Moviemakers like M. Night Shyamalan have discovered something we’ve always known: South Jersey is packed with beautiful and interesting locations. Now, only 2 years after the opening of the South Jersey Film Office Cooperative, production companies are using those picture-perfect settings for their movies and TV shows. So start looking very closely next time you’re watching a show – you never know what favorite South Jersey spot just might make an appearance.
To set the scene for his 15th movie, M. Night Shyamalan envisioned old-growth trees, dense vegetation, whistling wind and the rustling and clattering of birds, deer and other woodland animals. The location he had in mind needed to evoke the beauty and majesty of a fairy-tale forest – a setting where magical, even sinister, things would not seem so far out of the norm.
Although he may not have known it at the time, Shyamalan was describing the Pine Barrens. When his crew reached out to the New Jersey Motion Picture and TV Commission for help finding the perfect place to film “Knock at the Cabin,” scouts led him straight to rural South Jersey. And that’s how the psychological thriller – about a family whose idyllic vacation away from it all turns into an apocalyptic nightmare – was primarily shot on the grounds of a cranberry farm in Tabernacle in April 2022 .
Credits: Jayne Jacova Feld, South Jersey Magazine, June 2023
