"It's doing some really interesting things with roof."

October 27, 2022 6:41 PM

Architect Michael Wyetzner breaks down the details of five creepy buildings from scary movies for Architectural Digest.
posted by Faint of Butt (10 comments total)

That was some fun architectural geekery!

The valley where I grew up, if you climbed to the top of the hill where the orchard was, you could see this literal and figurative house of terror about five miles away.
posted by not_on_display at 7:27 PM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

I need some "Deep Roof" in my life...
posted by Windopaene at 7:37 PM on October 27, 2022

That was pretty good and covered a lot for such a short video!

I haven't looked it up, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the tower and veranda at the Beetlejuice house were added just for the movie to specifically make it look more like the Bates house.
posted by LionIndex at 7:59 PM on October 27, 2022

I never thought of my 1873 home as overly scary, but was delighted to learn that in fact ticks several appropriate boxes. Maybe that’s why we get so few trick-or-treaters!
posted by kinnakeet at 2:08 AM on October 28, 2022

This is great. There was a similarly great article a few years back about how the Victorian house became the totemic haunted house. It touched on "Psycho" and Hopper and I want to say it touched to the demolition of Bunker Hill in LA, but maybe I'm fusing articles in my head. It's entirely possible I read it here, but it I can't find it.

I also though the "Beetlejuice" renovation (exterior only) was pretty delightful. One of my parents' friends/boss lived in a peak 80s decontstructed/postmodern renovated farmhouse. That place was a total trip and so weird and I loved it.
posted by thivaia at 7:22 AM on October 28, 2022

Always good to see the Ennis House and Timberline.

Also fun that neither of those buildings have interiors that match the ones we see in their respective movies. The Overlook hotel interior doesn’t even begin to make sense, for that building even if you’ve seen the inside, which I always thought added to the charm of the movie.
posted by Artw at 7:43 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I enjoyed this! Including the detail of the plantation-house-style columns along the porch of the otherwise unassuming (if expensive) brick house in "Get Out".
posted by theatro at 8:05 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed this! Including the detail of the plantation-house-style columns along the porch of the otherwise unassuming (if expensive) brick house in "Get Out".

I found his lack of complaints about that house kind of refreshing - especially since the one proceeded it was the deconstructed Beetlejuice house. IMO architecture criticism swings wildly between "anything that is not explicitly originally a part of this style is wrong" vs "all the old things, including houses as triangles was dumb! Buildings should be rhombuses or dodecahedrons!"

He basically just explained where the different parts came from without much judgement.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:22 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Get Out house was the one spot where I thought he missed a bit - brick, columns, white trim are pretty common in Federalist/Georgian buildings in the South - so I think the reference to a plantation style was on point (and certainly relevant to the movie), but bringing Cape Cod into it seemed a little off. It was basically an updated Jeffersonian house.
posted by LionIndex at 10:38 AM on October 28, 2022

One of the YouTube comments made the interesting point (shocking, I know) that recent horror films seem to be replacing the symbol of the bygone 19th-century era, the Victorian house, with the symbol of the bygone pre-2008 depression era, the McMansion.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:53 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]