The owner of the mansion made famous by the black comedy “Saltburn” has complained after fans of the hit film descended on the property.
“I never envisaged the amount of interest there would be,” Charles Stopford Sackville told the Mail on Sunday after security staff were called in to patrol the Northamptonshire estate. “It’s quite weird.”
The stately 700-year-old Drayton House is the backdrop for many of the most “shocking and debauched moments” of the film, which stars Barry Keoghan as a young man who becomes fixated with a fellow Oxford student. It’s not open to the public, except for a limited footpath, but it has been “invaded by selfie-hunters and social media influencers”, said the paper. “Hordes of movie fans” have trespassed on the grounds “to take selfies or shoot videos for their social media accounts”.
The rise of ‘set-jetting’
“Set-jetting – flying off to see where a favourite movie or series was filmed – has long been a small but important tourism niche,” said The Observer, after international visitors travelled far and wide last year to see where “Wonka”, “Napoleon” and “The Crown” were filmed.
Almost a third of tourists coming to Britain said they wanted to visit locations from their TV and movie favourites, according to VisitBritain. Seren Welch, a screen tourism consultant, told The Observer that the UK had benefited from the phenomenon. British viewers are also keen to visit locations around their country.
Indeed, the people who run the local pub near Drayton House were “not complaining” about the “Saltburn” tourist boom, said The Times. “The Snooty Fox in Lowick has seen a huge surge in trade, thanks to the streams of fans making a pilgrimage to the site.”
A cafe featured in Netflix’s hit adaptation of bestselling novel “One Day” has also experienced an increase in visitors, even though it is only on screen for 10 seconds. La Maison Highbury has seen “endless queues” since the series dropped, said the Daily Mail. The effect could be even bigger on 15 July, the eponymous day in the romantic drama’s storyline.
The ‘invasion is just too much’
The “long-awaited” fourth season of Netflix hit “Emily in Paris” has begun filming in the French capital, and the reaction in many of the key locations was “far less positive” than that of fans of the star Lily Collins, said The Telegraph.
Locals “have made their contempt known”, with the actress’s face “scribbled out” on billboards advertising the series. Staff at one key cafe from the show said they were “sick to the back teeth” of Emily. The influx of set-jetters has also caused crowding and inflated prices, city dwellers told the paper.
Locations that Emily visits in the series “go viral” in real life, with tourists going there to photograph themselves in the newly iconic spots. “All these TikTokers and content creators come in making a spectacle of themselves, and they treat Paris like a pretty backdrop,” said culture writer Katherine McGrath.
Back in England, the set of the perennial Christmas staple “The Holiday” has proved more popular than the plot. Fans of the rom-com “have been flocking” to the tiny Surrey village of Shere where it was filmed, said HuffPost last December, to re-enact scenes made famous by Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz and Jude Law.
But “locals are far from impressed” by the tourists, who residents say pack the high street every winter, forcing them to stay inside.
“It’s become so bad now that we want to move,” one anonymous villager told The Sun. The “invasion is just too much”.