The filming locations used in Netflix’s creepy German TV series Dark.
Netflix’s sci-fi thriller Dark has been a huge hit with viewers since it landed on the streamer back in 2017, keeping fans hooked for three twisty seasons.
From co-creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, the story begins with the disappearance of a child from the town of Winden, and follows four families living in the town as they uncover a mind-bending mystery that spans three generations.
Along the way, viewers are taken on a journey through dark forests, subterranean caves, and many other unnerving locations.
Read on for everything you need to know about where Dark on Netflix was filmed, including what Odar and Friese had to say about the series’s creepy setting.
Where is Netflix’s Dark filmed?
Surprisingly, despite the spooky woodland setting, the production team behind the series found the ideal location less than an hour from the German capital of Berlin.
“We actually shot in Berlin,” Friese said. “Actually, once you go a few minutes from the city centre, Berlin basically becomes a village. We picked various different places: a house here, a house there. But all the locations are shot around Berlin.”
Odar added that the forest proved the ideal setting for Dark’s dark vision.
“The forest is about an hour away from the city centre,” he said. “The soil here is very dry, so you get a lot of coniferous, long straight trees. They feel for me very creepy, like a fairytale forest.
“I love those long straight trees – they’re like jail bars. Visually it’s very interesting.”
The action in the series also covers three different time periods: 2019, 1986, and 1953. Each new location therefore had to be redesigned to suit the particular era.
“As I directed all the episodes, we treated the entire thing like a very long feature film,” Odar said. “We told ourselves we were doing a ten-hour feature film, so we shot it chronologically.
“We shot everything in the woods, then everything in the school; we then had a weekend in between to redress the school from the present time to the ’80s. We also have another timeline in the ’50s, so we had to deal with that. But we stayed in one location and redressed it.”
While a German show, the filmmakers believe the series easily translates for a global audience.
“We always work in a way that we try to tell a story that works everywhere,” Odar said. “All of our projects so far have been well received internationally, because we want to reach a broad audience.
“We don’t believe in local stuff, we don’t believe in genre – we just believe in good stories.”
Is the town of Winden in Dark a real place?
Sadly, no: the small town next to a nuclear power plant is not actually a real town in Germany.
“It’s a fictional town,” said Friese. “We deliberately wanted that because we didn’t want to colour it with a specific Bavarian or northern German setting. We wanted it to be somewhere that could be everywhere.”
However, their real history did inform how they saw the location: “We both come from small towns, so you can probably find both our birth towns in there a little bit,” Friese added.
All three seasons of Dark are available to watch on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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