In Alex Garland’s new film Men, a historic English country home appears to be the perfect respite. The elegant stone and wood estate, surrounded by rolling green hills and apple trees ripe with fruit, seems the sort of place you’d want to spend the summer. But as the story unfolds, the house takes on a sinister tilt, transforming into something far less welcoming.
There are beloved films like The Holiday that showcase the English countryside in a picturesque romantic hue, but Men is far from the first film to use a real-life English manor house as the setting for an uncomfortable and terrifying story. “Ultimately, I think it’s because of the history that we feel embedded in that structure,” explains Men’s production designer Mark Digby. “The history of English culture and the change of that culture over two millennia really,” he notes. Although the house isn’t necessarily ancient, it reflects the constant changes that have taken place throughout English history, including periods of mysticism and paganism. Digby wanted viewers “to understand that there could be forces that still exist in those sort of buildings.”
Men follows in the footsteps of numerous films over the decades, from Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca to Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger to Jack Clayton’s classic, The Innocents. Here are six of the most unsettling English manor homes to appear on the big screen.
Men (2022)
For Harper (Jessie Buckley), the English countryside seems like the perfect place to relax after a tragedy. But of course it really isn’t: Someone begins stalking Harper from the dark of the surrounding woods, resulting in a nightmarish scenario that makes a horror of the pastoral setting. The movie was filmed on location on an estate in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, which usually exists as a vacation rental. Digby and set decorator Michelle Day transformed the property to be even more sinister, complete with red walls that purposefully contrast the rolling green fields outside. Digby wanted it to have a Jekyll and Hyde quality in which the viewer felt both comforted and terrified by the same building. Garland even adapted the script to the real-life house, which they found early in the process.
“Along the way we made a decision not to build,” Digby says. “We made the decision to have a real space and to be both limited and encouraged by that in our shooting space.” When shooting on location, he says, the home becomes a character. “We need to know all of its details and understand how we dress it and what it gives to us.”
The Nest (2020)
After middle class married couple Rory (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) relocate into a sprawling manor in Surrey, England, with their two children, cracks begin to emerge. Nether Winchendon House, a Medieval and Tudor country manor house in Buckinghamshire, stood in for the home’s exteriors as well as some interiors. Ironically, the historic, Grade I–listed property is primarily a wedding venue—a far cry from its oppressive status in The Nest. Production designer James Price and set decorator Stella Fox selected the house and re-imagined it for the film’s 1980s setting. They used primarily American midcentury furniture, which was juxtaposed with the gloomy and severe English architecture.
“This isn’t what American audiences would expect to see, as it’s not very classic English,” Price previously told AD. “We chose another direction because it creates more interest, and is unexpected. To me the home in The Nest is wherever the family is—at the end, they realize this is as good as it gets.”
Rebecca (2020)
The fictional estate of Manderley has appeared onscreen several times, most recently in director Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of Rebecca for Netflix. Rather than select one house, Wheatley and his team composited the fictional Cornwall estate of Manderley with several locations, including famous filming location Hatfield House (which has also stood in for Wayne Manor and Windsor Castle). Production designer Sarah Greenwood used eight houses in total—Mapperton House in Beaminster and Loseley House in Guildford also comprised the interior, and the exterior was Cranborne Manor in Dorset—to craft an oppressive feeling. It meant that Mrs. de Winter, played by Lily James, was emotionally and physically consumed by the house.
“Normally a very important part of our job is to give geography to a place,” Greenwood told AD upon the film’s release. “But in fact in this instance it was kind of about breaking the geography. She always sort of was finding her way around. In a way the audience would also have that difficulty.”
The Little Stranger (2018)
Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger, set in postwar Britain, centers its drama in the fictional Hundreds Hall, a once-grand estate now in disrepair. The house and its surrounding gardens were brought to life by production designer Simon Elliott using several existing houses. The filmmakers stitched together aspects of Hertfordshire’s Langleybury House, which Elliott almost completely refurbished for the film, and North Yorkshire’s Newby Hall, which stood in for a past version of Hundreds Hall from before the war.
“To support the idea that the house is haunted, I knew I wanted it to feel empty,” Elliott explained, noting that the intention was to subvert the expectations of the viewer by showcasing an untraditional Georgian manor. “With the house devoid of its clutter, I hope the audience sees and feels the house rather than be distracted by the items in it.”
The Haunting (1963)
Adapted from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting is the quintessential British haunted house movie. The film, directed by Robert Wise, follows a group of people invited to a supposedly ghost-filled manor by a paranormal investigator. The filmmakers used Ettington Park, in Warwickshire, for the fictional Hill House’s exteriors and grounds, and production designer Elliot Scott built interior sets intended to give a claustrophobic effect. The resulting manor house is meticulously detailed and full of objects, many of which have an unsettling feel to them.
The Innocents (1961)
The Innocents, based on Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, set the standard for haunted house films. Directed by Jack Clayton and starring Deborah Kerr, the movie centers on a governess who comes to believe that the two children she’s watching are possessed by spirits of their house. The manor’s interiors were primarily filmed at Shepperton Studios in England, but its Gothic exterior was found at Sheffield Park and Garden in East Sussex, which is home to the historic Sheffield Park House. Today visitors can glimpse the scenic house, but in the film—thanks to set decoration and cinematography—it has a terrifying aesthetic.
