With six suspects who may have committed the crime and nine rooms in which to perform the deed, the mystery game Clue has remained a popular—and legal—way to stage a murder. In 1985, this beloved board game got the silver screen treatment, with a film and set design dramatizing its intrigue and mystery. Critics at the time may have found it, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, “gimmicky,” but the film version of Clue has endured as a cult classic that reimagines the whodunit board game as a playful black comedy.
Audiences find different pleasures in Clue, from its over-the-top plot to its zany characters. There are the campy performances from stars including Tim Curry (as The Butler) and Eileen Brennan (as Mrs. Peacock), which reach a new level of slapstick. Then there’s the witty repartee—such as the oft-repeated “Husbands should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, and disposable,” said by Mrs. White—that elicits laughs despite the movie’s darker themes of Cold War paranoia.
And, of course, there is Clue’s set design, namely the luxurious-but-creepy mansion, which is almost a character in itself. Hill House boasts grand rooms and Baroque style, making for one opulent backdrop. Now, on the film’s 40th anniversary, AD zeroes in on the famous setting, revealing secrets about Clue’s set design and the Easter eggs hidden within Hill House. Here, five under-the-radar design cues of Clue.
Clue was filmed on hallowed cinematic ground
Although it was filmed smack in the middle of the decade, Clue resisted the on-location trend of the 1980s by filming almost entirely on a Paramount lot. And Lot 18 had one fabled history: It was where Alfred Hitchcock broke ground—literally digging some 30 feet below Lot 18’s floor level—to build the apartment complex for his single-location thriller Rear Window. It’s apropos that Clue, a film set in 1950s McCarthy America, was made on the same lot where Hitchcock’s masterpiece of paranoia and surveillance was filmed.
It was on Lot 18 where the famed Hill House mansion was constructed. “Location scouts and the producers would never find a mansion that would match the exact layout that they needed, so they built their own,” explains John Hatch, the author of the Clue history book What Do you Mean, Murder? Clue and the Making of a Cult Classic. The Hill House property was built with almost the exact layout of the board game, complete with moveable walls and countless antiques furnishing its interior.
A few exterior shots were filmed at the Max Busch house in Pasadena, California, a historic 1929 English Tudor residence that once belonged to the Anheuser Busch brewing dynasty, which was designed by Paul Revere Williams, the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects. “The Clue crew spent one day filming on location at the Busch house, capturing a stunt driver winding up the long driveway, exteriors of the house,” says Hatch. “They duplicated the façade, fountain, and roundabout of the driveway of the Busch house for the mansion on the soundstage.”
A horror classic inspired Hill House
It wasn’t just the lot that represented a piece of cinematic history via Hitchcock’s oeuvre; the script referenced one famed Gothic property for Hill House: the manse from Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho. The Bates family home, with its forbidding, sinister feel, was a source of inspiration. “The first draft of Clue mentioned Psycho,” explains Hatch. It described the fictional mansion as “imposing, Gothic, gloomy, menacing. Perhaps it is reminiscent of the house in Psycho.”
Since an entire sprawling property wasn’t built (only its interiors), producers opted to use a visual rendering of the façade of Hill House in the end. According to Hatch, “the exterior of the Clue mansion was a matte painting created by Syd Dutton and Bill Taylor, based on paintings by Bill Major, and was meant to evoke American Gothic homes like the Psycho house.” (Another more subtle reference to Hitchcock’s horror classics can be found in the multiple references to birds, such as the eagle-shaped lamp in the study.)
Despite its intentional spookiness, the Clue set would later be claimed for use in the prime-time television soap opera Dynasty, with the interiors appearing as the Carlton Hotel—and the Max Busch house serving as the Carlton’s exterior.
A bad version of Queen Anne design
Before construction began, the film’s production designer, John Lloyd, concluded that they would “never find a house with the same layout as the game.” There was some interest in modeling the property on a style from across the Atlantic, which often appears in murder mysteries—but that quickly changed. “Initially they thought about going with an English Tudor but decided on the American Gothic mansion. And not something subtle, but they wanted a design that was almost hyper-American, an aggressive Queen Anne style,” Hatch explains.
Queen Anne was a Victorian architectural style characterized by pitched roofs with cross gable and asymmetrical façades. But the style may have been bastardized somewhat in Clue. “If you pause the film on the matte painting of the exterior, it’s sort of Queen Anne McMansion of its day, complete with large turrets and towers and a jutting greenhouse,” says Hatch. “This exterior was never meant to be beautiful, but to seem eerie, and it does work for that purpose, only appearing very briefly when lightning flashes or when the power goes out. I imagine actual architects of Queen Anne homes would be appalled!”
Even if the mansion captured a Queen Anne revival style, it did borrow one feature from centuries earlier: a parquet checkerboard floor recalling the board game itself. “The screenplay had the floor as marble, but the set designers wisely opted for oak and made it a parquet floor to match the board game,” explains Hatch.
The set hints at the animal within each of us
In a blink-and-you-miss-it strategy, Clue is filled with representations of animals: stone gargoyles buttressing the mansion face, clocks and lamps mounted by eagles, beasts carved into staircases, and even some taxidermy specimens. “Set decorator Tommy Roysden is the one who opted for what he called an ‘animalistic’ look for the set,” explains Hatch.
These unsettling animal figurines were subtle attempts to convey the tense, even desperate, feeling between the characters in surviving the murderous night. But the aesthetic also belied a hidden conflict with implementing one coherent set design. “[It] goes to the conflicting existence of Hill House that producers and director Jonathan Lynn struggled to solve,” says Hatch. “They wanted the house to be scary, and at various times it was described as dusty, drafty, and abandoned. But conversely, they also wanted the mansion ornate, lavish, and pristine. They solved this contradiction a few ways with the set decor, including Roysden’s animals.”
Since some of the façade carvings also had mythological creatures (like gargoyles) for this effect, Hatch adds, it may explain why Paramount originally said it patterned the decor after a “Renaissance Revival.”
US presidents make some cameos
Original publicity materials reveal that the library set included a “desk with a bookstand” that came from the estate of Theodore Roosevelt. The Roosevelt connection would not be the only nod to presidents; the Clue set featured paintings of other deceased POTUSes. The first is of James A. Garfield, who was assassinated in 1881, and the second of William McKinley, who was later assassinated in 1901. Honest Abe also makes a brief appearance, albeit not in a framed painting: “Abraham Lincoln’s portrait can be seen in the library in a book that’s propped open on a bookstand,” says Hatch.
But not all portraits are those of murdered heads of state. George Washington, who died a natural death, also makes an appearance. “The producers and director opted for US presidents to emphasize the political nature of the film,” says Hatch. Each portrait was a bespoke painting done specifically for the film, modeled on a real-life version of the former leader.
The presence of presidents was, of course, intentional. Clue may be considered a farcical, slapstick take on a beloved board game, but it had a political message too: That power corrupts, the government can’t be trusted, and people can turn against each other in times of paranoia. All of which may inspire feelings of hatred similar to those Mrs. White describes in an often-quoted scene from the film: “Flames on the side of my face! Heaving breaths!"
