There’s a vacant lot on the corner of James Street and Eulalie Avenue in Oshawa — except it wasn’t vacant on two occasions this summer when it played home to a haunted house for the Warner Brothers film adaptation of the novel It by Stephen King.
Construction crews from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts (IATSE) Local 873 built the pre-aged facade of the broken down house to film exterior shots for the movie.
Oshawa This Week reports that the outside of the house was built from siding repeatedly torched and power washed to give it that abandoned-for-decades ambience. Carefully crafted plaster mimicked the fieldstone foundation. There were no rooms constructed inside the house, which was used for exterior filming only.
Jannine Norman lives a few properties away with clear sight lines to the It house.
“You can’t tell that it isn’t an old grey house made of dilapidated, weathered barn board,” she says. “Driving down the street it really looked like an old, abandoned house.”
Residents began receiving notices about the construction and filming as early as May. Most of the construction was completed in July with filming taking place in mid-August.
“The house attracted a lot of attention,” says Norman. “There were hundreds of people lining the streets day and night while it was being built and it was kind of exciting. By August they parked some old cars on the street and placed a gnarly old artificial tree in the front yard that really looked excellent.”
The house was torn down near the end of August, only to be resurrected — at least in part — in early September.
“They built about one-quarter of the house back up again so they could do some close up exterior shots with some of the cast,” says Norman.
While she’s read King before, she never read It — or even watched the 1990 television miniseries — but says she’s hoping to catch the movie in theatres at its scheduled release date in September 2017.
“I’m just waiting for the free tickets to arrive in the mailbox, instead of those filming notices,” she jokes.
While she didn’t recognize any famous actors, she did one day see the very incarnation of evil—villainous Pennywise the clown—walking down the street with a fistful of balloons.
“Clowns don’t scare me to begin with” says Norman. “But he looked kind of small beside the roadie who was accompanying him.”
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