Wisconsin Death Trip is set in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The story is built up of true stories published in the local paper in Black River Falls. This small town in Northern Wisconsin houses what looks like a respectable community of hard-working Protestant traders and farmers, most of who had emigrated from Germany and Scandinavia. The news in the eighteen-nineties is however dominated by bizarre stories about insanity, eccentricity and despair among the local population. Suicide and murder are the order of the day. People in the village are pursued by ghosts and terrorised by pyromaniacs and outlaws. The writer of the book on which the film was based, Michael Lesy, was inspired by the powerful black & white photos of the late nineteenth century made by a local portrait photographer. Film- maker James Marsh, who describes Lesy’s book as ‘a catalogue of strange, disturbing and darkly humorous vignettes of real life tragedy, from a forgotten place and a forgotten time’, regarded the stark black & white quality of the photos as an important point of departure for the camerawork of the film. Wisconsin Death Trip was shot over a span of two years with a small crew and a relatively modest budget, on location in Wisconsin, with many local (non-professional) actors.
