The Hammonds bought their Mississauga home because they loved the quaint neighbourhood.

Hollywood knocked on the door because it seemed like a good house for a religious fanatic and her telekinetic teenage daughter.

MGM’s modern take on the 1976 horror film Carrie, starring Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz, was shot at several locations in Mississauga last summer.

Scouts find shooting locations — schools, hospitals and homes — through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s online location library. The Hammonds’ one-and-a-half-storey home was not listed — but their neighbourhood is. Location manager David McIlroy said his scouts looked at 60 to 70 houses before choosing the Hammonds’ for its look — a peaked roof with the window in the middle.

“When they said it was Carrie, I was like, oh no, that’s a bit of bad karma,” says Victoria Hammond, who doesn’t particularly like blood, guts and gore, but decided, along with her husband, Mathew — well, why not?

To shoot there, the production company had to get neighbourhood “buy in” — in this case 80 per cent approval, as per the local film office.

“Oh. My. God,” are some of the first effusive words spoken by neighbour Jennifer MacBrien when asked about last summer. “There’s only one other time the street had this much fun.” (A goodbye potluck.)

Neighbours got to know each other, the film crew, the Moretz family, and even Moretz’s pocket dog. Julianne Moore once waved at a group lurking quietly nearby. For three magical weeks, MacBrien scheduled her bookkeeping work — some of which she does for her husband — around the shooting.

“He’d say, ‘Aren’t you going to work today?’ I’d say, ‘Oh no, I can’t — they’re filming the blood dress scene, I have to be around for that!’” she recalls. “Poor man didn’t get a proper dinner in weeks, because they filmed a lot at night.”

The fictional Carrie is supposed to live “on the wrong side of the tracks,” Hammond says. Their neighbourhood was decorated with old mailboxes, metal garbage cans and bicycles. One house that looked too modern was camouflaged with large trees and a foreclosure sign.

“We’re an industry of smoke and mirrors,” explains Carmen Ford, of the Mississauga Film Office.

Toronto has long been the centre of Ontario’s film and television industry, but other cities, such as Hamilton and Mississauga, supply a lot of different “looks” for domestic and international shoots. Hamilton still has many industrial locations, while Toronto has lost some with gentrification. Mississauga is known to be versatile and, of course, close to downtown studios.

Ontario competes with the likes of London, Sydney and Los Angeles to land international and domestic projects. The Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, is responsible for luring the film industry to Ontario. Last year, film and television companies spent $1.28 billion shooting in the province and accounted for 29,000 full-time direct and indirect jobs, according to the OMDC. A lot is at stake.

“We get contacted by a production, for example, who says: ‘We have this script, we’re thinking of shooting in Toronto, we’re also looking at other places, what can you do?’” says Ontario film commissioner Donna Zuchlinski.

Zuchlinski has been at the OMDC since it was called the OFDC (for film, instead of media), in 1987. Back then, it could take a week or longer to get a location package together. Negatives had to be processed, images had to be pasted together. Now, there is an online library of more than 11,000 locations searchable by type, style and keyword.

“Some are not what a location is, but what it could be, like ‘police station looks.’ It could be any different kind of building, but if a scout has identified that it would make a good police station, we flag it that way,” she explains.

Let’s say you’re looking for an “European eastern bloc” feel. The catalogue suggests the Mississauga Central Library (which also, allegedly, looks like Los Angeles), the residential towers of St. James Town, or the Estonian Apartments on Kingston Rd. Anyone can submit their homes to the database — but only industry and OMDC staff can see those entries because of privacy concerns.

The OMDC also keeps a list of “short term” properties available for all manner of carnage.

“If you think about it, if you buy a teardown, wouldn’t you rather get someone to blow it up and get paid for it, than pay for someone to tear it down?” says Marsha Herle, the digital locations library team leader, sitting in a cubicle covered with yellow sticky notes.

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Once a production decides to film in Ontario, the OMDC backs away unless it’s needed. Permits come from the local film office and a fee to shoot is negotiated between the homeowner and the production company.

It took three weeks to transform the Hammond house into a home of terrifying secrets. Hammond, who is expecting twins, has a collection of photos that show the work: the entire front of her home removed, the brand new deck dismantled. Their front door was moved to the left, windows were installed, fake dormers were added to make the home bigger. The final touch was colour — they wanted a baby blue house — so the siding was painted.

“I remember speaking with the painter, and saying, ‘You guys could have done this in a studio; why did you do it in a real house?’ He said ‘It’s the surroundings, look at the streets, we couldn’t replicate that in the studio,” she says.

The house was only used for external shots — the interior was created on a sound stage. The Hammonds were compensated for the use of their house, put up in a nearby hotel, and given a per diem for food. They came back often, because there are very few chances in life to watch Carrie being asked to the prom in your driveway.

“It was such a fantastic way to get to know our neighbours,” Hammond says. “We didn’t have access to our house, so if we were watching the shooting, we’d run into our neighbour’s house to get a drink or use the washroom.”

Near the end, a crane was brought in to drop small foam-like rocks on the home for a key scene. The next morning, MacBrien woke to see the Hammond house strategically “destroyed,” with hunks of wood through the roof, dormer windows broken, and rocks everywhere.

The mix of telekinesis and cruel teenage bullying was bad for Carrie, but good for the Hammonds, who received new siding in the deal. Everything else was returned to normal — with the exception of a few changes they liked, like the door. Neighbours were compensated for any direct inconveniences.

“I can’t imagine these people being any more considerate of us,” says MacBrien.

When the shooting ended, she was a little forlorn to see her fictional mailbox disappear.

“It was like all of a sudden you go through withdrawal. There was nothing to do every day anymore,” she says. “I had to go to work and get caught up, and it was no fun.”

The movie will be in theatres in October — when the Hammonds will be busy with two newborns. Some in the neighbourhood hope to have a viewing party at some point.

“Maybe a couple of us will do it for her, to congratulate her,” MacBrien says. “They used her house, now she’s having babies, the least we could do is give her a party.”

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