After scouting many places in the Central Florida area, director Laura Lopez and production designer Rachael Boarman stumbled upon the old Sunnyland Hospital Complex in Orlando Florida. The Sunnyland or Sunland Hospitals were a chain of Florida mental health facilities that specialized in children. Most of these facilities were closed down by 1983 due to various health and safety reasons.
The original Sunnyland Orlando was built as a Tuberculosis Hospital in the 1930s. The main hospital building was town down in the 1990s, but the nurses’ quarters/administrative building still remains near the original site. This massive three story structure had been abandoned for over twenty years. Currently it is owned by the Department of Juvenile Justice and The Health Services of Florida who have used the building for twenty years as a storage facility for a ton of things such as metal scraps, desks, a room full of toilets and doors. Please check out our production design page for before and after pictures. Rachael was able to take this massive junk filled location and turn it into a wonderful that looks beautiful in the film Acts of Mercy. Our cast and crew had no electricity or running water in this location, meaning we had no air conditioning during the sticky hot Florida summer.
Fortunately we were able to get permission to shoot at this location (it was a long process dealing with the State of Florida and the different departments). This site is known as one of the most haunted placed in Central Florida and our crew had a few eerie experiences during our nearly two moths working at the location. We will be posting some of their encounters over the next few months.
We have included some links to websites that talk about the hauntings at Sunland please check them out.