How about a subset of Death Valley, the Racetrack Playa: a flat plain with a surface cracked into little tile-like segments, studded with boulders sitting at the end of movement tracks. The name would need some improvement, though–“Lake of the Sailing Stones”, perhaps.
I offer Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. Really. No, REALLY. 
J.
The Great Dismal Swamp.
I just wrote (and submitted) a fantasy story for children set in the Dead Sea.
The Wave would be an awesome place to film a science fiction movie. Good luck getting the permits, since they only allow a handful of people to visit each day.
Something about the name Superstition Mountains, AZ that seems like there’s some, otherworldly story around it.
Hah! I’ve lived in Uranium City. Dystopia, perhaps. Futuristic? Never. There are something like 25 permanent residents, and most of the place is overgrown. There’s no fire department, so when something burns down the locals just gather to watch.
io9 takes on the subject from time to time with articles such as The Abandoned Spacecraft City of San Zhr, or if you want to live in Cruise’s house in Oblivion for real, residences with a sci-fi look.
That and the bountiful subject of worldwide ghost towns.
Unlikely candidates would be:
Luton, from a Space 1999 episode ‘The Rules of Luton’
Dunwich, an important British port before it was destroyed by coastal erosion, from H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’. That was probably before he turned his attentions to making Brown Sauce… (Sorry, no cite).
??
Well, except Lovecraft’s Dunwich was in Massachusetts, and didn’t really exist.
A number of folks have suggested what’s now called “America’s Stonehenge” 9originally “Mystery Hill”) in North Salem, NH as the inspiration for “THe Devil’s Hop-Yard” in The Dunwich Horror, and at least one has gone as far as drawing a map correlating scenes from the story with the site. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi disagrees, saying Lovecraft hadn’t yet visited Mystery Hill before he wrote the story, but agrees that one of the stone structure complexes in New England – like Gungywamp – may have inspired the story.
Properly shot, Mystery Hill/America’s Stonehenge could be visually interesting for a movie. But it’s not really all that impressive, to tell the truth.
Holy crap ! That crater in Darvaza is insane !!! I have never heard of such a place/thing. Hard to believe no one has included that in a movie yet.
Oh, there’s bigger craters than that. Here’s another good site in Arizona… Meteor Crater. It’s about a mile wide.
Yeah, but Meteor Crater hasn’t been on fire for the past forty years.
I’ve been to the Meteor crater outside Winslow. And though I thoroughly enjoyed/appreciated it, it would have been a LOT more impressive if it was on fire !
Well, Luton, the planet in ‘The Rules of Luton’ doesn’t exist either.
Unfortunately, Luton in South Bedfordshire does…
Precisely my point.
I climbed Devil’s Tower in 2012, and when I would tell people about it, they generally fell into two categories:
- those too young to have seen the movie so they had never heard of it
- those who had seen the movie but was convinced it was “created” (pre-CGI) for the movie (a prop).
I was amazed how many people didn’t know it was a real structure.
The title of the thread:
“Which real world locales would you use in sci-fi/fantasy?”
The first line of the thread:
“Which real place names conjure up sci-fi vistas or fantasy settings for you?”
Shall we call it a draw and blame An Gadaí?
Buzludzha. An abandoned mountaintop Communist Party headquarters in Bulgaria.