Roosevelt Island or the scene of a horror film?

I recently decided to film a book trailer for Life's a Witch and after talking things over with Matt, we figured we needed a really intense backdrop for it. And considering there's going to be an epic battle in the book, lots of destruction and some creepy moments, we thought that the perfect setting for the trailer would be an abandoned building of some sort. Something falling apart or destroyed; possibly a structure in ruins. When we started looking into locations, Matt found that Roosevelt Island had an old, run-down hospital, so we decided to go check it out.

On Sunday, we took the subway over to the island, a place neither of us had been before. Turns out that the building (or what's left of it) was no longer open to the public. In fact, it had a huge fence around it with a big sign telling the public that trespassers would be arrested...so that made this location out of the question. What we did find was an island that was even creepier than the ruins we were hoping to shoot at.

When we first arrived on Roosevelt, we started walking in the direction of the old hospital. The island itself isn't that big. We actually walked around it in about a half hour. But as we began to walk, we started to see some crazy things. The first thing we saw when we walked off the subway was a man lying on his stomach and wheeling himself down the middle of the street on a hospital gurney. As he passed us, we saw that he didn't have a body from the waist down and there was a collastomy bag hanging off the side of the bed. It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in real life and I felt like I was already in some kind of scary movie.

But, we kept walking, because we were on a mission. And that's when we saw them.

Cats.

Like, a dozen of them. As we got to the fence of the old hospital, all of these cats (more than half of them were black) started coming out of hiding. Now I love cats—I have two of my own after all—but even I thought this was weird. They were everywhere and looked ferrel (maybe this was my imagination, but after the gurney wheeling guy, I was sort of in an odd mindset) and just kept showing up.

This was about the time when Matt and I decided it was time to get off Crazy Island. If there was ever a place to shoot a creepy trailer this would be it...but I think we need something a little less creepy and more destroyed. I want people to read Life's a Witch, not be terrified by it!

5x5,
B.