Haunted or no, mansion’s ideal for film
S.F. Westerfeld landmark is location site of “Snaggletooth”
Dusk came slowly, setting an appropriately spooky aura at the William Westerfeld house in Alamo Square on Wednesday, April 27. A packed house filled the foyer to tour the purportedly haunted mansion before catching a sneak preview of “Snaggletooth,” a short film written and directed by San Francisco filmmaker Colin Bishopp.
Shot inside the Westerfeld House, the film, which will premiere at the Scary Cow Film Festival on Monday, July 9, at the Castro Theatre, follows a young girl ( Jolie Ledford) who is tricked by her mother (Sierra Marcks) into visiting an orthodontist in the dead of night. Haunted twists soon ensue in the horror-comedy tale.
Beyond the Westerfeld residence’s storied past — it has opened its doors to czarist Russians, jazz luminaries and Janis Joplin and her hippie counterparts — the house is the perfect horror story setting, considering its history of rumored paranormal activity. The mansion already bears its fair share of horror cinema history, as experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger lived in the house while shooting “Lucifer Rising” and “Invocation of My Demon Brother.” These short films featured the likes of Anton LaVey, the cult leader and founder of the Church of Satan, and Bobby Beausoleil, Anger’s housemate who would go on to join the Manson family cult and is now serving a life sentence for murder.
LaVey visited the house often to perform “satanic rituals up in the tower,” said the house’s owner and resident Jim Siegel before leading the tour up to the room that provides a panoramic view of the city.
The haunted mythology has persisted: While tour members snaked through the hallways of the 28-room Victorian, a separate film crew was setting up a shoot for the Travel Channel’s reality television show “Ghost Adventures.”
“‘Interview With a Vampire’ requested to film here, and Jimmy said no because he didn’t know who Brad Pitt was,” Bishopp said with a laugh before the tour. As for Bishopp, he secured the house for a four-day shoot with a small, crowdfunded budget and a string of lucky connections.
“We gave them a super good deal because I want to encourage the arts, and the true artists in San Francisco are being forced out,” said Siegel, who grew up partly in the Haight. Siegel bought the house in 1986 and has restored and re-created its Victorian interiors.
The Westerfeld location was a huge boon for Bishopp, a relative newcomer to filmmaking who grew up in Santa Cruz. “Snaggletooth,” created in partnership with Scary Cow Productions, a San Francisco incubator for independent filmmakers, is his debut work after an entirely disparate career spent primarily in politics. Previously, Bishopp was an Obama appointee at the Department of Energy and has worked as an advocate for clean water and energy.
“When I lived in Washington, D.C., I was approached randomly in a bar and asked if I’d ever done any acting,” Bishopp said. “I thought the person was hitting on me, and it turned out they were one of the casting directors for ‘House of Cards.’ They were looking for tall people to play Secret Service agents.”
Bishopp, as it turns out, was a “terrible actor,” but the collaborative process of filmmaking and a visit to the “House of Cards” set sucked him in. After arriving in San Francisco in 2014 and finding his way to Scary Cow, Bishopp began working on the script for “Snaggletooth.”
“It was really my then-9year-old niece who gave me the idea,” Bishopp said. “She complained that girls never get to be the monster. She was like, ‘There should be more movies where girls get to have special powers and be cool and mysterious!’ ”
In Bishopp’s film, a young girl gets power in a monstrous turn of events, becoming an unlikely source of fear in the creepy house.
After a successful screening in the foyer and a brief Q&A session, audiences requested an encore showing and the lights dimmed again. By then, it was fully dark outside.
“I spent four days here until very late at night, and I’m not aware of any close encounters,” Bishopp said when asked about any eerie occurrences. “But every object in the house has its own history.”
After purchasing the house, Siegel brought in Buddhist monks to bless the place and ward off any remaining LaVey vibes, though he attributes this more to his hippie nature. He’s more of a paranormal skeptic.
“But I did have one unexplained occurrence where my bed shook for a good minute, or 30 to 45 seconds, and I thought we were having an earthquake, so I braced myself,” he recalled. “But I looked at my crystal chandelier in my bedroom, and it wasn’t moving. Nothing else in the room was moving. And then I felt something get into the bed with me. Only time in 32 years.”