaurant, and a viewing lobby on its top floor. It is also the location of an annual charity fun-run up its seventy-six flights of stairs.
In the film, there is a lobby where people can take their kids to play with Funki toys on a free afternoon. I wish I could say this was actually in the building, but it was filmed in the atrium at the University of Auckland, half a world away. That said, the Seattle area (technically Everett, a bit to the north) is the home of Funko toys, creators of the famous and ubiquitous Funko Pops, and their flagship retail location, a pretty great real-world alternative to the fictional Funki lobby.
The outdoor school location where Gemma (Allison Williams) takes Cady (Violet McGraw) for her alternative education, only to have M3GAN (Amie Donald) nearly tear off another student’s ear before his untimely demise, is a pretty convincing stand-in for a Washington woodland. Again, the film does a pretty good job of convincingly depicting the northwest despite a few visible palm trees around Gemma’s yard. A few other tidbits include a drive across what appears to be the Narrows Bridge early in the film. Though if they were returning from Oregon, where Cady was hospitalized, this would be a very circuitous route back to Seattle, including driving in the wrong direction. I also love the nice close-up of the Washington license plate as M3GAN peels out from Funki headquarters in her stolen ride. It’s a nice touch.
The fakey-est (and one of my favorite) Fake Seattles of recent memory is found in Final Destination Bloodlines, specifically The Skyview. This setting of one of my favorite opening sequences of the franchise is clearly an homage to Seattle’s most famous landmark, the Space Needle. So, what’s the same and what’s different here? Well, the Space Needle is taller (605 feet compared to the 449 feet mentioned in the movie) but was completed around the same time as the opening of Bloodlines appears to take place, 1962. The elevator operator does say that The Skyview was completed ahead of schedule, though, which is always a bad sign in a Final Destination movie. What the Space Needle did not have in 1962, when it was completed for the Seattle World’s Fair alongside the rest of what is now called the Seattle Center, was a glass floor like the Skyview. There was a restaurant at the top, though, called Sky City that rotated for panoramic views of the city, as well as a mostly enclosed observation deck.
As a kid, I do remember being able to throw pennies over the windows of the observation deck, even if we were warned not to (we probably deserved to have a piano dropped on us), but it took some skill to be able to do it. The Space Needle went through a renovation starting in 2017 that added a glass floor to the restaurant. In fact, it is the world’s only revolving glass floor, and Sky City is now the Loupe cocktail lounge. Because I have seen Final Destination Bloodlines and am deathly afraid of heights, you will not find me up there anytime soon.
The rest of the film was shot in the classic Western Washington stand-in, Vancouver, B.C. Unlike the other films I’ve mentioned, Bloodlines never claims to take place in real Seattle, so it really could be anywhere, but it does capture the feeling of the area very well. Stephani’s (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) drive out to her grandmother Iris’s (Gabrielle Rose) secluded home feels very much like the drive to Mount Rainier. The logging roads and the clear-cut sections of forest where Iris’s house sits also feel familiar, as does the suburban backyard with its corrugated plastic awning and weather-worn trampoline.
But let’s bring it all back to the romance of the city with Heart Eyes, the Sleepless in Seattle meets My Bloody Valentine romantic slasher mash from director Josh Ruben and writers Christopher Landon, Phillip Murphy, and Michael Kennedy. Once again, Auckland, New Zealand, stands in for Seattle. The film starts out in a vineyard, and there are a fair number of them in the state. The bulk of Washington wine country is about a four-hour drive east of Seattle near Lake Chelan, but for the sake of the story, this one would logically be about twenty miles away from the city in Woodinville, though this would be outside of Seattle PD jurisdiction. But hey, I will let it go, along with a rather prominent palm tree, for the sake of one hell of an opening sequence.
Ally’s (Olivia Holt) apartment building also passes pretty well for a Seattle location. That style of architecture and the surrounding hills all had me wondering if a few scenes might have been shot in the city. As for the park with the carousel, this is a bit of a stretch. There are two carousels of that kind in the area, one inside Woodland Park Zoo, which would be closed during the time that the scene takes place, and the other is in Pike Place Market. Also, as the police arrive at the end of the scene, there are some very large, healthy, and prominent palm trees in the shot. This happens again at the airport.
Again, I’m not mad about it; it just makes me smile to myself. I would love more than anything for there to be a drive-in under the shadow of the Space Needle that shows great classics like His Girl Friday. There are a lot of wonderful art house and repertory theaters around the city, though. It is also not unusual for pop-up outdoor movie screenings to happen in the area, especially in parks during the summer months, but probably not in February. As David Hyde Pierce says in Sleepless in Seattle, “it rains nine months out of the year in Seattle,” and I’m afraid that assessment is not much of an exaggeration. It’s a trade-off, though. It keeps things green and beautiful and gives us locals our unique disposition.
What Heart Eyes does very well is capture the romance of the city, along with our uncanny ability to create such prolific serial killers. I’m only half joking about that last part. All the films I’ve mentioned are able to capture the very real feeling and attitude of the city, even if it is through sleight of hand and movie magic. So, I’m really not mad about the whole Fake Seattle phenomenon. In fact, I hope this romance lasts for a long time to come. After all, there’s plenty left to explore. The monorail practically screams Final Destination movie. How about ghosts in Union Station or The Phantom of the Cinerama? A cursed objects series about the crazy shops on the waterfront would practically write itself and I’m positive the ferries are all haunted. Even if horror’s love affair with Seattle ended today, I think I can speak for many Northwesterners when I say we’re just glad you were thinking of us at all.
So, whether you’re looking for love, your evil twin, a killer doll, death itself, or a killer with a kink, I hope you find it in Seattle. Though with most of those, I’d prefer it to be the fake one.
