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You won’t find it on a map: 11 fictional places that have appeared in multiple works

December 4, 2014

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4. Santa Mira, California

Alien imposters. Invisible men. Malevolent mask-makers. The sleepy California community of Santa Mira has played host to all these horrors, and several others, since director Don Siegal and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring first introduced it in 1956’s sci-fi classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Modeled after the very real Mill Valley, California—where Jack Finney actually set his 1955 book The Body Snatchers, the film’s source material—Santa Mira is the platonic ideal of safe, clean, small-town America. That makes it, in turn, the perfect ground zero for a supernatural conspiracy, as the friendly facade provides an ideal smokescreen for insidious activities. No wonder other writers and filmmakers have appropriated the fictional locale; it’s appeared, or at least been mentioned, in no less than nine other sci-fi properties, many featuring “replaced” humans—the phantoms of Dean Koontz’s Phantoms, the robot henchmen of Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, the DNAliens of Ben 10: Alien Force. It’s a town fit only for pod people, or maybe for those willing to risk life, limb, and identity for a little breezy West Coast weather.

Read the full article @ A.V. Club.