Context

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark takes place in the fictional town of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, in early November, 1968. Protagonists Stella and Ramone find themselves in the holding cell at the local police station on the eve of Nixon’s election. The task was to create graphic artifacts to dress into the police station set to reflect the world of late 60s rural America.

Method

Collected visual references (hunting licences, police pamphlets, political campaign posters, newspapers, county fair posters etc.) from the late 1960s Pennsylvania. I consulted with the production designer to determine the desired character of the set. My fellow graphic designers on the show advised me how to achieve the look and feel of graphics from the period.

Design Process

After gathering my historical references I began replicating police paperwork, populating the forms with copy that suited our fictional town, inked fingerprints and hand drawn illustrations of wanted and missing people. Alterations were made to meet clearance needs. Final graphics were handed off to the set dressing team to install. As filming drew closer, I responded to last minute requests for additional graphics.

The Mill Valley Police Station bulletin boards were bursting with period appropriate artifacts: missing person posters, newspaper clippings reporting on police and community news, hunting licences, community event posters, and children’s drawings of the police dog Trigger. Police awards and certifications decorated the walls and wanted posters and period accurate police paperwork covered the sheriff’s desk. The result was a living, working sheriff’s office in rural PA, Nov 1968.

This set was one of my proudest moments; Guillermo del Toro personally praised me for the detailed layering and texture of artifacts on the bulletin boards. While never explicitly featured on camera, the graphics I created to dress the Mill Valley police station brought the set to life.