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Old, Dark House
- 383 statements
- 75 feature instances
- 117 referencing feature instances
| Old, Dark House | type |
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| Old, Dark House | label |
Old, Dark House | |
| Old, Dark House | page |
OldDarkHouse | |
| Old, Dark House | comment |
You know that old, foreboding house up on the top of the hill, surrounded by thick forests, and accessible only by a single bridge that has a tendency to wash out during every rainstorm? The one where the ornate wrought iron fences are red with rust and creaking, and the ancient stonework is crumbling? The one where the old servants behave oddly? Yeah, that one. Have you ever noticed that it always seems to attract eclectic groups of strangers who get invited for the reading of a will or a dinner party with a mysterious host? And why is it that the strangers keep getting killed off, one by one, during the night? It must be one of them doing it. But which? Expect many passageways hidden behind bookcases, usually operated by candlesticks, portraits with removable eyes for spying, and the ubiquitous thunder and lightning. Almost inevitably, all methods of communication with the outside world will have somehow ceased to function – if they ever existed at all – especially telephones. (This was more plausible in the early 20th century, a.k.a. Agatha Christie Time, when many older dwellings had not yet been fitted with telephones and service in general was commonly more apt to fail.) You can also expect for the lights to go out several times during the night. (Usually when it's least convenient.) May or may not be haunted, or cursed, or be hiding a Dark Secret. If the mystery is set in Europe, this might be a castle rather than a mansion. See also Haunted House and Haunted Castle, which usually are haunted. Symbolic Glass House is the inverse, but often has the same effect. Actual hauntings are fairly rare in this type of story, in any case. It's far more likely that the mysterious poltergeist bedeviling the characters will turn out to be an elaborate hoax. And please bear in mind that not just any old house with poor lighting will make for a proper Old, Dark House. This is a classic trope of, and a great set piece for, whodunnit murder mysteries. |
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| Old, Dark House | fetched |
2024-04-09T22:31:39Z | |
| Old, Dark House | parsed |
2024-04-09T22:31:39Z | |
| Old, Dark House | processingComment |
Dropped link to BigFancyHouse: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
| Old, Dark House | isPartOf |
DBTropes | |
| Old, Dark House / int_136469af | type |
Old, Dark House | |
| Old, Dark House / int_136469af | comment |
Hillsglade House in Pact is a large, Victorian house on ample grounds in the middle of a medium-sized town in Eastern Canada. And it is also the traditional estate of the Thorburn family, the local dynasty of demon summoners. It's got enough space and features-particularly a library filled with forbidden tomes-to also be considered a Big Fancy House. | |
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Castle Duckula in Count Duckula is a mess of dark turrets and towers on the outside, and a maze of bare stone rooms on the inside. Igor keeps it that way, much to Duckula's disgust. | |
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The Hollister house in Dead Birds is a sprawling abandoned farmhouse in the middle of dead cornfield, and the scene of unspeakble evil that has forever tainted the property. Perhaps not the best place to hide out and divide the loot after a bank robbery. | |
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Larry Blamire's Dark and Stormy Night is an intentional Affectionate Parody of this genre with a couple of Lampshade Hanging moments. One character even accuses another of "watching too many Old Dark House movies" in one scene. | |
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The similarly-themed 1954 short Claws for Alarm has the same duo spending the night in an abandoned Old, Dark Hotel in a Ghost Town. | |
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The show Psych has an episode which is an homage to Old Dark House films in general and the movie Clue specifically, with guest appearances from several of the stars of Clue. | |
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In The Hazing, the pledges have to survive the night at the Hack House, the location of a gruesome murder/suicide by Jeremiah Hackford sixty years earlier. | |
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Umineko: When They Cry: The Rokenjima mansion, complete with being cut off from the rest of the world and its own witch stories. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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The Simpsons: The eponymous "Bad Dream House", which the family moves into in the first segment from the first "Treehouse of Horror" episode, is one of these. It turns out to be possessed by a malevolent spirit a la The Amityville Horror. Played with at the start of "Bart the Fink", when the family learns of a long-lost aunt who's passed away and left them her estate, provided that they spend one night in an allegedly haunted house. Cut to the family entering the house, Homer confidently declaring "There's no such thing as ghosts." Cut again to the next morning... and the family is well-rested and refreshed. The Republican party headquarters◊ is an ominous castle straight from a horror movie. |
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In Where Are the Children?, there's a large old house by the sea that overlooks the rest of the town, known as The Lookout by the locals. It was originally built by a sea captain back in the 1690s and has been added to over the centuries, though no one has owned it in years. The villain Courtney Parrish has rented the top floor, which was converted to an apartment, for the past six years until a buyer can been found. He uses the location to spy on the Eldredge house and brings Mike and Missy Eldredge to The Lookout after abducting them. | |
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The Lodgers is a gothic horror story set in Campbell Country, so naturally, there's a cursed, dilapidated mansion. Perhaps more dark than usual because the twins who live there have limited resources for keeping it lit. | |
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Most of What a Carve Up! takes place in Blackshaw Towers; a creepy old mansion of the Yorkshire moors. It becomes even creepier when the killer sabotages the power plant, plunging the house into darkness. | |
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Looney Tunes: The 1948 short Scaredy Cat has Porky and Sylvester spending the night in one of these, with the latter becoming aware of a cult of murderous mice attacking them. The similarly-themed 1954 short Claws for Alarm has the same duo spending the night in an abandoned Old, Dark Hotel in a Ghost Town. |
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Parodied by the play-within-a-play in The Real Inspector Hound. | |
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The Roivas Mansion of Eternal Darkness is normally quite pleasant in its Gothic splendor, but it has a nasty tendency to attract agents of the Ancients to menace its occupants. Mostly on account of being built over a massive subterranean city. | |
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The titular manor in Murder at Colefax Manor, fitting the trope even further by being set on cliffs above the sea. | |
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One of the Dark Brotherhood mission from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion sends you to one of these, only you are the murderer. (Though it's possible to convince the guests to kill each other.) | |
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Episode 6 of Minecraft: Story Mode will be this with several Minecraft YouTubers and the game's protagonists being the guests of "The White Pumpkin." | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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The Shinra Mansion in Final Fantasy VII is unusual in that the hidden evil in it is not some creature, but records of experiments of mad science. Sephiroth (a former test subject) goes mad from reading the records there, and emerges from the house as the Big Bad of the game. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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The Bat is set at the house of Courtleigh Fleming, the late president of the failed Union Bank. Rumor has it that the money robbed from the bank is stashed in a Hidden Room in the house. In an old country house whose lights tend to fail during storms, candles, pocket flashlights, and wristwatches with illuminated dials all become important items. | |
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The Cat and the Canary, where a young heiress and her relatives are harassed by a killer. | |
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The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. had an episode that took place on an island during a gathering of famous bounty hunters where someone begins killing them off. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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Arsenic and Old Lace somewhat parodies this, being set in an old Victorian house. It's not particularly dark, though its elderly owners disdain electric lighting, and it turns out to have a fair number of places for stashing dead bodies. | |
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In an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Batman becomes a vampire and invites several heroes to the Justice League satellite, which quickly becomes an Old Dark House, as he takes them out, one by one. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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The board game Clue (aka Cluedo) is a well known example taking place in an English country house called Tudor Mansion (named Tudor Close, Tudor Hall, Arlington Grange, Boddy Manor or Boddy Mansion in some editions) in Hampshire, England, in 1926. | |
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| Old, Dark House / int_5275595f | type |
Old, Dark House | |
| Old, Dark House / int_5275595f | comment |
In Superman Family #168, the Villain of the Month -a wannabe sorcerer- lives in a shady, spooky, centuries-old abandoned mansion located on the top of a hill. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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Carfax Abbey in Dracula serves as the 19th-century equivalent of Dracula's castle when he makes his way to London. He specifically bought it because it was dark and foreboding despite Harker being confused why he would want a building that's so run down. Also, because it's big enough to hold his coffins of dirt and close to London to hunt for blood. | |
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In The Man Who Changed His Mind, Dr. Laurience is conducting his research in a decaying, isolated manor house in the country. The local cabbie refuses to take Clare to the door; instead dropping her off some distance away from the house. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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Most of Foxworth Hall in Flowers in the Attic is beautiful, but the giant, labyrinthine, dark, dusty attic with its forgotten relics and creepy schoolroom definitely falls under this trope. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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The Monster (1925) might be the earliest example of this trope. The mansion/asylum currently occupied by Dr. Ziska has hidden passageways, hidden trap doors, steel shutters that slide down in front of the windows to prevent escape, and fireplaces rigged to emit knockout gas. And of course it's got Ziska's creepy lab down in the basement. | |
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Betrayal at House on the Hill takes place in one of these. Though you usually know who the bad guy is. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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The Don Knotts film The Private Eyes featured one of these where the house staff are being knocked off one by one some time after the lord and lady are murdered. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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In Adventure Comics #408, Supergirl investigates an old, ramshackle mansion owned by a lunatic old man who will threaten with a shotgun whoever knocks on the entrance gate, and haunted by the ghost of a little girl whose parents were murdered and buried in the cellar by the old man. | |
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The majority of A Haunting in Venice takes place inside Rowena Drake's crumbling palazzo in the centre of Venice. According to legend, the palazzo was an orphanage and when the plague swept the city, the doctors and nurses abandoned the orphanage and sealed the children inside; leaving them to die. The palazzo is supposedly haunted by the spirits of the children who hate all doctors and nurses. | |
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Murder by Death is one of these movies, only the guests are all pastiches of famous fictional detectives. | |
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Knives Out takes place mostly in a New England mansion owned by a recently murdered eccentric billionaire, and most of the scenes takes place while it's foggy outside. Hillariously, during the Motive Rant, one of the killer's grievances was that the old man intended to will the family mansion to his nurse instead of a family member, only for the detective to burst out laughing and point out that the "family mansion" was bought just a few decades ago. | |
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13 Dead End Drive is a board game with a sinister mansion as the set piece and the players as potential heirs trying to bump each other off. | |
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A variant of this in the neo-noir Bad Times at the El Royale. Instead of a crumbling Victorian mansion it's a flashy Art Deco motel, but a lot of the hallmarks of the genre - an eclectic cast of characters bearing shocking secrets, trapped together - are all there. | |
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In Starfire's Revenge, the titular Queenpin's main European headquarters are in a old, ruined and gloomy castle located near the River Seine. | |
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The long-abandoned Dansen mansion lies at the centre of the rash of brutal slayings striking rural Louisiana in Dark Heritage. | |
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Old, Dark House | |
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Even though it takes place in a radio station during a live show, The Radioland Murders plays this trope pretty well. The biggest difference is that only certain important people connected to the station are in danger, and not everyone in the building. | |
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Count Yorga moves into a creepy like manor at the start of both the films. The first one being on a hill outside the city, though it seems to be just for show as he spends most of his time in the lower sections where he has a makeshift throne room that his undead concubines kept and his coffin kept in a darken area around the house where he sleeps in the daylight hour. In the sequel, the manor isn't quite as big and looks like an everyday house. But the inside is fairly creepy with dark corridors, dusty rooms, cobwebs aplenty and no notable windows which of course is perfect for him and his growing female vampire horde. It likewise does have shutters he can control through button presses to trap his victims while he and his concubines use their powers to warp around the house to chase them. He likewise has a throne room in this one but a tad bigger and where the coffins of his concubines are kept (as opposed to just stone slabs in the first). As well as a quicksand pit in the back of the house to get rid of dead bodies he doesn't intend to revive. | |
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The movie The Old Dark House (1932) (as well as the 1963 remake) is the Trope Namer. In the former, group of characters get stuck on a stormy night in a house with dark history. The latter is a comedy murder mystery concerning a family fortune. Both movies are based on an old novel, Benighted, by J.B. Priestly. |
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In The Ghoul, Professor Morlant lives in a rambling old mansion on the Yorkshire Moors, lit entirely by candles. | |
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Farndale Avenue series: The spoof whodunnit show-within-a-show in The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery is set in the remote country house Checkmate Manor, where the characters are being murdered one-by-one after gathering for a will reading. The spoof B-movie horror show-within-a-show in The Haunted Through-Lounge and Recessed Dining Nook at Farndale Castle is about a young couple whose car breaks down, forcing them to spend the night in Farndale Castle, with the spooky portraits, secret passages and sinister occupants. |
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The were-car episode of Futurama begins with Bender inheriting one of these off a dead uncle, prompting the following exchange: The castle itself turns out to be full of robot-themed spookiness such as paintings with mechanized eyes which follow motion sensors, the Windows start-up music echoing through the halls, 666 in written in binary appearing backwards in the mirrors, etc. |
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The ×××HOLiC movie A Midsummer's Night Dream takes place in one of these. Though the house itself is the one making the guests disappear. | |
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The Gothic-Horror-with-tentacles novel The Crows features a dark old house with a gruesome history that's initially an ominous ruin, restored by its new owner, and reveals itself as a Sapient House as well as a Haunted House. It invades its owner's dreams to let her know that her feelings for it are mutual, and manifests an physical humanoid avatar as the result of a wish gone awry (Be Careful What You Wish For). | |
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Neverending Nightmares begins in one, where Thomas and his sister Gabby live. And taking place inside of a nightmare, it only grows more dark and desolate as the plot advances. | |
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Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None takes place in a mansion on an isolated island, where the boat to the mainland won't be coming back for several days. But the house itself is actually an aversion, having the finest modern amenities available for the era with plenty of windows to allow light to come in. Vera Claythorne comments on this. | |
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Clue the movie took place inside such a mansion. In 1954, six strangers arrive by ominous invitation at a secluded New England mansion, ominously named 'Boddy Mansion'. | |
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In Husk, a car crash leaves the protagonists stranded in a cornfield. After discovering their cell phones don't work, they decided to make their way to a creepy, seemingly abandoned farmhouse located in the centre of the cornfield to see if they can phone for help. What could possibly go wrong? | |
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This is a staple of Scooby-Doo and many of its imitators, though the victims are usually just kidnapped instead of murdered. | |
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Dracula: Ruler of the Night: As in the original story, Carfax Abby serves this role, though Dracula does try to make a bit more homely since in this rendition his brides eventually join him on his trip to London. When the hunters start to come after them following Lucy's turning. They at the suggestion of Lucy's now turned mother, Minerva, raid the house of a socialite friend of the Westerna family, make her into a new bride who, after turning, willingly gives up the house and slowly turn her manor into this as well, least on the inside. | |
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The old Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends had an episode where The Chameleon invited Spider-Man and six other heroes to an island he owns and filled with traps so he could impersonate them, sowing distrust, and then kill them. He even uses a Ten Little Indians-style rhyme. | |
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The setting of Insanity is an old, seemingly abandoned mansion on the edge of town, which is rumored to be haunted. The protagonists become trapped there and can't call for help because all the phone lines have been cut. It turns out to have a very dark and tragic history. | |
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The Compleat Al depicts Michael Jackson's home as this, complete with dark and stormy weather. | |
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Dark Manor in Kirby's Epic Yarn though despite being haunted, the biggest challenge is simply navigating it due to the darkness, with the ghosts almost being helpful mooks, as they give off light, however minuscule. In an extra challenge where living "enemies" take residence in Dark Manor Kirby and Fluff become the monsters of a Mook Horror Show. | |
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The Addams Family resides in one of these, in the original cartoons as well as the various adaptations. | |
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Ruby Gloom is set in a house that's superficially one of these, but because everyone in the cast is a Perky Goth, it's anything but spooky. | |
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Superman: In Adventure Comics #408, Supergirl investigates an old, ramshackle mansion owned by a lunatic old man who will threaten with a shotgun whoever knocks on the entrance gate, and haunted by the ghost of a little girl whose parents were murdered and buried in the cellar by the old man. In Superman Family #168, the Villain of the Month -a wannabe sorcerer- lives in a shady, spooky, centuries-old abandoned mansion located on the top of a hill. In Starfire's Revenge, the titular Queenpin's main European headquarters are in a old, ruined and gloomy castle located near the River Seine. |
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The Pagemaster: Dr. Jekyll lives in a big, dark mansion on the edge of a cliff. While Richard comes across a few ghost stories, the much bigger threat is Jekyll himself once he transforms into Mr. Hyde. | |
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Lucius plays this trope much like the Dark Brotherhood mission from Oblivion. You play a child of the devil who must kill everyone else in the house without arousing suspicion. | |
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Etra chan saw it!: Akamatsu rents a cheap, old house because he wants to save money; however, the house is suspected to be haunted due to the weird smell coming from it and Akamatsu witnessed a long-haired girl coming out of his closet in the middle of night. Tokusa feels something fishy about the place, so he has Tachibana to check the ceiling. The "ghost" turns out to be Yuzuriha, a stalker who keeps coming to the house even after her ex-boyfriend broke up with her, and the smell actually came from the food she brought over there. The whole incident causes Akamatsu to move out. | |
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The 1948 short Scaredy Cat has Porky and Sylvester spending the night in one of these, with the latter becoming aware of a cult of murderous mice attacking them. | |
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Dr. Brainstorm attempts to scare Calvin and company in one of these in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series. | |
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In Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, the Crumrin place is infamous as a haunted, sinister mansion. Turns out the neighbors are right, but it's not anything like they think it is. | |
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In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", Holmes gives his opinion that a manor house in the countryside can be infinitely more dangerous than any city street. In the city, aggrieved neighbors will soon report and spread the word about screams and violence. A villain on an isolated estate can act with total impunity, knowing that the nearest help for their victim is miles away. | |
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The original House On Haunted Hill is a modernized version of one, using a Frank Lloyd Wright house, built in 1923, for exterior shots of the eponymous location (although the interior looks more typically 19th Century). Some very clever camera work makes it look like it's located in some desolate hill country, rather than the winding, dense LA neighbourhood of Los Feliz, where the house is in real life. The 1999 remake is more of a traditional Haunted House. |
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The 1999 remake is more of a traditional Haunted House. | |
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Killer Party has the abandoned frat house where a young man named Allan was killed 22 years prior. Naturally, the sorority decides this is the perfect setting for an April Fools Day party. | |
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In The Curse of Sleeping Beauty, Kaiser Gardens, the property Thomas inherits, along with the family Curse, is a decaying old mansion that has existed for longer than the county property records. | |
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The villains' hideout Owl's Dene in Five Get into Trouble from The Famous Five: a lonely old house on a hill, with no telephone, gas, running water or electricity, surrounded by a prison-like high wall with mechanical gates, and contains a secret room for hiding wanted criminals. | |
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Xanadu is often presented this way in Citizen Kane. Built on an immense "private mountain" located on the "deserts of the Gulf Coast" in Florida, Xanadu is described as being the world's largest private estate. The estate is featured in the opening and closing shots of the film, and is where Kane dies, virtually alone. Though he is still fabulously wealthy at the time of his death, Xanadu, still unfinished according to the newsreel, has already fallen into visible disrepair, presumably from neglect and its impractical size. | |
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The titular setting for the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook House of Hell is one of these. | |
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