It’s Halloween and what better way to celebrate than a spoOOOoOOOoky road trip? From Amityville Horror to The Undead, we’re taking a trip across the continental United States to visit all of the locations these horror movies were filmed. This schlep won’t be a nightmare, since we’re creating the route using Mapzen Turn-by-Turn.

This map is interactive! View full screen ➹

Making this ghoulish map wasn’t a fright thanks to Mapzen.js, Tangram, and Mapzen Turn-by-Turn. We started with a list of our list of favorite horror movies (we may or may not have visited some of them 😉) and locations associated with them that a fan could visit. For example, the M street steps where Father Karras plummets down to his death have been since renamed “The Exorcist Steps” and going up and down them is a great leg workout! We also discovered this gem, listing where some of our favorite moments in horror movie history take place. Movie mappers rejoice! We then geocoded the locations and added details like location type to an array so we knew what to look for when we drove there.

To design the basemap, we played around with kinkade to generate a sphere map based off of Geraldine’s experiments with terrain. After creating the terrain, we used the waves and stripes block to add some detail to the water and landuse features. The ‘Creepster’ typeface was the perfect addition to this map with autumnal reds and oranges added to pop against the dark and “scary” terrain. A regular pin marker won’t suffice for this scary map, so we designed custom icons for the movie locations and the cursor. We love being able to add dynamic data with Tangram, so we animated the route we’re taking, from the apartment building in Rosemary’s Baby to the Amityville Horror house.

Explore the map and be sure to click on the different movie list titles for a scary surprise!

Witches image via Flickr user mryantaylor.