Humperdinck's Castle

Our hero, Westley, may not spend a great deal of time at the castle, swooping in at the very end as he does, but it's pretty much the central location. It's where Buttercup is imprisoned, where our villain resides, and where all of the climactic, final confrontations go down. Plus, it's a castle. How do you top a castle? (Answer: with turrets, but that's being really literal.)

In a way, the castle is a bigger, more inanimate version of Humperdinck himself. It's tall, powerful, well-protected, and—because it's surrounded by guards who won't let it fight its own fights—a major coward on top of it. It's as impenetrable to (most) outsiders as Humperdinck is impenetrable to things like, oh, say basic human emotions. Sometimes it's hard to tell which one is made of stone.

Because it's so grand and imposing, and is our villain's own home turf, it becomes the perfect setting for a standoff between Westley and the Humpster. What greater odds could be stacked against him? He's in the bowels of a hostile environment, barely able to move his body, cornered by his arch rival with nowhere to run. And yet he wins anyway. Gotta love fairytales.

The Fire Swamp

A dark, damp swamp inhabited by large, vicious creatures. Trees so thick you can barely tell you're outdoors. Intermittent bursts of flame, and the ever-present chance you could be swallowed up into the earth.

Yeah. This is not the place you would want to go on your honeymoon.

And yet, this is a honeymoon (of sorts) for Westley and Buttercup. Well, a reunion, anyway. But unlike most couples who get back together after a long separation, they don't have much time to chill on a beach or take a leisurely stroll hand-in-hand. Immediately upon being reunited, they're rolling pell-mell down a hill and then scurrying into the Fire Swamp, a place from which no one, apparently, ever emerges. Could just be us, but the beach thing sounds better.

Of course, our heroic duo eventually get their happy ending, but they have to go through many trials—like those offered by the swamp—before they are granted unfettered happiness. And you're familiar with comedy's "rule of three"? Well, it seems to apply here, too. When Westley first shows up after being assumed dead, he has to defeat three opponents—Inigo, Fezzik and Vizzini. In the Fire Swamp, he and Buttercup have to avoid three dangers—the fire, the sand, and the ROUS. There are even three mentions of The Princess Bride being a "kissing book" before the grandson is finally cool with it. And three times two is six, which is how many fingers Count Rugen has…all right, we're probably getting carried away with the numerology now.

But perhaps the most important aspect of the swamp is that it's one of the only times we actually get to see Westley and Buttercup together. There isn't much on-screen interaction between them prior to him leaving town at the beginning, and they don't see each other again until right before the end of the flick. So, as much as we think of this movie as a love story between W & B, this is really the only scene where we get to watch them as a couple.

Hopefully their marriage will be a little more low-key. We can't see the two of them really wanting to go for a daily morning swamp hike after tying the knot.

Miracle Max's House

Throughout The Princess Bride, we're taken to locations that come right out and tell us how we should feel about them. "The Cliffs of Insanity." "The Pit of Despair." But then we've got this little thatched hut, and it doesn't really have a name. Although, if it did, it might be called "The Place Where Miracles Happen."

Okay, in retrospect, we can see now why they didn't hire us as script supervisor.

But that's what Miracle Max's place is. If, in this fictional world, there was no such thing as a miracle, our movie would be over the moment Humperdinck turns the Machine up to "50," killing our protagonist. It also probably would have caused the film's Rotten Tomatoes rating to take a serious hit. Who kills the hero halfway through the movie? That's messed up, if you ask us.

Fortunately, miracles do exist in Westley's world, and Max's hut is where the magic happens. On one hand it seems like a bit of an easy out—you could imagine that no matter what troubles our heroes ran into, a miraculous solution could always be devised to keep things running smoothly. But because this story is a fairytale, and the rules of the real world do not necessarily apply, all we really want is for there to be a bright, beautiful bow tied onto the end of it, and we don't care all that much how we get there. After all, when you're dealing at the same time killer eels, mammoth vermin and giants, it's not like "reality" is your primary concern.