New England on 35mm Film

“I really loved New England. It has a charm all its own—quiet, still, but somehow alive within that stillness. It left a deep impression on me. It’s a feeling I’ve never experienced anywhere else.”

It was a grey morning in March as we left New York. The traffic was light, which made getting out relatively easy. Soon, we were in a very different landscape—rolling hills and big wooden houses surrounded by trees that had lost their leaves from the fall. Quiet, too. The odd truck and car on the road, but that was it.

We headed towards Lenox in Massachusetts. The three-hour drive took us through beautiful rural towns on back roads so pretty you didn’t want to take the turn-offs. We passed farmland with those beautifully built barns, the occasional derelict house, and quiet gas stations.

I started to feel a real sense of excitement—and oddness. It was the quietness that really struck me, and the wide-open spaces. As we reached Massachusetts and explored Vermont in the days that followed, that feeling only grew stronger.

Massachusetts and Vermont are stunning—even in March, when the trees are bare and the famous autumn colours are long gone. What you get instead is this haunting, “out-of-season” vibe. Small, eerily quiet towns with serious Stephen King energy—something I won’t forget anytime soon.

Picture-perfect wooden houses with white picket fences, cars parked along the curb, but no people around—just the sound of wind blowing leaves down the streets and the occasional caw of a crow overhead. Most shops had closed signs hanging from the doors, and the ones that were open felt like private showings. Even the motels were empty.

Honestly, it felt like being on a movie set—part Psycho, part The Shining.

We arrived at our motel just outside of Lenox, and we were the only guests there until the weekend, when a few more cars filled the parking lot. For the first few days, it was just us at breakfast and the bartender in the evenings. The place had a haunting atmosphere—and I have to admit, I loved it. It was a feeling I’d never experienced before, and much of the next few days carried that same tone, until we left New England and headed to Boston.