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After House on Haunted Hill came out in 1959, fans drove up Glendower Avenue at night to stand outside the house and scream. It made the house hard to sell. By 1965 a Los Angeles Times reporter found the gates padlocked and the walls covered in graffiti. The owner then, by a later owner's account, lived in one room and ran teenagers off with a shotgun.
Filming also kept it standing. By the late 1980s it was taking about $120,000 a year from shoots and $100,000 from other events, under a non-profit with no other way to pay for repairs.
The neighbours went to the city. Parties and tours went in 1985 on zoning grounds, public events in 1989, and in May 1991 the Board of Public Works came for the filming. The Los Angeles Times set out the terms in March 1994: nine permits a year, three trucks, one generator on the street, crew bused in. By the end of the decade the objections had gone quiet, and the no-parking signs on Glendower Avenue carried a written exemption for film crews. The city capped the shooting and cut a hole for it in the kerbside signs.
The first was Female, in 1933, and the production built a swimming pool at the house to shoot it, years before the house had one. House on Haunted Hill called the building a century old when it was thirty-five. Black Rain hung a matte high-rise behind it for a yakuza boss's house. Twin Peaks shot the soap opera inside the show here rather than on a stage, and Buffy used it as the mansion Angelus and Drusilla live in. Deckard's apartment block in Blade Runner is the outside of it.
Architectural Digest counts more than eighty appearances. Productions that want the look now build it: an episode of The Studio in 2025 copied the house for its set. The Los Angeles Conservancy, which holds the easement, labels its own entry for the house a private residence and asks people not to disturb the owners.