5 Set Design Secrets from the Movie Clue

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.

Most scenes were filmed on the mansion set created on Paramount’s historic Lot 18.

Photo: Paramount, Courtesy Everett Collection

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.