The price was recently slashed by $1 million for Bill Murray’s mansion from the comedy Zombieland. Owner Lee Najjar is now asking just $13.8 million for the property.
The 2009 film was a spoof of the horror genre. The film’s stars, including Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Woody Harrelson, are the last known survivors of a zombie apocalypse. It 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 33,000-square-foot mansion isn’t in Hollywood. It isn’t even in California. It’s in Atlanta, sitting on two acres on West Paces Ferry Road in the ritzy Buckhead area. And with the approach of Halloween, that annual homage to ghosts and goblins, it 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. It featured Johnny Depp in his movie debut, as well as Robert Englund as the razor-gloved killer, Freddy Krueger. If the three-bedroom house in the movie could talk, it would scream bloody murder. And it would tell you it’s not located in the fictional town of Springwood, Ohio, but rather on Genesee Avenue in Los Angeles.
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 NW, where the movie was made, but rather in a long-lost residence in the nearby Maryland suburb of Mount Rainier.
In the video for “Thriller” – often called the greatest music video of all time – Michael Jackson and his ghoulish friends break into song and dance, then he chases his date into a Victorian house. The video makes no mention of its location, but listen up, superfans: The house is on Carroll Avenue in Los Angeles.
Not far away in Altadena stands the Omega Beta Zeta House from Scream 2, another Wes Craven slasher. The 6,500-square-foot house on East Crary Street sits on 1.5 acres and has seven bedrooms and four full bathrooms.
Across the continent, folks who remember Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror film, can find Rosemary Woodhouse’s apartment building on West 72nd Street in New York City. The building, called the Dakota, is probably better remembered as the place where Beatle John Lennon lived, and was killed.
Halloween, a 1978 film directed 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 murderer Michael Myers actually shot scenes in a five-bedroom house on North Orange Grove Avenue in Los Angeles.
In the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (adapted from the 1992 movie of the same name), high-schooler Buffy Summers must defend the world against vampires. Exterior shots of her house showed a palm-studded four-bedroom house on Cota Avenue in Torrance, California, just down the street from Torrance High – aka Buffy’s school, Sunnydale.
The eerie-looking “witch’s house” in the 1957 film The Undead was built during the 1920s on a studio lot as a dressing room and office, before being moved to Walden Drive in Beverly Hills to be used as a private residence. A longtime resident used to dress as a witch to hand out candy every Halloween.
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. In the movie, Vincent Price pays guests to stay one night in a house where the ceiling drips blood. But the only thing that really drips from this place is history: The exterior shots were of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924 masterpiece Ennis House in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood.
In What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a psychological thriller starring Bette Davis and 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 and Andy Garcia, as well as its filming location on Broadview Terrace in L.A.
Lew Sichelman has been covering real estate for more than 50 years. He is a regular contributor to numerous shelter magazines and housing and housing-finance industry publications. Readers can contact him at lsichelman@aol.com.
