Where Was Alice, Sweet Alice Filmed? Inside Its Paterson Museum Location
The warehouse sequence in Alice, Sweet Alice was filmed in the Thomas Rogers Building at 2 Market Street in Paterson, which has housed the Paterson Museum since 1982. The building supplied both the warehouse and the attic used for the killer-reveal material.
What happens there on screen
Spoiler warning. This section describes the ending of the film. Skip to the next heading if you have not seen it.
The building carries the climax. The masked killer attacks Dom, Alice’s father; the killer’s identity is revealed; and Dom is pushed to his death. The attic is where the reveal happens. That is the whole of what the sourced record establishes about the location, and we are not going to reconstruct the rest of the plot around it.
Released in 1976, the film has also circulated as Communion and Holy Terror. It is regularly cited as one of the earliest American slashers, and it is the film in which a young Brooke Shields appears early in her career.
The real Thomas Rogers Building
The building is the restored erecting shop of the Rogers Locomotive and Machine Works, one of the major nineteenth-century manufacturers that made Paterson an industrial centre. An erecting shop is where locomotives were assembled: tall, wide, heavily built, with the clear span and roof height that assembly demanded. That architecture is the reason the location works, and it is why the production needed to add so little.
The Paterson Museum itself was organised in 1925 and spent its early decades elsewhere, beginning in the assembly room of the Danforth Public Library and later moving to a carriage house. It relocated into the restored Rogers building in 1982, six years after the film was released. It is owned and maintained by the City of Paterson, and its collections cover the city’s industrial and technological history: silk and textiles, locomotives, Colt firearms and the Holland submarines.
One date we are not publishing: some accounts give a construction year in the early 1870s for the building. Neither the museum’s own site nor the other sources we opened states a construction year, so we leave it out rather than repeat a figure we could not confirm.
Real location versus on-screen location
| In real life | On screen |
|---|---|
| Restored nineteenth-century locomotive erecting shop | An ominous industrial warehouse |
| Home of the Paterson Museum since 1982 | An abandoned building in the film’s world |
| A preserved civic collection of city history | The setting for the film’s killer reveal and Dom’s death |
| An attic closed to the general public | The attic where the killer is unmasked |
Worth stating plainly, because the framing gets repeated: the building is not abandoned. It is a working municipal museum. The abandonment belongs to the film.
Can visitors see the location?
Partly. The Paterson Museum publishes visiting hours of Monday to Friday, 9:30am to 4:30pm, and lists itself as closed Saturday and Sunday. Admission is a suggested donation. Walking into the museum means walking into the building the film used.
The attic is a different matter. It is not normally open to the public, and ordinary museum admission does not include access to it. Nothing here should be read as permission to enter closed areas of a municipal building.
Check before travelling. The museum currently notes on its own site that it has no air conditioning and may close to the public unexpectedly in high temperatures, and asks visitors to call ahead on 973-321-1260. Hours, exhibits and access can change at any time, and the museum’s own site is the authority, not this page.
Upcoming event: September 13, 2026
The organiser currently lists a 50th anniversary screening of Alice, Sweet Alice on Sunday, September 13, 2026 at the Paterson Museum, 2 Market Street, including a pre-screening tour of the attic that is otherwise closed to the public.
As listed by the organiser: check-in at 6:00pm, the attic tour from 6:45pm to 7:15pm, and the film from 7:30pm to 9:15pm. General admission is listed at $40, with $25 for Paterson residents. Autograph signings are priced separately from admission.
Why the location worked
The following is our own analysis, not a documented statement from the production.
A low-budget 1970s horror film needed a warehouse that felt genuinely dangerous, and set construction of that scale was out of reach. What Paterson offered was the real thing: an industrial building whose proportions could not be faked cheaply. Height and volume are what sell menace in a space like that, and they were already there. So was the texture — masonry, ironwork, the accumulated wear of a working building — which is exactly the quality that painted flats fail to reproduce.
The attic compounds it. After the openness of the main floor, a confined roof space inverts the geometry and takes away the room to run. Whether the filmmakers reasoned it through that way or simply found a building they could get into, the architecture is doing the work.
Sources
- Local authorityThe Paterson Museum, official site: building history, the 1982 relocation, visiting hours and admission
- Local authorityCity of Paterson, museum department page
- ReportingOn Set Cinema, 50th anniversary event listing: the filming location, the attic and the September 13, 2026 schedule
- ReportingFangoria, coverage of the On Set Cinema screening
Information checked August 16, 2026. Building history, hours and admission come from the museum’s own site; the scene description, attic detail and all event information come from the organiser’s listing and are attributed to them throughout. The City of Paterson department page returned no readable content when we tried to open it, so nothing on this page rests on it. A construction year for the building is deliberately omitted. Nothing here implies the building is available to productions. Spot something wrong? Send a correction.
Related research
This guide is researched and reviewed by Sam Moskowitz, a New Jersey-based producer and DP who runs BLL Films. Sam’s production and cinematography credits include work for Netflix, History Channel, Hulu, the NFL and Google. Every changing fact on this page carries a verification date; see how this site is researched for the full process.