The Set Of Elf Would've Been Right At Home In A Horror Film
In the 2003 comedy "Elf," Will Ferrell plays Buddy, a regular human who was raised at the North Pole as a Christmas elf and works in Santa's Workshop. When he finds out he's really a human from New York City, Buddy travels to The Big Apple to find his father, Walter Hobbs (James Caan). A timeless winter holiday classic, "Elf" is one of the best Christmas movies ever ... which only makes it all the more amusing that a huge chunk of the film's set would have been fitting for a horror movie instead.
Searching for his father, Buddy parades around the bustling streets of New York City, and it's obvious the film's exterior version of Manhattan is the real deal. The New York interior shots, on the other hand, is where the movie tricks us all. Scenes set inside the elaborate Christmas-decorated Gimbels department store, Walter Hobbs's work office and apartment, the orphanage where Baby Buddy once lived, and the jail where he gets locked up — all of these were filmed inside an old, shut-down mental institution in Vancouver, Canada.
In the "Elf" episode of the Netflix documentary series "The Movies That Made Us," which features interviews from the major players involved in bringing the movie to life, production designer Rusty Smith discusses what it was like filming the Christmas movie in such an un-Christmas-y place. "We had to repurpose this draconian mental institution," he explains. "It worked great for the police station, but it is one of the creepiest places I've ever been in my life." But while working at the location was a creepy experience for Smith, it was a funny one for one of the film's actors: Artie Lange.
Seeing Will Ferrell in costume in a mental institution made Artie Lange laugh
In "Elf," Artie Lange (who's also known for his roles on "The Howard Stern Show" and "Mad TV") plays a mall Santa hired by Gimbels, where Buddy works as an elf for the holidays. Because Buddy grew up with the real Santa at the North Pole, he knows an imposter when he sees one. More to the point, being unfamiliar with the ways most people celebrate Christmas, he doesn't know to keep his mouth shut and let the children have their fun. Consequentially, he ruins everything and exposes the mall Santa as a beef-and-cheese-smelling fake, resulting in a huge brawl that leaves much of the store in ruins (all while the comically-horrified kids and their very confused parents look on).
In a 2017 episode of ABC's "20/20" [via ABC News], Lange talked about how watching Will Ferrell walk around set in his full "Elf" getup was funny because of the history of the building. Recalled one particular interaction: "Will walks by in the outfit, the elf outfit, which he tried to stay in character. The boots that are curled up," said Lange while laughing. "I look up. He goes, 'Hi Artie.' And then he just walked past."
I image what popped into Lange's head were those scenes from a lot of comedy movies and sitcoms that portray mental institutions in a comedically stereotypical light. You know the ones: The protagonist visits such a location for the first time and is greeted by a cast of zany adult inmates dressed up as clowns, Peter Pan, etc. I can understand why seeing a 6-foot-3-inch Will Ferrell casually walking by in a Christmas elf costume would get a laugh out of Lange.
How did they end up in a mental institution?
"Elf" was made on a budget of $33 million. That's not exactly peanuts, especially not back in the early 2000s. Anyhow, the film's producers couldn't afford to shoot the entire movie in New York, so they packed up the crew and moved them to Vancouver. Indeed, a lot of American movies are filmed in the Great White North because it is cost effective; the American dollar is worth more in the county. However, the crew ran into one big problem: The sound stages weren't large enough to support their needs.
That's when they found the mental institution, which turned out to be so versatile that they used it for filming almost the entire movie. In addition to making use of an old, abandoned building, the "Elf" production crew cleverly converted a public-use hockey rink into the North Pole and Santa's Workshop, according to the "The Movies That Made Us" episode. Considering that they were filming in Canada, I can't think of any place that would have been more fitting or colder.
In another episode of the series that focuses on another holiday classic and one of filmmaker John Hughes's best films, 1990's "Home Alone," it is revealed that the inside of the McCallisters' elegant suburban Illinois home where Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) sets up his sophisticated array of booby traps is really an abandoned high school, which was also used to film scenes in other Hughes movies such as "Uncle Buck" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." All this goes to show that filmmaking is truly an art — one that involves a lot of creative thinking and hands-on craftsmanship.