6 Fictional Places You Didn't Know Actually Existed

The Real Thing:

As it turns out, Middle Earth - that is, the Shire, the forests, Isengard, even freaking Mordor -- all came from author J.R.R. Tolkien's surroundings growing up in and around the city of Birmingham, England. Seriously. The above image is what the University of Birmingham looked like back when Tolkien was in town.

OK, so what about Mordor? That charred, ruined country is pure fantasy, right?

Well, just northwest of Birmingham was an area called the Black Country, so called because it had been marred with pollution from all the coal mines, iron foundries and steel mills dotting its landscape thanks to the Industrial Revolution. The air was so dense with smog and dust and ore that the whole place looked like Godzilla's shithouse, all the time:

So, when it came time for Tolkien to create a homeland for the most evil being in his fantasy world, he just channeled the Black Country into his writing, renaming it "Mordor" because that sounded less like a racist old debutante's description of Africa.

For a while, Tolkien lived with his aunt in a section of Birmingham called Edgbaston -- an area that was known for having two very distinct towers in it:

Those are the Edgbaston Waterworks Tower and Perrott's Folly. The former would even periodically billow smoke out into the air, as if fantasy siege engines were being constructed deep in the earth beneath it (or as if steam were coming out of a waterworks tower).

At another point in his childhood, Tolkien lived in Sarehole (a hamlet right outside of Birmingham). It provided much of the inspiration for what eventually became the Shire. It even was said to have large tunnels running beneath it that could've easily been the basis for Bag End, Bilbo's home (and incidentally also the name of Tolkien's aunt's farm in the area). Sarehole and nearby Moseley Bog look ... well ... look like something out of The Lord of the Rings:

The Fictional Setting:

Arkham Asylum is one of those places that could only exist in a comic book universe, the sprawling insane asylum/haunted house where supervillains are imprisoned after being caught by Batman.

The Real Thing:

Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts.

Arkham is of course well-known for both its creepy atmosphere and its atrocious security, which make it kind of a shitty asylum. Even without the costumed villainy lurking inside, Arkham Asylum is pretty over the top. Its looming structures and labyrinthine hallways lean heavily toward the macabre, almost to the point of absurdity.

It's like a caricature of a haunted house, pulled straight from a turn of the century horror story. That's because it is literally from a turn of the century horror story, specifically from the work of H.P. Lovecraft's stories set in Arkham, Massachusetts, which included (along with cosmic insanity beasts) Arkham Sanitarium. But the sanitarium in Lovecraft's writing was based on a real place: Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts.

And true to its representation in D.C. Comics, Danvers comes off as a stereotypical haunted house, with such standard fixtures as ominous tunnels that, by the way, make a great video game setting.

Look familiar?

It's a vast complex of shadows, arched doorways and exposed brick. It would be a cliche, if it weren't real:

And how about the over-the-top, spooky patient rooms tucked away in the Arkham Asylum video game:

No way a real building is going to top that, right?

Yeah, Danvers' decaying patient quarters are now, without question, home to the shrieking spirits of the damned:

The Real Place:

Those are pictures of the unassuming town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which at one point was a nice enough place to live, with a population of over 1,000 residents.

Then the strip mine beneath Centralia caught fire, and the residents were evacuated by the order of Governor Dick Thornburgh (it is unclear whether this took place before or after he was punched in the face by Holly McClane in front of Nakatomi Plaza). The fire is still burning ... five decades later.

The massive, smoldering hellblaze has opened up sinkholes, steam pits and carbon monoxide vents all over the town. Just like Silent Hill, Centralia is burning from the inside out, as if it were sitting directly over the gates of hell. This place is literally opening up like the streets of New York at the end of Ghostbusters.

As for the abandoned buildings, they've certainly got that:

The similarities aren't coincidental. While the Silent Hill movie was in production, the filmmakers actually visited Centralia for inspiration, which seems obvious when you compare photos of the actual church in Centralia with stills of the Spookhouse Chapel of Barbed Wire Rape from the film:

So if for some reason you want to visit Silent Hill in real life, you totally can. We'll wait in the car.

It is cool, but also looks kind of fake. Who would take the trouble to carve a whole hidden city into a remote canyon?

The Real Place:

That city is completely real, and it is called Petra.

In the film, the grail is stashed in an ancient temple deep within the Middle Eastern desert in "The Canyon of the Crescent Moon."

Surely that has to be a matte painting (which, to our younger readers, is a thing they used to do in the days before a director could just beat his dick against a computer until it shit out alien landscapes). But it was modeled after the narrow canyon that leads through the ancient Jordanian town of Petra:

It was once the capital city of the ancient Nabataeans, who were apparently so far ahead of their time they carved their buildings directly into the stone for what we're assuming was a safeguard against nuclear war (today we known that you can forgo all that stonecutting nonsense and invest in refrigerators).

The city remains perhaps the single most jaw-dropping surviving masterpiece of rock-cut architecture on the planet, boasting a theater, a monastery, numerous tombs and, at the end of a narrow passage, Al Khazneh: the treasury.

Yep. It's a friggin' bank.

Bamboo forests like that can be found around the world, and they're actually more striking than what you saw in the movie. Here's Arashiyama, a forest outside of Kyoto, Japan:

Of course, Crouching Tiger wasn't the first movie to realize what an awesome setting bamboo forests would be for karate fights -- they turn up in House of Flying Daggers and the 1993 epic poem/anime expose on supernatural rapists Ninja Scroll. The consensus seems to be that the more bamboo you stick into a sword fight, the more likely it is to be awesome.

When you see them in real life, it isn't hard to understand why filmmakers feel so inclined to toss in a bunch of sword-fighting ninjas, because chances are you're already imagining that yourself.

A particularly stunning example is China's Shunan Bamboo Sea, which stretches over an area covering more than 500 hills:

Without question, each one of those hills is like a Pez dispenser full of samurai warriors. There are several more examples all over the Eastern hemisphere, each picturesque landscape just begging for a decades-old blood feud to be settled among their branches.

The Real Place:

It's pretty much a photograph (with some artistic license) of Venezuela's Angel Falls:

Holy crap, the real thing looks more like CGI than the animated movie.

Pixar films love to reference and tie in to one another, but as a general rule they keep references to the real world at a minimum (surprising, we know, that a studio would want to keep its movie about a green Cyclops with the voice of a Jewish comedian separate from reality). However, when the real world does show up, it's pretty spot on.

Even the house of main character Carl was based on a real place, although Pixar refuses to reveal the identity of the inspirational location. However, Internet sleuthing has narrowed it down to this house in the greater Oakland area, and we have to admit, it's pretty freaking close:

But all that is beans compared to the town in Cars. The history of Radiator Springs and its struggle with the tourism industry was directly inspired by the real-life town of Amboy, California, but the physical locations in the movie were taken from places all over the Western United States. And by "taken" we mean directly copied.

The left photo is Ramone's body shop from the film. The right is the U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. Then there's the Cozy Cone Motel:

Which is clearly based off the Wigwam Motel in Arizona:

There's even a subtle reference to a famous billboard for the Jack Rabbit Trading Post, also in Arizona (on the right there):

Honestly, it seems like Pixar just drove along Route 66 and put all the most interesting sights in the movie.

Even the speedway at the beginning of the film was based off of the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee:

Now somebody take us to that volcano island fortress Syndrome had in The Incredibles.

Jacopo della Quercia is the proud author of "Go @#$% Yourself!" - An Ungentlemanly Disagreement, by Filippo Argenti and "The Sound of Laughter" in Wordplague's The Four Humors. David is a freelance writer and aspiring screenwriter, follow him on Twitter or check him out over at Film School Rejects.

For more fiction that became reality, check out 7 Real World Heists That Put 'Ocean's 11' to Shame and 5 Real Bank Heists Ripped Right Out of the Movies.

And stop by LinkSTORM to learn where the hobbits are.

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