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Six Derelict Movie Theaters That Inspired Joshua Erkman’s Horror Thriller, A Desert
A Desert With Joshua Erkman’s eerie horror/thriller, A Desert, which centers around a photographer lost in a Southwestern desert while on an expedition to photograph its abandoned movie theaters, in theaters now, the director presents here six inspirational photographs he shot on his own early research trip to the film’s locations. — Editor
The original seed of A Desert was the photographer character, Alex Clark. I’ve long been obsessed with photography, and before movies took ahold and bent my brain, I had aspirations of being a photographer. Before I even had an idea of what A Desert was going to be about, I knew that I wanted to examine a very specific type of contemporary art photographer. One that dealt with the cumbersome nature of shooting large format film, that did their work outside of the controlled setting of the studio and was also a modern-day explorer of the back roads of America. Someone with a kinship to photographers like Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, and Robert Adams. ery different than the super-cool, loft-living, overly slick photographer characters typically portrayed in movies. A Desert is a surreal horror neo-noir set in the high desert of the American Southwest that follows photographer Alex Clark as he attempts to rekindle his lost creative mojo; along the way some very bad things happen to him and those closest to him.
To better understand Alex, I spent a couple of years creating what would become his fictional body of photographic work. Starting in 2019, I went on multiple road trips across California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Knowing who his influences were, I stylistically shot as I thought he would. Driving alone through the desolate sections of the American Southwest and discovering these images opened-up new ideas and began to shape the plot and characters of the script. While I explored and photographed, I found I was drawn to certain places: motels, churches, cemeteries, but especially movie theaters, both drive-in movie theaters and traditional movie theaters. Many of these derelict theaters were abandoned long ago and their remnants left to rot in the sun, some were shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, others are rundown and just hanging on by a thread, some even have been repurposed as venues for swap meets and car shows.
These movie-going spaces and their dilapidated state informed what I was trying to conceptually work through in A Desert around our relationship to images and movies, their various functions and their cultural importance.
The following photographs are a selection of some of those places I encountered in my travels.
Skyline Drive-in – Barstow, California
Barstow, California for most people is a place to stop and get gas on your way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. In years past, Routes 66 and 91 were the major roads that most people drove through Barstow, but now most pass through via the 10 Freeway. The Santa Fe Railroad, a Marine Corp Logistics Base,and the second Del Taco ever to be in business all call Barstow home. I was already aware of this drive-in — 20 years ago I’d caught a showing of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Egyptian adventure CGI bonanza, The Scorpion King there. I remember it was a beautiful night at the movies, smoking cigarettes under the stars as “The Rock” swash-buckled his way across the desert on the giant screen. At the time I took this photograph I thought the theater was permanently shut down — thankfully, it was just closed for the winter. It is one of the last running drive-in movie theaters in San Bernardino County.
Comanche Drive-in – Buena Vista, Colorado
This photograph is reminiscent of the work of the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, someone that Alex would have been familiar with and admired. This is the highest elevation drive-in movie theater in the United States. This photograph was taken during their off season. I especially like how the crooked speaker posts are akin to old grave markers and how they jut out of the overgrown grass. This influenced the scene in A Desert when Alex gives his artistic spiel to Renny about how in his photographs he attempts to capture nature reclaiming its place from what man has built on it. I ended up spending a great deal of time at this location, waiting for the right lighting conditions and searching for the best angle to capture the massive white screen against the snow-capped mountains in the distance.
Abandoned Movie Theater – Victorville, California
For anyone that has searched for movie locations, images to photograph, places for artistic inspiration, etc. there is that incomparable rush of excitement when you find a place that truly sparks your imagination. This theater was a gold mine of inspiration for me on A Desert. This theater is part of a massive military base that was shuttered in the 1990s and left to the harsh desert elements to disintegrate over time as it is too expensive to properly demolish it. The banal signage seems sadly appropriate against the sun faded yellow walls of the theater. After spending some time photographing the nearby military base, I discovered that John Divola, one of the great contemporary photographers of the Mojave Desert and Southern California, had recently been shooting there too. Knowing this made it even more appropriate that Alex would take photographs in this location and that scenes of the movie would take place here.
Abandoned Movie Theater Entrance – Victorville, California
This photograph is of the main entrance of the same theater. Piles of dirt, rubble, old furniture, and dead shrubs block the boarded-up entrance and other exits in an attempt to keep delinquent teens and transients out. The American military base movie theater now a bizarre impenetrable desert tomb. I wonder what the last movie to play there was.
Basin Drive-in – Manti, Utah
Taken in the summer of 2020, the moment when drive-in movie theaters around America had a brief window of renewed public interest due to the restrictions with the pandemic. With few options for new movies, classic family favorites were being screened. This image captured in the present when time seemed to stop. A book of Alex’s photographs, Death of the New West, is a prop that features in multiple scenes in A Desert. This is one of my favorite images from the book.
Shuttered Movie Theater – Yucca Valley, California
After I discovered the abandoned “the movies” theater, I knew I wanted to open A Desert with a scene of Alex photographing the inside of a shuttered movie theater. We would see him with the large format equipment and show in near real time, him framing the image and the process of exposing the negative. It was important to show the time required to take a photograph with that particular camera. This also felt risky and could potentially be seen as too on the nose and hokey if ham-fistedly handled. The sequence needed to be mysterious, even a little scary, where the audience isn’t quite sure where he is or what he is doing. I wanted Alex to feel like an explorer, an archeologist finding his way in the dark to the antechamber of a pyramid. Since the interior of the abandoned “the movies” theater was not a possible location, I searched for another one. After many phone calls and multiple trips out there, I was finally able to get inside this shuttered movie theater in Yucca Valley. This photograph is of the lobby as it is with its enormous American flag hanging above the entrance. The American flag was present in some of the “Alex” photographs I had taken and one of the other locations in the movie, a pet cemetery, had a large American flag flying from a pole at the center of the grounds. This location was perfect, not only did it work logistically, but it became a motif that further supported the theme of American cultural decay that was taking shape in the movie. In this seemingly devolving world, the creeping disappearance and physical erosion of our cinemas is a direct result of how images and movies have gradually become so disposable in our culture, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are to everyone – they certainly aren’t for me.
