These TV and film settings span decades and genres, from science fiction to horror to fantasy. But they have one crucial connection: They all either filmed in, or were directly inspired by, one private residence in Los Angeles: the Ennis House, built in 1924 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Stone-colored and covered with intricately patterned tiles, it looms imperiously from atop the Los Feliz hills—and, as the Historic American Buildings Survey described it in 1969, “appears from the distance as a tremendously large monument rather than a two-bedroom dwelling.” [...]
The architect thought that an experimental construction technique with concrete—already a relatively common building material, and available in do-it-yourself form for use at home—might be the key. He didn’t particularly like concrete, writing in his autobiography that it was “the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world.” But he did understand the material’s potential and challenged himself to make it beautiful, posing the hypothetical, “Why not see what could be done with that gutter-rat?” [...]
Regardless of the countless times the Ennis House has been immortalized on film, Wright’s textile-block structures were not the big break the architect was looking for. Hollywood contacts were not enough. Wright headed back east and would not build in California again for years. He would briefly go into bankruptcy the year after Ennis, taking him into the difficult years of the Great Depression. [...]
The house is somber in other ways, as well. While the architect’s knowledge of the Mayans was superficial and arguably appropriative, perhaps he knew—he was always careful with the small details—that they typically used their temples as tombs. That built-in mood, more than anything, may explain the success of the Ennis House: It could fit any bill as a location, as long as it was home to monsters, villains, or anti-heroes. Though many kinds of movies and shows used it as a setting, pulpy, genre projects in particular gravitated to its unusual cinematic possibilities.
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