The House That Inspired Ghostbusters

A house on Woodrow Wilson Drive in Hollywood Hills has quite a history. It's been the home of Natalie Wood, Mama Cass Elliot, and Dan Aykroyd (and presumably other people not quite so famous). The house itself has a place in history because of what happened when Aykroyd moved there in the 1980s.

It didn’t take Aykroyd long to conclude that the house was haunted—something was turning on his StairMaster, playing the piano and slamming doors. Aykroyd says one night, he even felt someone, or something, crawl into bed with him—and it wasn’t his wife, actress Donna Dixon! He chalked it up to ghosts—and believes at least one of them was the spirit of the home’s former occupant Elliot, of the folk-pop group the Mamas and the Papas, who died of heart failure in 1974 at the age of 32. Instead of being unsettled by the paranormal activity, Aykroyd (who later moved out and sold the house) was inspired by it. The supernatural vibes gave him the idea to co-write (with Harold Ramis) the hit 1984 movie comedy Ghostbusters.

“I’m sure it’s Mama Cass,” the actor said in a 2003 interview. What made him so certain? Some of the disturbances were so “large” and noisy, Aykroyd noted, “you get the feeling it’s a big ghost.”

The house that inspired Ghostbusters is only one of eight places in haunted Hollywood you can read about at Parade. -via Metafilter


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Two titles I would add are "Say You Love Satan" about whacked out American teens on a killing spree, and "Lords of Chaos" about the whacked out Scandanavian death metal scene.
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One of my most disturbing books (but still a fun read!) is the drive-in by Joe Lansdale. Its a sci fi book, but features the most bizarre acts of Canabalism often involving children. It was one of the few books that left me very uneasy.
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In a rare instance, I SAW American Psycho before I read it and thought the movie was a riot (especially the whole "business card" thing...I work for a commercial printer).

A third of the way through the book, I wanted to pluck out my own eyes. Not so much for the gore, as the whole obsessive portrait. Beyond horrifying.
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I had a sneak preview of Kaaron Warren's Slights, upcoming in July, and it's one of the most disturbing books I've read. I'd put it somewhere between American Psycho's and We Need to Talk Kevin. It's about a girl who accidentally kills her mother in a car accident and has a horrific near death experience where she confronts the ghosts of everyone she's ever slighted. The sense of sly menace keeps building, rending happy suburbia apart with shocking revelations, from an awful little old lady next door to the things she unearths in her obsessive excavation of her backyard that reveal disturbing clues to her past. It's brilliant, queasy-making storytelling, the kind that sticks with you, so the details might hit you again like a nasty flashback. www.angryrobotbooks.com
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Awesome, a few more books to add to my 'must buy or borrow these'. I love Burroughs, Selby and Ellis but would definately have put at least one Ryu Murakami on that list - all his books have a distinctly disturbing edge to them and are all great reads.
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I saw the 1992 movie of this with Peter Weller (Robocop) and it was the most bizarre thing I ever saw. It was somewhat entertaining, but like the book you really never had your bearings on what was happening.

Didn't this movie have a talking anus? Man, I thought I had repressed that. Crap I'm freakin' out again!!
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Suffer the Children by John Saul. At one point a 13 year old girl kills a cat with a rock and dresses it in doll clothes, then she has a tea party with it in a mineshaft and ends up swearing at it because the corpse won't respond and then beating it and finally cutting it's head off with a butcher knife in a mad rage. It made me really sad to see her abuse the animal so horribly.
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