The casting call is coming from inside the house, and these real-life horror movie houses achieved infamy as on-location sets for some memorable film shoots.

Amityville Horror House

The so-called Amityville Horror House can be found at 108 (formerly 112) Ocean Avenue in Amityville, NY. Producers of the 1979 film sought permission to shoot on location at the actual house where Ronald DeFeo Jr shot and killed 6 members of his family in 1974, but were denied. Instead, a house in Toms River, NJ was altered to resemble the three-story Dutch Colonial home, right down to the distinctive “pumpkin eyes” attic windows. Ironically, the house on Ocean Avenue itself has been altered and no longer sports the quarter-round windows. (images via austinpomer and Encouraging Quotes)

Poltergeist House

This house at 4267 Roxbury St. in Simi Valley, CA is where the 1982 horror film Poltergeist was filmed. Unlike the movie home, this house did NOT implode into some sort of supernatural black hole. The photo above was taken 35 years after filming completed and not a whole lot has changed other than the extensive brickwork in the front yard. One would hope the masonry wasn’t sourced from any abandoned cemeteries. (image via Jack Stephens)

Silence of the Lambs House

Also known as Buffalo Bill’s house, this rambling three-story Victorian home in the Village of Layton, Fayette County, PA featured prominently in the 1991 shock horror thriller The Silence of the Lambs. The home was put on the market by its owners in 2016 but, to quote Trib Live, the sale was going “torturously slowly”. Not for the obvious reason, mind you, but likely due to the 4-bedroom house only having one bathroom. Now THAT’s what we call horrible! (image via Paul McCarthy)

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Surreal Estate 7 Real Life Horror Movie Houses

When catching a contemporary Hollywood movie like ‘Blade Runner 2049’ at the theater, it’s easy to assume nearly everything we see is CGI, but a new video from the famed Weta Workshop gives us an inside look at the incredible miniature world they created for the film. They bring Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi vision of Los Angeles even further into terrifying focus through the lens of director Ridley Scott, showing how the city evolved over the decades that have ensued since the original 1982 film took place.

The city is now blanketed by smog, constant rain and snow from extreme pollution of the entire earth. The Weta design team built upon the original film’s classic aesthetic, making the architecture even more doom and gloom than it was before, and exploring the ways in which the polluted atmosphere affects residents of the city, even at ground level.

Weta artists conceived, built and hand-painted the miniature sets, creating an entire fictional L.A. that’s terrifying and amazing all at once. The centerpiece of the set is the LAPD building, which has come to loom villainously over the rest of the city. The miniature for this particular structure is 16 feet tall, so large and heavy, they had to build it lying down and lift it into vertical position with a chain block.

As noted on Weta’s Instagram, each and every shot of the city (led by cinematographer Alex Funke) “represents many, many hours of meticulous setup and painstaking attention to every detail.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by W?t? Workshop (@wetaworkshop)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by W?t? Workshop (@wetaworkshop)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by W?t? Workshop (@wetaworkshop)

“During the film’s production, Weta Workshop was brought on to build large miniatures for many of the key environments. The sequences had been worked out in pre-vis, but required a detailed design pass to imbue the environments with life and realism, these concepts were used as a guide for the miniature teams. Extreme weather, tropical storms, and tsunamis are commonplace in 2049, leaving coastal cities destroyed. Mostly abandoned, the cities are now wastelands, occupied only by scavengers and those that were unable to escape.”

There’s something about creating art that’s not quite reflective of our physical reality and then giving it life through motion that can be alternately beautiful and unnerving. The slight jerkiness of stop-motion animation only adds to the effect, while digital animation can take the surreality to a whole new level with mesmerizing movements. These recent animated projects are especially GIF-worthy (and in fact, are sometimes just GIFs that stand alone as works of art.)

Loving Vincent, a Fully Painted Feature Film

The last days of Vincent Van Gogh are gorgeously rendered in the artist’s hallmark swirling style in the new film Loving Vincent, which was created using thousands upon thousands of hand-painted frames.The directors first shot live-action footage of actors playing the scripted roles, and then had a team of artists over-paint the frames.

Persistence of Vision III by Ismael Sanz-Pena

From a single photograph he took of the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway, animator Ismael Sanz-Pena created a mesmerizing continuous-motion animation simply by panning and zooming over the image.

REACTION by Anton Wall Söder

In a quest to learn more about VFX software Houdini, Swedish motion designer Anton Woll Söder experimented with particle-based animation. This short called ‘REACTION’ captures some of the results.

Flow/er by Alexa Sirbu and Lukas Vojir

Artists Alexia Sirbu and Lukas Vojir came together to produce a short animation called ‘flow/er,’ a piece that feels like a visual symphony of blooms crashing together. “In nature, it is often the simplest rules that lead to forming the most complex, beautiful forms,” they explain. “Flow/er is a visual poem that observes this through a design lens, combining our fascination with organic, raw aesthetic with foreign geometric forms. We observe natural laws take shape in a strange dance of meticulous choreography clashing with violent forces of nature.”

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Beautiful Animated Short Films

The Chevrolet Corvette’s long list of silver screen starring roles turned America’s first mass-produced sports car into an automotive pop culture icon.

One of the Corvette‘s first film appearances was in the 1955 film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. Directed by Robert Aldrich, the movie starred Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled private investigator Mike Hammer. The latter roamed the mean streets of Los Angeles in his 1954 Corvette, one of only 3,640 manufactured that year and one of only FOUR painted black.

Hammer’s black ‘vette may have looked cool but performance was anything but hot due to the pedestrian Stovebolt Six engine under its fiberglass hood. GM introduced a V8 for 1955 but limited model year production to just 700 in order to move the rest of the slow-selling ’54s. Even so, Hammer’s sleek (for the times) ride definitely added badly-needed panache to a niche model whose future was very much in doubt.

True Lies – 1959 Corvette

True Lies, a 1994 action-adventure-comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Tia Carrere, Bill Paxton, Eliza Dushku, and even Charlton Heston has aged rather well. Ditto for the red 1959 Corvette driven by Paxton (playing sleazy used car salesmen Simon) as he regales AH-nold on his time-tested seduction technique: “Let’s face it, Harry, the ‘Vette gets ’em wet.”

Clambake – 1959 Corvette XP-87 Stingray Racer

“Hey buddy, where’s the gas cap on this thing?” Built in 1959 “to test handling ease and performance,” the Corvette XP-87 racer won an SCCA National Championship in 1960. It was then modified with the addition of a passenger seat and made the rounds of the auto show circuit.

The XP-87 bowed out in grand style, appearing in the 1967 film Clambake as the private car of Elvis Presley’s oil tycoon character. Thank you, XP-87, thank you very much.

Heavy Metal – 1960 Corvette

“You can hedge your bet on a clean Corvette”… Heavy Metal – the 1981 animated sci-fi fantasy film produced by Ivan Reitman and inspired by the eponymous graphic magazine, featured a 1960 Corvette but if you arrived a few minutes late to the movie theater, you probably missed it.

Here’s a link to the ‘vette’s impressive entrance (dude totally sticks the landing!) in which it literally brings evil to the world in the form of the glowing green loc-nar. Mustang owners most definitely approve.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Like A Rock Star 12 Iconic Movie Corvettes

The second-tallest building in the world seems to appear out of nowhere, shooting into the sky as if of its own accord, in this stunning time-lapse video of the skyline in Lujiazui, China taken over a four-year period by filmmaker Joe Nafis. The 2,073-foot Shanghai Tower is surpassed only by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and features a double-decker elevator offering the longest single elevator journey in the world at an amazing 1900 feet in under a minute. Its construction has made the skyline even more iconic, dwarfing all of the other buildings in the city.

Every single shot taken by Nafis is a work of art – razor sharp, beautifully composed, dynamic – and seeing them all put together in the final video is breathtaking. The filmmaker spent 1,000 work hours taking and editing 350,000 photos to capture the process as each of the 128 floors is built.

“Construction had already begun when I arrived in the city in 2009,” says Nafis. “The site was a large hole in the ground with construction crews milling around pouring concrete for the base. I began exploring the city looking for views and locations that would serve as groundwork for this video. In 2011, I secured a location with unobstructed views of Lujiazui where I could just glimpse the tower peeking behind the 185m (607 feet) Aurora Plaza.”

“I maintained a camera there for the next 4 years until the tower was completed. In the meantime I took hundreds of thousands of photos from various viewpoints around the city filling up around 8TB in the process. In all, over 1000 hours were dedicated to this project in exploring, shooting and post-processing.”