Location, location, location

Location is everything when it comes to creating a successful ensemble mystery thriller. A big, mysterious-looking house (“The Cat and the Canary,” “The Old Dark House”) is usually a filmmaker’s location of choice. Among equally effective alternatives are apartments (“Wait Until Dark,” “Rope,” “Rear Window”), motels (“Psycho”), trains (“Murder on the Orient Express”), boats (“Lifeboat,” “Knife in the Water”), spaceships (“Alien”) and even a convent (“Thunder on the Hill”).

The latest entry in this popular genre, “Identity,” which opens today, embraces all its traditions. The action takes place at a small, isolated desert motel/cafe -- think “The Petrified Forest” meets “Psycho” -- where 10 people are stranded during a torrential downpour that has flooded the roads. A supernatural twist is thrown in for good measure.

Isolation is also a crucial ingredient for these thrillers to deliver chills. The setting should be in an out-of-the-way place that has little access to main roads. To increase the sense of isolation, mix in a massive thunderstorm that disrupts all communication with the outside world. It’s also imperative that the action take place at night.

As with “Identity,” it’s not necessarily a house that’s isolated. In the case of director Rene Clair’s 1945 thriller “And Then There Were None,” based on the Agatha Christie novel, diverse individuals find themselves isolated on a small island from which there is no escape. In the 1951 sci-fi thriller “The Thing,” an angry, insatiable alien is systematically eliminating scientists at an Arctic outpost during a massive snowstorm.

The isolation can also come in the form of a character’s handicap or injury, as in the case of Jimmy Stewart’s broken leg in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 “Rear Window,” Audrey Hepburn’s blindness in 1967’s “Wait Until Dark” and Dorothy McGuire’s deaf-muteness in 1946’s “The Spiral Staircase.”

These thrillers often explore games people play and what happens when they go awry, as in 1958’s “The House on Haunted Hill,” 1972’s “Sleuth” and 1982’s “Deathtrap.” Still others utilize a supernatural subplot usually involving ghosts (“The Haunting,” “The Innocents,” “The Others”).

One of the most bizarre supernatural twists can be found in the 1930 thriller “Outward Bound” and its 1944 remake, “Between Two Worlds,” about people aboard a ship. No one in the group knows anyone else or how they got there or where they are going. Eventually it’s revealed that they are all dead and traveling to their final destinations in the netherworld.

In today’s release, among the reluctant guests facing an “Identity” crisis at the creepy motel are John Cusack, who plays a limo driver who was once a Los Angeles police detective. Ray Liotta plays a police detective transporting a vicious prisoner (Jake Busey). Amanda Peet is a Vegas hooker who just wants to quit the business and buy an orange grove in her native Florida. Of course, it isn’t long before the guests are being killed off one by one.

Director James Mangold (“Kate & Leopold,” “Girl, Interrupted”) says he was drawn to the film because he is a fan of the single-location thriller. “The sense of strangers being brought together, the sense of a very specific location are all kind of wonderful conventions of the genre. One of the great things that came from movies when movies were shot on sound stages [was] this wonderful tradition, those almost theatrical traditions of the single-location thriller. It could be argued that some are slightly stage-bound in a sense of feeling a bit like a play, but a lot of them are incredibly cinematic endeavors -- in fact, more cinematic and passionate in the use of cinema languages than movies that travel all over the place.”

Rain, adds Mangold, is a great cinematic tool because it helps obscure what the audience senses. “Fear and anxiety in and of themselves are really by definition the denial of our senses,” he says. “The inability of our senses that we normally rely upon to give us the answers we have. I have a cat named Chuck, and Chuck freaks out when the wind blows because he can no longer use his ears the way he normally can. If we wake up in the middle of the night and the house is dark and there is sound outside and the rain is falling -- we can’t be sure what it is. The presence of nature and the presence of wind and rain and sounds generated by nature make it almost impossible for us to understand what is out there and renders our senses useless.

“The reason I think so often movies of this type enjoy taking place in storms and at night is that, in a sense, it puts layer upon layer of gauze between our heroes and the threat. They have to keep pushing aside a door or a curtain or a sound or illumination in order to get to this thing that is unknowable.”

Producer Cathy Konrad (“Scream”) says she never tires of this genre. “I love puzzles,” she says, “just the idea of training your mind to observe the world that is represented to you in the film. I love that kind of storytelling, the unfolding of the narrative. Jim was very fascinated by the idea of how much we can make out of this one place.”

During one scene in “Identity,” the cast point out that their dilemma is very much akin to “And Then There Were None.” Mangold says that reference “is, in a sense, a tip of the hat to one of the films that started all of this. But it is also in a way an acknowledgment that we are going to be beyond that.

“One of the interesting things about the thriller in general is that it is the only genre where the contract between the filmmakers and the audience is one in which the audience really expects that the movie be unlike any other. Part of the deliciousness of the experience for an audience watching a thriller is that the story itself ... will be twisted in new ways.”

It’s also important, says Mangold, to pick the right moments to reveal the clues in order to achieve the ultimate jolt.

“You reveal these bread crumbs, you lay them down one at a time very carefully,” he says. “It’s like music. Writer Michael Cooney and I had had a great time distributing the clues. The story and the tale and the telling all become the stars of the film.”