Allow an architect to explain what makes some of film’s most famous haunted houses look scary
Architect Michael Wyetzner looks at houses from Psycho, Get Out, Beetlejuice, and more
Film Features Haunted
Michael Wyetzner is an experienced architect and we’re only a week out from Halloween, so it only makes sense to ask the man to explain what, exactly, makes a haunted house look creepy. In order to do just that, Architectural Digest presented Wyetzner with a few of the most famous scary homes in horror film history and had him discuss their design.
Wyetzner starts off with Psycho’s Bates Motel, a Victorian home that “sets the stage for houses of horror in film” going forward. He notes that the Motel was inspired by Edward Hopper’s House By The Railroad and evokes a “symbol of decaying America” before moving on to discuss Beetlejuice’s house, which was renovated from another Victorian house into a trendy ‘80s deconstructed home.
As he goes on, Wyetzner digs into The House On Haunted Hill’s blend of modern and ancient “temple-like forms” and The Shining’s enormous Overlook Hotel (which isn’t really a house, but gets by on reputation). For the most modern example, the video highlights the unassuming house from Get Out and its combination of Cape Cod and plantation manor design.
Almost all of these buildings, Wyetzner notes, are set atop a hill and have “really deep, high roofs” that hint that they hide a big, spooky attic. Given how hard it is to find a first home in 2022, they’re all also places that would probably sell very quickly if priced well—no matter how often the walls bleed and demonic wailing echoes through the pipes.
[via Digg]
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14 Comments
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The architecture and geography of horror fiction is a very niche subject that I find extremely fascinating. As someone with a bad sense of direction and spatial relations on the best of days I’m very susceptible to purposely odd/discomforting design. I’ve googled the subject before and there are *maybe* two books about it.
Have you seen Room 237, the documentary about people obsessed with The Shining? There is a fascinating part where they explain how some of the layout of the hotel is intentionally impossible, which subconsciously makes you feel something is just a bit… off. The example I remember the best, because I remember feeling it was off when I first saw the film but couldn’t figure out why, was at the start of the film where Jack arrives to have his job interview. The receptionist leads him down a big hall toward the manager’s office, and you see the hall continues into the distance. Then, when they step into the office, there are exterior windows with sunlight coming in – but if the hallway continued into the distance, then there should be no way for there to be windows in that room. There’s a few more examples in the flick, really interesting, yet another layer of my favourite film.
Yes! I have feelings about The Shining as a film (it’s a technically great and disturbing film but a disappointing adaptation that deeply misses the point of the source novel and I HATE Nicholson as Torrance because he’s a loon from the jump) but its use of space to create discomfort is fantastic.Although I didn’t particularly like the new Hellraiser movie I DO like Bruckner’s tendency to emphasize odd architecture. There was some of that in Hellraiser and a fair bit in The Night House. And I really liked all the hidden details in the architecture of the Netflix Haunting of Hill House. Even something like the long hotel hallways in the original Ghostbusters is pretty great.
That movie had some really interesting, fun bits. One I remember was in the movie, when the poor chef is driving through the storm, he passes a car flipped on the side of the road – that car is the make and model that Jack drives in the book, as a subtle fuck you to King. I love petty stuff like that.
I didn’t know that – that’s great
I’ve noticed this becomes more apparent during the climactic chase, first we follow Nicholson running out the door, then we follow Duvall but it’s not the same somehow?
It’s so funny to me that the routine explanation for why haunted houses in fiction are Victorian is just that they were the McMansions of their day and went to shit after the Depression.Assuming we’re not extinct by 2122, I hope haunted house fiction is still around and they’re all set in gaudy 1999 Palo Alto estates with off-center porticos and plaster columns and in-ceiling speakers connected to a broken stereo amp in some unpainted closet.
And the speakers are streaming somebody’s awful playlist even though the Internet and electricity were cut off years ago!
“The music, it’s in the walls! Something about….ants marching, and crashing into me…”
“Architect”, gimme a break that’s not realthat’s just a thing they made up to sell romcoms
Ha! But seriously they are real (have one in the family), but the job is way less glamorous than in the movies. Not so much designing brilliant houses and skyscrapers and a lot more designing strip malls and renovations to schools.
I’m from a city with whole neighbourhoods of crumbling and decaying Victorian mansions. Most of them were converted in the 1970s right through to the modern day into plush new apartment buildings (“Oh, my bathroom used to be the maid’s bedroom! Don’t mind the shrieking though, she’s not used to seeing a man’s willy!”) but they still retain an air of decay about them. One of the reasons for that is that the majority of them were built from sandstone which, as some of you know, doesn’t do well when exposed to pollution and rainwater (or even polluted rainwater!) What were once clean-edged lintels and carefully sculpted caryatids become broken and those sculpted caryatids take on an air of menace. Funny thing though – the Edwardian (and some late-Victorian) architects realised that the air in my city wasn’t playing fair with houses that were only built, what, fifty, sixty years prior and thus there’s a dramatic shift away from exterior decoration and an explosion in interior decoration. Even the lowliest working class tenement can have the most gorgeous tilework you’ll have ever seen…and it still looks creepy under the right conditions. Want to see what I mean?We call this a “wally close” (wally, in Scots english, meaning made from china) and they were pretty damned common in Glasgow (I say “were” because we lost a lot of them during the War and the post-war years). This, believe it or not, is pretty typical for an old tenement building in Glasgow – it was tiled because it was easy to keep clean (every household in the close would take turns in cleaning the close from top to bottom every week), the floors were usually ashlar (dressed stone, essentially). The biggest surprise though was what you can see in that picture: stained glass. Glasgow was an industrial city but also a centre of the creative arts in the Victorian and Edwardian era (go a little out of the city and you come to Paisley, which is where the name “paisley print” comes from (even though that pattern ain’t Scottish!)) and we specialised in creating things of utter beauty from the most banal things: windows, wrought iron, wood, you name it. Stained glass windows in a close wasn’t uncommon. They were also huge (often six feet tall, though I do remember living in a tenement in the Kelvinbridge area that had windows in excess of 12 feet in height and cleaning those suckers wasn’t as scary as you think. Our windows are designed to be opened inwards so you can clean ‘em with ease).That said…there are buildings where the beauty of the interior plays against you. Go to the oldest parts of Glasgow’s Royal Infimary where, yes, they have ceramic-tiled walkways and corridors and stained glass and it’s almost too easy to imagine seeing a ghost or ghoul coming toward you (and it doesn’t fucking help that the Infirmary is sited next to the buried Molendinar Burn which is allegedly the most haunted river in Glasgow and when you take the ancient belief that the ghosts of the recently deceased use rivers and burns to travel to the next life and then when you consider that right next to the Infirmary is a goddamned necropolis…) It also plays against you when you realise that the buildings of today are more often than not constructed using machinery whereas in the past teams of men would put those buildings together. And, in some cases, you get bloody told about X dying on Y spot where a block of sandstone fell on his head and that doesn’t help at all, Lorraine…And one thing that 19th Century architecture has – and this is relevant to British, Irish, French, American, Canadian, you name it – is that it was often built to be imposing and sited in ways to make you crane your head back to look up at it and marvel (or be intimidated) at the person who built it. It’s one of the reasons I can’t buy any ghost stories or films set in, say, Art Deco villas or buildings. They’re just too damned beautiful – playful, even. Now, 1970s modernist. Oh, hell yeah. We’ve got our own “walls o’ shit” building here in Glasgow. I’m almost scared to put up a picture.
He should’ve done Hill House from The Haunting (1963), A classic of gothic horror design. BTW you can now stay at Ettington Park, the house that exteriors of the movie were filmed.