Continuing our monthlong celebration of Halloween with various scary movie and TV-related lists. Check out our online movie database at channelguidemag.com to see if any of these or other scary titles are on this month.
SURREAL ESTATE: TOP 5 HORROR MOVIE DWELLINGS
The real estate industry is down, and these nasty places certainly aren’t helping drive up values. Not nice places to visit, and you wouldn’t want to live there:
5. The Bates House, California (Psycho, 1960)
An ultra-creepy version of your great-grandma’s house, this place makes its adjoining motel look the Ritz. We all know what waits in the fruit cellar, but the rest of the house is no great shakes either, filled with sadness and eeriness, especially in Norman’s pathetic little-kid bedroom, seen in this photo (with a stuffed toy bunny that for some reason fills me with great unease).
4. Cuesta Verde housing development, southern California (Poltergeist, 1982)
Location, location, location! That old real-estate adage applies here — in a negative way. You usually don’t want to build your dream home on top of an old cemetery. Especially when developers sunk the bodies and “only moved the headstones!!! Why!!??!!” TV reception is troublesome here, but the place does have a huge walk-in closet …
3. 122 Ocean Drive, Amityville, New York (The Amityville Horror, 1979)
Generally, when a home itself tells you to “get out,” it’s probably time to move on to a different open house — preferably very far away. The movie itself wasn’t the greatest (nor was its remake), and the “true story” upon which its events were based turned out to be not too truthful, but the house, with those windows that look like evil eyes, is a classic:
2. The Overlook Hotel, Colorado Rockies (The Shining, 1980)
Stephen King based the infamous Overlook on the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, but it’s doubtful that hotel’s guest list included a rotting — and walking— female corpse in a bathtub, sinister twin girl ghosts, and a host of 1930s phantoms partying at an eternal ball. And while I’ve often been driven to the brink by bad hotel stays, I haven’t approached Nicholson’s reaction to his experience:
1. Hill House, New England (The Haunting, 1963)
A realtor’s nightmare, Hill House, as we learn in this excellent movie’s beginning, was “born bad.” Deadly accidents, suicide, insanity — all elements of the house that an inspector isn’t likely to detect for you if you decide to buy. And if you’re lucky, that pounding in the walls you hear will only be rats. You’d also better be a do-it-yourselfer, since no one will come out to help you “in the night … in the dark.”:
