Lighthouses on Film and Television
A Setting That Does Half the Work
Few locations carry as much dramatic weight per square metre as a lighthouse. Isolated, vertical, combining the domestic and the monumental, surrounded by sea whose mood shifts from glass to fury in hours, the lighthouse provides a screenwriter and a cinematographer with a ready-made shorthand for isolation, obsession, endurance, and the conflict between the rational management of danger and the chaos just outside the lantern glass. The lighthouse has appeared in film and television across virtually every genre — thriller, romance, horror, historical drama, animated children's film — and recurs in the visual vocabulary of cinema in a way that reflects something genuinely deep about what the building means to its audiences.
The Lighthouse (2019)
Robert Eggers' black-and-white film, shot in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio that compresses the frame to something like a daguerreotype, is the most formally serious lighthouse film in the canon. Shot in Nova Scotia using a replica lighthouse exterior (the light sequences were filmed at the Cape Forchu lighthouse near Yarmouth) and lit with a mixture of natural light and period-appropriate lantern sources, the film follows two wickies — a term for lighthouse keepers derived from the wick they tended — played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, enduring an extended stay at a rock station during a protracted storm. Eggers drew on the journals of nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers, the short stories of Herman Melville and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and the Greek myth of Prometheus to create an atmosphere of claustrophobic deterioration that the lighthouse setting makes both literal and symbolic. The light at the top of the tower, which the older keeper refuses to let his assistant tend, becomes the organising obsession of the narrative.
Jamaica Inn and the Wreckers Tradition
Alfred Hitchcock's 1939 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel Jamaica Inn is set on the Cornish coast and involves a ring of wreckers — people who lured ships onto rocks by showing false lights and then plundered the wreck. The tradition of wrecking, which was historically real though probably less organised than fiction suggests, is inseparable from lighthouse history: the establishment of reliable lighthouse lights on the Cornish coast by Trinity House was in part a direct response to the wrecker problem, and the Cornish lighthouses at the Lizard (established 1752, the current tower by Samuel Wyatt in 1812) and at Pendeen (1900) were specifically cited as wrecking deterrents. Hitchcock's film, though shot at Elstree and not on the actual Cornish coast, uses lighthouse imagery throughout its promotional material and narrative.
The Fog (1980)
John Carpenter's horror film is built around the Antonio Bay lighthouse in fictional coastal California, through which a ghost radio broadcast alerts the town to approaching supernatural danger. The lighthouse — shot partly at the Point Reyes lighthouse in California, a three-story 1870 structure with its original third-order Fresnel lens still in place — functions as both the communications hub of the story and its symbolic high point, the elevated vantage from which the protagonist surveys the approaching menace. Carpenter used the real lighthouse to establish authenticity and then returned to sets for the interiors, a common production approach. The Point Reyes lighthouse, 308 steps below the headland car park and surrounded by Pacific fog exactly as depicted, is itself one of the most atmospheric lighthouse locations in the United States.
To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf and Adaptation
Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel is not primarily about the lighthouse itself — the Godrevy lighthouse off St Ives in Cornwall, which inspired it — but about the human longing for arrival at a destination that is always deferred. Several film and television adaptations have been made, the most significant a BBC production in 1983 directed by Colin Gregg, with Rosemary Harris and Michael Gough. The adaptations face the structural problem that the lighthouse is entirely off-screen for most of the novel; what matters is the journey toward it, not the arrival. The Godrevy lighthouse, a white tower completed in 1859 and now solar-automated, is visible from the St Ives seafront and remains an active light showing an occulting white characteristic.
Trézien and French Lighthouse Cinema
French cinema has returned repeatedly to the Brittany lighthouse tradition. The 2004 film Le Phare, directed by Christophe Ruggia, is set at a fictional version of the Phare de Trézien on the Presqu'île de Crozon, and deals with the psychological effects of isolation on a keeper near the end of the staffed lighthouse era. The film is notable for its accurate depiction of daily keeper routine — winding the clock mechanism, trimming the lamp, recording in the log — at a period when French lighthouse keepers were being replaced by automation. Trézien itself, a 37-metre tower built in 1894 and automated in 1993, was used for exterior shots. The film captures the specific melancholy of the last generation of keepers watching their occupation disappear.
Television and the Lighthouse Serial
British television has used lighthouse settings for serial drama from the 1960s onward. The BBC series The Lighthouse (1965), starring Gerald Harper, depicted the daily lives of Trinity House keepers at a fictional offshore rock station and was praised for the accuracy of its technical detail, having been made with the cooperation of Trinity House. More recently, the Danish-Norwegian co-production Lysets voktere (Guardians of the Light), a docudrama series produced in the 2010s, followed the final staffed lighthouse keepers of the Norwegian coast, combining archival material with contemporary filming at stations including Utvær, the westernmost lighthouse in Norway, and Slettnes, the northernmost lighthouse in continental Europe.
Documentary and the Keeper's Voice
The documentary tradition is arguably more important to lighthouse representation than fiction. The series Lighthouse (BBC, 1998) followed the automation of the last manned lighthouse in England — North Foreland in Kent, which was automated in November 1998 — and provided an unsentimental record of what the final keepers of a centuries-old tradition actually experienced on their last days of service. The North Foreland lighthouse itself, first established in the seventeenth century and in its current 26-metre form dating from 1793, remains active and open to visitors.
Open the map to find the real lighthouse locations that appear in or inspired the films discussed here — from Point Reyes to Godrevy, the on-screen lighthouse almost always has a real-world original whose geography shaped what the camera saw.