Bill Murray’s mansion in the comedy classic Zombieland is up for grabs for a mere $19.9 million.
The 2009 spoof of the horror genre—the film’s four stars, including Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Woody Harrelson, are the last known survivors of a zombie apocalypse—takes place all over the make-believe map. But before they wind up at the supposedly zombie-free Pacific Playland amusement park, they visit Murray’s house in Hollywood.
Only the 40,000-square-foot (3,720-sq-m) mansion isn’t in Hollywood. It’s isn’t even in California. It’s in Atlanta, sitting on two acres (0.8 ha) on West Paces Ferry Road. And with the approach of Halloween, that annual homage to ghosts and goblins, the fact that the place is now for sale causes one to wonder about other scary filmdom houses and their actual locations.
Places like the house in Nightmare on Elm Street, the 1984 slasher film by Wes Craven. The first film in the Nightmare series, it featured Johnny Depp in his movie debut. It also featured a murderous Robert England, aka Freddie Kruger, who slashed the house’s occupants with his razor glove as they slept.
If the three-bedroom house could talk, it would scream bloody murder. And it would tell you it’s not located in the fictional midwestern town of Springwood, Ohio, but rather on Genesee Avenue in Los Angeles, according to Zillow, the online real estate marketplace.
The townhouse featured in The Exorcist was in Georgetown, a ritzy section in the nation’s capital. The movie about demonic possession was released in 1973, but just the thought of Linda Blair’s head turning 360 degrees still brings shivers to the spine.
The film was based on a book by William Peter Blatty, which itself was based on an actual exorcism. But the ritual didn’t take place on Prospect Street, N.W., where the movie was made, but rather in a long-lost residence in the close-by Maryland suburb of Mount Ranier.
In Thriller—often called the greatest music video of all time—Michael Jackson and his goulish friends break into song and dance, and then he chases his date—former Playboy centerfold Ola Ray—into a Victorian house. The house, of course, plays second fiddle, as movie haunts tend to do, and the video makes no mention of its location. But Zillow found it on a small lot on Carroll Avenue in Los Angeles.
Not far away in Pasadena stands the Omega Beta Zeta House from Scream 2, another Wes Craven slasher flick, this one starring Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Liev Schreiber, and Neve Campbell.
The 6,500-square-foot (604-sq-m) house on East Crary Street sits on 1.5 acres (0.6 ha) and has seven bedrooms and four full bathrooms, and is fondly remembered by other actors in the movie—Jada Pinkett Smith , Jerry O’Connell, Omar Epps, Timothy Olyphant, and Sarah Michelle Gellar, all of whom met an early demise.
Across the continent, folks who remember Rosemary’s Baby, the 1968 horror film directed by Roman Polanski, can find Rosemary Woodhouse’s apartment building on West 72nd Street in New York City.
In this movie, Mia Farrow played a pregnant woman whose “loving” hubby, John Cassavetes, makes a deal to allow his eccentric neighbors to use her child as a human sacrifice in their occult rituals in exchange for success as an actor. But the building, the Dakota, is probably far better remembered as the place where Beatle John Lennon lived and was killed.
Both Halloween and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were filmed on location in southern California. So, kiddies, it may be wise to go elsewhere for treats.
Halloween, a 1978 independent film directed and produced by John Carpenter and featuring Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut, was set in the fictional midwestern town of Haddonfield, Illinois. But white-masked Michael Myers actually did his thing in a 2,600-square-foot (241-sq-m), five-bedroom house on North Orange Grove Avenue in Los Angeles.
In Buffy, cheerleader Buffy Summers, played by Kristy Swanson, is asked to defend the world against vampires. Exterior shots where she sleeps were of a palm-studded four-bedroom house on Cota Avenue in Torrance. And just down the street sits Torrance High, aka Buffy’s high school, Sunnydale.
The witch’s house used in the 1957 film The Undead and in early silent films was built during the 1920s in a movie studio. But trick-or-treaters be warned—it was later moved to a lot on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills, where Zillow found it as a private residence.
The place featured in the 1959 B-movie House on Haunted Hill might just be the only house of any architectural significance to ever be featured in a horror film. Here, Vincent Price pays guests to stay one night in a house where body parts lurk and the ceiling drips blood.
But the only thing that really drips from this place is history, for the exterior shots were of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924 masterpiece Ennis House, which is perfectly sited on a hill in Los Feliz, California, with sweeping views all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Clint Eastwood’s horror/drama Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil featured Kevin Spacey and John Cusack, as well as a cameo by Uga V, the University of Georgia’s English bulldog mascot. Also making a cameo appearance is the mansion on Bull Street in Savannah where the party never ends. By the way, God only knows what roman numeral Uga is up to now. But in the 1997 film, V was played by his father, Uga IV.
In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,—another psychological thriller, this one starring the legendary Bette Davis and equally legendary Joan Crawford—the five-bedroom house used for exterior shots can be found on South McCadden Place in Los Angeles. The final scene on the beach, however, was filmed in Malibu.
Dead Again, a 1991 reincarnation film, might come back to haunt its actors, among them Emma Thompson, Andy Garcia, and Robin Williams, as well as its location on Broadview Terrace in L.A.