Severance: Explore Real-Life Locations That Built Lumon's World

7. Bayonne, New Jersey – The Severance Elevator Exterior

The streets of Bayonne, New Jersey, serve as the setting for the crucial entry point into Lumon’s world—the ominous elevator that marks the boundary between an employee’s severed and unsevered consciousness. On the surface, these ordinary city streets might seem like an unlikely choice for a show rooted in sci-fi horror, but the location’s gritty realism creates a stark and chilling contrast to the sterile, artificial world inside Lumon’s walls. In these scenes, we watch as Mark and his fellow outies navigate a mundane, everyday environment—walking down streets, entering buildings, and taking what should be a normal elevator ride. However, this seemingly ordinary commute masks an unnerving transformation, as the characters step into the elevator’s unremarkable metal confines and emerge as completely different people. The choice of Bayonne’s weathered, industrial landscape adds to the theme of duality that runs through Severance. While the city streets feel real, flawed, and alive, they also carry an eerie detachment, as though they, too, are part of a carefully controlled illusion. The elevator itself becomes a metaphor for corporate control, a place where personal agency is erased in seconds, and the person stepping out is no longer the same as the one who entered. The inconspicuous setting of this transition scene emphasizes the hidden horror of severance, reinforcing the show’s disturbing implication: that the most terrifying prisons aren’t always the ones we recognize—they’re the ones hidden in plain sight.