The terrifyingly haunted house on an Indian burial ground in Poltergeist is actually (appropriately?) in Simi Valley.

The picturesque Verdugo Hills High School tucked away in the North Valley has been a popular filming location for decades, but its use in 1996’s The Craft represents one of its most notable on-screen appearances. In real life, it’s not a private Catholic institution but part of the LAUSD public school system.

Now known as the VA Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center, this Valley hospital’s exteriors stood in for Haddonfield Memorial in Halloween II, in which the unstoppable Michael Myers tracks down a bad wig-wearing Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).

Fans of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers can step into the fictional town of Santa Mira by taking a stroll along Sierra Madre’s Kersting Court, which becomes Grand Central for alien intruders in the 1956 classic. The cozy downtown’s “Everytown, America” feel offers a fitting backdrop for whatever Eisenhower-era metaphor you choose to ascribe to the film.

In the classic murderous car movie Christine, Arnie’s girlfriend Leigh lives in one of the oldest surviving Victorian homes in Monrovia, built in 1887.

This private home in rural Topanga Canyon was made famous by Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the dishonestly-titled slasher sequel that saw Jason Voorhees stalking a new crop of teenagers (including a spasmodically-dancing Crispin Glover) at Camp Crystal Lake. Its remote location lent itself well to a number of subsequent horror films, including Pumpkinhead, Ed Gein, and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.

You don’t see much of it in the movie, but this is where Laurie Strode lives in Halloween.

jhas appeared in many, many films, but notably played “the school” in both A Nightmare on Elm Street and the original film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Laurie’s BFF Annie is babysitting at the Wallace’s house when she’s murdered; afterward, Michael Myers hangs out and peers creepily out the windows. The home has been altered dramatically since the movie was filmed.

While the exterior and lobby of Scream 2’s opening scene were filmed at South Pasadena’s now-shuttered Rialto Theatre, Jada Pinkett Smith’s Maureen Evans met her untimely end inside the Vista’s expansive Egyptian-themed auditorium. In a nod to this history, the theater hosted a revival screening of the first Scream in 2016.

The nightmare was on North Genesee is located on a tree-lined street in Hollywood, and a recent owner admits she used to be freaked out by the basement (for good reason!). She told Zillow she did a gut reno and then, property records show, sold the place in 2013 for $2.1 million.

Silver Lake’s Canfield-Moreno Estate, aka The Paramour Mansion, aka The Crestmont, is big in horror sequels that were made too late—it played the Stab 3 movie producer’s house in Scream 3 and Hillcrest Academy High School in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. Now, you can rent it for your wedding.

The dark, steamy boiler room where the maniacal Freddy Krueger would take his youthful victims was shot in the old Lincoln Heights Jail, another Los Angeles city landmark. Plans to redevelop the jail are in the works.

The psychiatric institution where Freddy Krueger stalks his sleep-deprived teenage victims in Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors is actually Royce Hall, one of UCLA’s four original buildings. The red-brick structure’s Romanesque Revival architecture—modeled after the Sant’Ambrogio Church in Milan—offers an appropriately foreboding backdrop for what many consider the greatest of the Elm Street sequels.

This Victorian used for exteriors in the John Landis-directed music video for Michael Jackson “Thriller” has made its historic Angelino Heights neighborhood very popular on Halloween.

This Country Club Park house designed by Alfred Rosenheim around 1908 was home to some seriously creepy shit in the first season of American Horror Story. In real life, it’s a work of art, with stained glass windows, a set of Tiffany glass doors, and six Batchelder tile fireplaces.

The Ghostbusters caught their very first ghost (Slimer) in the ballroom at the Sedgewick Hotel, a.k.a. the Millennium Biltmore Downtown. The hotel’s stairway also played the stairway in the insane Shandor building.

Before the Linda Vista Community Hospital, built in 1905, was turned into housing for seniors, it was featured in loads of horror films and shows. Very few are worth mentioning, but they include Dexter, The Cell, Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return, Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, and Insidious: Chapter 2.

The hodgepodge, vaguely Gothic architecture of the historic Doheny Mansion (part of Mount Saint Mary’s Downtown campus) gives it an eerie look that’s perfect for a horror movie. In Sam Raimi’s wicked 2009 spookfest Drag Me to Hell, it hosted the dual seances that unleash the demonic Lamia.

The action of Fred Dekker’s cult 1986 sci-fi/zombie movie is centered around the Kappa Delta sorority house, which, in real life, most recently housed the fraternity FIJI, until it was suspended from campus.

This unassuming El Segundo home played host to an extraordinary battle with the supernatural in the terrifying 1983 shocker, which was inspired by a real-life case of alleged paranormal activity in Culver City. The house of the real-life incident is located about seven miles north.

Most of the high school scenes for the original Carrie (e.g., Carrie covered in pig’s blood) were shot at the former campus of Hermosa Beach’s Pier Avenue Junior High. Today, it’s a community center.