Most terrifying spots in Hamilton ... according to horror movies

Hamilton's a pretty spooky place.

Half a church looms over James Street South, haunting the local condo market. LRT-abandoned zombie buildings line King Street. Swamp Things (feces) curdle the waters of Cootes Paradise. And monsters occupy city hall.

Perhaps real life horror is scarier than the movies, but the city is also a hot spot for the fictional variety of terror.

Since the early 2000s, Hamilton has been home to many horror film shoots. Those scenes weave their way into genre classics.

If you're into ghoulish, slashing, blood curdling-terror, look no further than this little city ... there's a spectre of horror flick filming locations lurking around every corner.

Dundas is home to quaint century homes, but it's also home to deformed cannibals, according to the 2003 film Wrong Turn."

In the slasher flick, six friends are stranded in the deep dark forest of rural West Virginia where they are stalked and slain by the horrifying hillbilly occupants of the woods.

But the movie's stars, Eliza Dushku and Desmond Harrington, find a rather local place to hide ... behind the roaring water of Webster's Falls.

Two years later, the small American town" of Dundas, Ontario was prominently on display in a lesser known film, Swarmed."

In the Canadian-made, science-experiment-gone-wrong movie, pesticides are to blame for voracious, human killing swarms of wasps.

Will anyone make it out of Dundas, U.S. alive?

Plenty of spooky things happen around Burlington Heights - that little strip of land between Cootes Paradise and Hamilton Harbour.

Just over 200 years ago, the area was the site of Ancaster's Bloody Assizes execution. Eight men were hanged for treason on July 20, 1814 near where the Admiral Inn now stands.

One hundred and ninety years later, a massacre of the undead happened right next door. In creepy Hamilton Cemetery, Milla Jovovich beat back the zombie horde in 2004's Resident Evil: Apocalypse."

Just across the street, Dundurn Castle has its share of ghoulish scenes.

Hamilton fan Guillermo del Toro featured the little house on the land bridge in his 2015 period romance Crimson Peak."

Nearly 25 years earlier, Dundurn Castle was featured in a different type of movie billed as horror.

But the only scary things about the 1991 supernatural mystery Graveyard Story," available in full on YouTube, are 1980s cultural quirks and a truly 1980s era soundtrack.

Spoiler alert: It is a strange story" is the last line of the movie.

Other creepy Hamilton buildings have been commonly featured in horror movies, including Scottish Rite on Queen Street North, on display in Crimson Peak," 2006's Silent Hill" and IT: Chapter Two," released in 2018. Also the Sanatorium, built on the Mountain at the turn of the 20th century to treat patients with tuberculosis, has been used for a variety of horror flicks, including the second IT" film and Skinwalkers," a werewolf movie from 2007.

But maybe more scary than a haunted hospital or Masonic lodge is the danger of Hamilton's roads.

Cillian Murphy demonstrates downtown distracted driving in the 2012 psychological thriller Red Lights."

The paranormal investigator/critic should have been paying more attention, instead of focusing on purported psychic Robert De Niro, while driving up James Street North. His nearly-fatal error in the film's trailer nearly sends a pedestrian crossing near King William Street to a trauma centre.

Normally, a fast car overturning is every driver's - and pedestrian's - worst nightmare.

But in Stickman," a 2017 flick about a child's nightmare turning into a killer monster, an SUV rolls right into Parkdale Spring & Suspension, an automotive shop on Brampton Street in Parkview West neighbourhood.

And really, that's the best place a flipped SUV could possibly be.

Jeremy Kemeny is a Hamilton-based web editor at The Spectator. Reach him via email: jkemeny@thespec.com