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)

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Surreal Estate 7 Real Life Horror Movie Houses

Abandoned Dundas Castle in upstate New York is said to be cursed: its builder died and his family were committed to asylums before they could even move in.

Ralph Wurts-Dundas (1871-1921) was a wealthy recluse who, since he could not BE a Scottish laird, did the next best thing by living like one… at least, that was the plan. In 1907, Dundas bought a log cabin on the banks of the Beaverkill River, deep in New York’s lush and forested Catskill Mountains. The cabin, known locally as “Beaverkill Lodge”, featured many comfort and convenience features but for Dundas only a stone-walled and luxuriously furnished castle would do.

Highlands Fling

By 1915, blueprints had been drawn up and several dozen Finnish stonemasons were brought to the site. To help keep costs reasonable, thousands of locally sourced river stones were used to construct the castle’s three-story-tall walls and grand turreted “witch’s hat” gate towers. Construction moved ahead in fits and starts, however. Dundas was both meticulous and impulsive, at times ordering entire completed sections to be torn down and reconstructed so as to better match his vision.

All the while, Dundas’ emotionally-unstable wife and sheltered daughter lived in a side wing of the original log lodge so the family patriarch could see to their immediate needs. World War I came and went with the nascent Dundas Castle still unfinished, although some fixtures, rugs, and tapestries had already been delivered and were in storage pending installation. Then tragedy (the first of many) struck: Ralph Dundas passed away on October 16th of 1921.

Seeking Asylums

Dundas’ passing saw his wife, Josephine, deprived of her only emotional support and in short order she was declared legally incompetent. On May 1st of 1922, she was committed to the West Hill Sanitarium in Riverdale, Bronx County, NY where she spent the rest of her days. As for the Dundas’ 18-year-old daughter Muriel, she was honeymooning in Europe at the time of her father’s demise.

Poor Muriel might have inherited her mother’s mental issues as she, in turn, was committed to an asylum in Great Britain. That left Muriel’s husband who – this is starting to sound like a broken record – returned to the United States only to be committed to a mental institution. Perhaps Dundas could have saved everyone a lot of bother by building his Scottish fantasy as an actual insane asylum instead of a palatial home. Just sayin’.

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Catskill Keep Abandoned Cursed Castle In Upstate Ny

A series of elaborately curved houses designed for Eindhoven will rest like large boulders in the Dutch landscape, illustrating the complex forms made possible by new and evolving 3D-printing technologies.

The first single-story house will be around 1,000 square feet and allow for process refinements for the multi-story units to follow – research and innovation are part of the mandate of the Eindhoven University of Technology and other project partners.

The goal, in part, is to optimize for quality, comfort and cost, with each phase building on the previous iteration, a marriage of experimentation and architectural creation.

Construction will begin this year and the first unit should be occupiable sometime next year. While the ideas are bigger than creating a single small neighborhood of homes, having them be functional in the end is also a key aim of the project.

Despite the old maxim that living well is the best revenge, these homeowners have chosen to creatively spite busybody neighbors and inflexible authorities.

Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring can afford to live life lushly in the posh London neighborhood of Kensington while spending the off-season in Switzerland, yet the now 67-year-old property developer has spent the past five years constantly quarreling with her neighbors and the local council. The trouble began in 2012 when Lisle-Mainwaring bought a charming white stucco townhouse and applied for a permit to construct an “iceberg basement” beneath the edifice… permission was denied.

Subsequent basement planning applications were refused as well, so in March of 2015 Lisle-Mainwaring spited both the haughty council and her snooty (snotty?) neighbors by painting the facade of her townhouse in garish red and white stripes… with the last stripe left unfinished just to add visual insult to injury. Flickr member Francesco Camardo‘s nighttime photos above highlight both the paint job (which took just over five hours to semi-complete) and the stuccoed wall’s rich texture.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s POV, a court order handed down in January of 2016 declared the striped house “had an adverse effect of the amenity of the area” and ordered Lisle-Mainwaring (above) to return it to its original state within 28 days. Instead, the peeved homeowner has chosen to level the existing structure and erect a four-story-plus-basement home on the lot, ensuring many months of noise, dust, traffic and inconvenience for her neighbors. Now that’s Maximum Spiting for ya!

Gaylordsville “Wedding Cake” House

Some say there are no gossips like New England gossips and when giving condescending townsfolk the literal finger won’t shut ’em up, building an architectural up-yours is the next logical step. Speaking of steps, the step-pyramid-like Wedding Cake House in Gaylordsville, Connecticut really takes the, er, cake when it comes to spitefulness.

Back in the early 1960’s, the state Child Welfare Department removed an infant girl from the custody of homeowner Jan Pol’s foster daughter. Rumor had it the baby was fathered by Pol; something he furiously denied. In protest, Pol built the faded pink structure yet never lived in it a single day up until his passing in 1979. Flickr members Walking Philly and Beyond and howderfamily.com snapped the spiteful structure in 2012.

Plum Island Pink House

Going through a bitter divorce? Best to dissect the separation agreement with a fine-toothed comb and a magnifying glass lest ye end up like a certain bamboozled wife back in the Roaring Twenties. In a nutshell, it seems the husband was required to build his soon-to-be-ex-wife an exact replica of the pretty pink home in downtown Newburyport that they once shared.

Fine and dandy, but she should have checked the fine print: the agreement didn’t state where the replica house had to be built. Once she’d signed on the dotted line, the spiteful ex-hubby constructed the duplicate home way out in the middle of a salt marsh on deserted, wind-swept Plum Island.

It’s not known if the chagrined ex-wife actually lived in the Pink House – without any connection to utilities it would have been difficult to say the least. People did live there later on, however. One family owned the house from 1960 through 2012, eventually selling the house to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge who are determined to demolish the lead-painted, asbestos-insulated and radon-infested house. Kudos to Flickr members Ron Grant (old 41), Jacob Taylor, and Bud (Bud in Wells, Maine) whose images above capture the Pink House’s essential beauty, sadness and yes – spitefulness.

Lubbock Purple Rental House

Don’t mess with Texas… or Texans, for that matter, even if the folks doin’ the messin’ be Texan too. You might get something like the so-called Lubbock Purple Rental House. This otherwise unremarkable single-family residence drew the ire of city authorities attempting to enforce an ordinance that allows no more than two unrelated people to live in a single-family residence. In 2001, homeowner Bill Davis and the several college students living at the house decided to protest the city’s “harassment” by painting the house purple with black and yellow polka dots. That’ll show ’em!

When a new group of students began renting space at Davis’ house in 2003, the city tried to enforce the ordinance again and Davis responded as before, though this time he eschewed the polka dots and instead painted the lawn and bushes. Kinky! The city was not amused. “We had these ordinances before he bought the house,” explained City Councilman Gary Boren, “but he (Davis) likes to be a sissy and paint his house… and say he’s making a statement. It’s a sissy way to deal with something.” Or, some might say, a spiteful way.

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No Respite 10 More Houses Built Out Of Spite

Architects around the world strive to incorporate regional design histories into contemporary work, but Bolivian designer Freddy Mamani Silvestre takes it a step further, blending pop culture inspirations into his fantastically bizarre buildings.

Mamani is an Aymara, part of a people who were historically conquered and displaced by Incan and Spanish populations.He trained as an engineer, then grew into fame designing mixed-use mansions for the rich (generally: stores on the ground floor, apartments above and a penthouse for owners).

“Mamani’s architecture incorporates circular motifs from Aymara weaving and ceramics and the neon colors of Aymara dress,” reports the New Yorker, “and it alludes to the staggered planes of Andean temples.” It also is inspired by cyberpunk visions and science fiction films like Transformers.

Creative, eccentric, joyful, imaginative are all words that have been used to describe his work, though some see it extreme, superficial, garish or gaudy as well. It can be polarizing, with fans praising his audacity and critics decrying the lack of formal method to the apparent madness.

Silvestre works in unusual ways as well, sketching ideas onto walls or simply describing what he wants to coworkers, leaving them to execute the details. He has completed a number of projects in this way in El Alto, the highest city in the world.