The Witches Of Eastwick | 1987

John Updike's dark novel is brightened up to become a lively fantasy with three women in the New England coastal town of Eastwick realising that, together, they have a strange power. When they use it to conjure up a far from perfect man, he turns out to be downright diabolical.

Little Compton in Rhode Island, was originally chosen as the location to stand in for the fictitious village of 'Eastwick' until some locals objected to the sacrilegious nature of the script.

Unfortunately, by the time the town council had voted in favour of the film, Warner Bros had already upped and moved on to the town of Cohasset, on the coast of Norfolk County in Massachusetts, about 27 miles southeast of Boston.

This picture-perfect community has also been featured in Housesitter, The Finest Hours, Thoroughbreds and 2022's Confess, Fletch.

Still recognisable are the local shops including the office of local newspaper 'The Eastwick Word', which is the Samuel Bates House (now available as a furnished rental if you fancy a stay in 'Eastwick') at 35 South Main Street, and the 'Eastwick Hardware Store' just opposite at 40 South Main Street.

Cohasset's First Parish Unitarian Church, 23 North Main Street, became Eastwick's church, where Felicia (Veronica Cartwright) has a disturbing outburst and where Van Horne ultimately seeks sanctuary. The location fee helped with the restoration of the building which was constructed in 1746 as the First Parish Meeting House.

The women's houses are in the area. The home Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer) shares with her children is 28 Otis Avenue, a Victorian farmhouse east of town overlooking Bailey's Creek and Cohasset Harbor, put on the market in 2019 for a little over $1,600,000.

The waterfront home of sculptor Alex (Cher) is 82 Border Street, which was the Mill River Marine Boat Yard and lives on as Cohasset Lobster Pound at the southern tip of Cohasset Cove. Plans to turn it into a boutique hotel (to be called The Eastwick Inn, no less) seem not to have been realised.

At the time, 'The Yapping Fox' where Alex sells her little sculptured figures, was the Quarterdeck gift store in Scituate a picturesque seacoast town on the South Shore, a few miles down the coast from Cohasset. It's now Lucky Finn Cafe, 206 Front Street.

The film opens with an excruciatingly boring school meeting which is brought to a sudden end by the onset of a mighty thunderstorm.

'Eastwick Elementary', the school in front of which the meeting is being held is the Robert Saltonstall Gymnasium on the campus of Milton Academy, an independent boarding and day school at 170 Centre Street, Milton, south of Boston.

The school has an impressive list of former pupils including Nobel-winning poet TS Eliot (famous as the guy who wrote the lyrics to Cats, of course), inventor Buckminster Fuller, both Robert F Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, playwright Robert E Sherwood (screenwriter of Waterloo Bridge, Rebecca and The Best Years of Our Lives), and musician James Taylor.

The local 'Lenox Mansion', with its dark history of witch-burnings, is purchased by mysterious stranger Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson) who announces his arrival into the community by snoring loudly through a music concert.

This is held in Abbott Hall, 188 Washington Street in Marblehead, and it's where the unfortunate Felicia slips on the dropped pearls and breaks her leg.

A town hall and historical museum, which was built in 1876, it's listed on the National Register of Historic Places and it's also seen in Disney's 1993 Hocus Pocus.

'Lenox Mansion' itself is the Mansion on Turner Hill (Turner Hill Golf Club), 251 Topsfield Road, part of the Crane Estate in Ipswich, about 30 miles north of Boston. A golf club and wedding venue, see it again in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island and as the wedding venue in Kristoffer Borgli's 2026 The Drama.

The mansion's interior is enhanced with a couple of other locations.

Its vast pillared ballroom is the extravagant lobby of the Wang Center, 270 Tremont Street, in Boston's Theatre District. Opened in 1925 as a movie palace and vaudeville house, the theatre was extensively renovated in 1983 (courtesy of a donation from computer engineer and inventor Dr An Wang) and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as a venue for live theatre and music. It was also used in American Hustle and the 2016 version of Ghostbusters.

Van Horn's wildly luxurious bedroom (and bathroom) is the Living Room and Minstrel Gallery at our old friend the Greystone Mansion, 905 Loma Vista Drive, Beverly Hills.

The mansion has been seen in numerous films including the original Ghostbusters.

It was also the interior of Norman Osborn’s Gothic Manhattan mansion block in Spider-Man, the ‘Pasadena' mansion in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, a hospital in Star Trek Into Darkness, the funeral home in Death Becomes Her, Swan's mansion in Brian de Palma’s Phantom Of The Paradise, Abigail's (Diane Kruger) home in National Treasure: Book of Secrets as well as the mansion of Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. Its other screen appearances include All Of Me, The Disorderly Orderly, Indecent Proposal and There Will Be Blood.

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