Architect Breaks Down 5 Haunted Houses From Scary Films | Architectural Digest

hi I'm Michael weitzner and I've been an architect for over 35 years and today we're going to look at some of the architectural details in horror movies from psycho to The Shining and Beetlejuice [Music] first up the Bates House from psycho okay so here's everything that jumps out at me it's a house up on a hill it's got this very tall mansard roof with the Widow's walk that goes all around it it has these ornamental brackets that are holding up the eve it's got this very prominent front porch that sits in front of a central tower and the thing about the porch also is it has a lot of ornament that goes around the porch and that was something that was very typical of Victorian houses of which this is won so Victorian houses are not really a style It's actually an era and it's the era of Queen Victoria which basically was 1837 to 1901 and within that era Architects were using the style that was kind of a combination of Gothic elements from the italianate and elements from the Greek Revival and so all these elements formed what's now known as the Victorian style most of these houses are large they're almost like mansions and that's because they were built by people of means mainly in the Gilded Age which was the tail end of the Victorian era but by the 1930s a lot of the rich people had abandoned these houses having moved on to other types of styles and they fell into disrepair and they became sort of the iconic dilapidated spooky haunted house I hate the smell of dampness don't you I don't know creepy smell so the house in Psycho is considered the iconic House of Horrors and it sort of sets the stage for houses of horror in film Hitchcock was inspired by the Edward Hopper painting the house by the railroad which is sort of a symbol of decaying America so although the straw is unreal historical information it's actually not a real house at all it's just a two-wall exterior set that borrows from other sets because it had such a tight budget an old house which is if I may say so a little more Sinister looking now let's take a look at a film where the characters themselves literally attempt to modernize A Haunted House Tim Burton's Beetlejuice so this is the house and what it looked like when they first move in and what jumps out at me right away is it's a house set up on a hill like psycho and like psycho it has this very prominent Tower with this mansard roof and the widows walk around it it has a wraparound porch which is one of the elements of Victorian architecture it has these very small Windows especially for the size of the house and the other thing it has is these very tall pitched roofs which implies that there's a very large attic within and these pitch roofs are metal which gives it this sort of Farmhouse feel or this farm-like structure and of course it's Tim Burton so you know there's a model version of the house featured somewhere in the film Beetlejuice foreign [Music] I think we're in the model so the plot of the film is that the main characters who buy this house they want to renovate it and the people who are haunting this house don't want them to renovate it so let's face it you want somebody out of the house I want to get some money out of your house so now let's take a look at what it looks like after the renovation okay I love this renovation it talks about so many kind of architectural Styles most prominently deconstructivism deconstructivism was a style of architecture that was very popular in the late 80s at the same time that this film came out in 1988 in Architects such as Frank Airy and Daniel liebskind and zaha Hadid and the Austrian firm Co-op himo Blau were practitioners of this style and what deconstructivism did was it sort of like it sounds it broke apart architecture into its different elements and what that means is they've taken specific elements and pulled them out and highlighted them so for instance this Gable and forms the edge of this porch which is been expanded and sits on the single column support with an opening in it and they emphasize the ridge beam sticking out through the gables here and here in yellow the ridge beam is usually at the very top of the roof or the ridge but in this case they've lowered them down so the ridge is popping out from the attic which actually makes no architectural sense but gives it a very fun sort of feeling to it and the idea that they've created these exterior walls with nothing in them just the frame of exterior walls here without Windows it all gives the house a different kind of scale and a different kind of feeling look at this place everything's different while our Furniture's gone a lot of what's been added hasn't formed any new spaces it just emphasizes existing spaces so personally I disagree with the ghosts I think this renovation is actually a lot of fun and is keeping with the whole feeling of the film that it portrays a certain exuberance of which Tim Burton is known for so the other thing I love is that even though they've added all this stuff to it and really gussied this house up is that they left the one element that ties it to the house of horror with a typical house of horror and that's that tall central tower with that mansard roof and the widow walk around it [Music] next up is a truly modern Haunt from House on Haunted Hill in just a minute I'll show you the only really haunted house in the world [Music] since it was built a century ago seven people including my brother have been murdered in it okay so this is what jumps out of me this is another house up on a hill sitting on a platform in the Hills outside of Hollywood and it's a really modern house yet it uses somewhat ancient forms you could see that the house is made of these component parts these modular Parts the other thing that jumps out is it doesn't have a very domestic scale it almost feels like it could be a museum or some other type of religious building I'm gonna hide anybody this would certainly be the house I'd do it in there's very few windows at least Apparent from this view you could see a large window here and you could see these very very temple-like forms that repeat throughout so this is clearly influenced by the Mayan style of building and it also feels somewhat Egyptian in that it's a trabated style of architecture which means there's no curves there's no arches there's no vaults there's no domes besides House on Haunted Hill this house was used in many other films and TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer Blade Runner and day of the Locust and although this actually looks like a fantasy house or a set this is actually a real house so Frank Lloyd Wright created this house out of what he called textile blocks which are essentially concrete blocks or cinder blocks as we might call them that was made in these aluminum forms from the earth and the sand and the gravel right at the site of where the house was built okay so the way he constructs this wall of textile blocks is he takes a a block that's 16 inches by 16 inches on the face and is nominally four inches thick he takes another one also 16 by 16 and then he puts another layer on the interior also 16 by 16 on the face and nominally four inches thick and he leaves an air space between them and that airspace in the Los Angeles environment acts as an insulating layer and keeps the house cool and then the other thing he does to tie them together is he creates this Furrow in the edge of the blocks and he lays inside that Furrow a thin Steel Rod which is essentially rebar and he ties the blocks together using that rebar and then he puts ornament built directly into the mold so that when he pulls the block out of the mold the ornament is already part of it and that's how he constructed these textile block homes so Frank Lloyd Wright did four houses of this style in the LA area and this the Ennis house is the grandest of them all it's been a murder almost every place in this house and to form this house he actually used 27 000 of these blocks next up the Overlook Hotel from The Shining where working remote takes on a whole new meaning okay so here's what jumps out at me first and foremost is the roof it's got this huge deep roof with an even deeper huge roof at the central entrance and then it has these Dormers which are somewhat unusual because they pop out of the front facade they're not set back like the Dormers over here or set back the other thing it has is this very rusticated base all made out of stone closer to the Earth rougher and then it comes out and gets smoother as it rises it's another building up on a hill and the other element that I find really interesting about this building is this roof line comes all the way down to the ground so it goes past the roof past the eve becomes the wall and then becomes the base and the rustication and runs right into the ground I think that's a really cool element it's got this nice big bay window over here to sort of give some interest to this facade and this wing and then on this end where we have this big big chimney popping out as part of this Dormer it also has these three roofs that are sort of layered these shed roofs and in fact the main roof pretty much comes down on this Edge and comes all the way down to the rusticated base so it's doing some really interesting things with roof and that seems to be the common element in all the haunted houses that we look at they always have these really deep High roofs that imply that there's a big deep attic within and who knows what goes on in there so this line that comes down from the roof this sort of angled line almost Echoes the mountains Beyond in fact the entire roofscape I feel like is meant to Echo the entire mountain range Beyond so in actuality this is the Timberline Lodge which was designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood who was known for Designing many of The Lodges at U.S national parks and one of the themes that runs throughout all these designs is that he uses natural materials from the site so all this stone is from nearby as well as all the wood and all the wood on the shingles of the roof and so he used natural materials basically from the surrounding area so that it would blend in and be part of its habitat of where it was built so the building is reminiscent of the Adirondack style which was a style built in Upper New York state for these sort of remote camps for rich people and basically all these lodges in the U.S parks are based on that original Adirondack style and the other thing about this building is the size and how that relates in the film because he's there alone with his wife and son in this huge building this vast and empty building and they are the only ones there and that plays very prominently in the film The other thing about this film is everybody always wants to go and visit the Hedge maze but in fact it doesn't exist because it was shot on a set in England [Music] next up let's take a look at the house from get out we're here [Music] right away you could see this house is not exactly what it portrays to be [Music] it's got this very deep roof which is sort of indicative of all the houses we've looked at before but other than that it's very different than all the houses we looked at before it's not on a hill it's not Victorian it's not foreboding it appears to be a Cape Cod house at first glance but the more you look the more you realize actually all that's Cape Cod about it are the three Dormers in the roof and in fact it's an amalgamation of all sorts of different houses so it's got this very prominent porch with these supporting Greek Doric columns that looks like they came from a plantation from down south and it's got these brick Gables that go up past the roof and it's got these two side wings that are also made out of brick that let you know that the house is actually much bigger than it appears to be at first glance so it's a very strange house typically Cape Cod houses were built out of wood this one's built out of brick and typically they don't have a porch one enters in directly to the centrally located door so it's like this Cape Cod house with this sort of Plantation style porch stuck on the front with the French doors that lead out to it so at first glance the house looks like a very regular typical house you'd find on Suburban street but the more you look at it the sort of stranger it gets [Music] putting Hara in a very plain and sunny Place we've come sort of to the complete polar opposite of the psycho house and in fact that's something that the director Jordan peel had in mind when he selected this setting for the film he's taking the idea that when movies show you these sort of haunted and spooky homes you expect bad things to happen there but when they show you this bright and sunny house that at first feels very warm and inviting you're shocked when horror does occur there because you're really not expecting it sink into the floor [Music] so these are the architectural details I noticed in these haunting homes let me know which is your favorite in the comments below [Music]

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Keywords: arch digest, architectural digest, bates motel, bates motel psycho, beetlejuice, beetlejuice architect, beetlejuice architecture, beetlejuice house, blueprint show, get out film, get out house, haunted house, haunted houses, haunted houses in film, michael wyetzner, movie haunted houses, overlook hotel, overlook hotel real, overlook hotel shining, psycho bates motel, shining hotel, tim burton architecture, tim burton films, tim burton movie

Id: GGrKSsMO4LY

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022