The Haunted Vogue Theatre

This Hollywood theatre has come back from the dead more times than an 80s slasher franchise.

Hollywood is a place where careers come and go. Hot one minute and obscure the next. This applies to more than just the residents of Los Angeles; it goes for the architecture as well.

Hollywood Blvd’s Vogue Theatre is one such building. From its opening in 1935 to its most recent change in 2018, the Vogue has changed hands and purposes with almost every decade passed.

There’s a saying that not even Jesus could resurrect his career in Hollywood. And yet, the Vogue has come back from the dead time and time again. Only George Romero has been responsible for more revivals.

Did You Know?

• The Vogue first opened its doors on July 9, 1935 and first closed them in 1995.
• In 2001 every single piece of the theatre’s interior was stripped and sold off.
• Like all but its first incarnation as a movie theater, the Vogue reopened in 2010 as a nightclub called The Supperclub. It would shut down just 5 years later.

Haunted or Just Myth?

As with many haunted locations the debate amongst skeptics and believers is often the validity of a place’s supernatural integrity.

The Vogue is no exception.

Ask those familiar with the spectral history of Hollywood and they’ll tell you that back in the 70s a projectionist had a heart attack and died on the job.

His name was Felix. And Felix is believed to still roam the halls of the theatre, likely angered by the switch from film to digital.

If you ask people who’ve worked at the theatre in the past 50 years they’ll tell you that there was never a Felix or any employee who died of a heart attack inside the confines of the theatre.

So which one is it?

The only way to find out is to wander the spaces that once projected film but now preserve film history.

Maybe it’s appropriate that the first film projected on the Vogue’s screen was a talkie remake of Hitchcock’s The Lodger, called The Phantom Fiend. From its inception, the halls were filled with phantoms.

The Vogue’s interior was itself a phantom. A thing killed and brought to ruin, only to be brought back again in a new body.

Each time it’s reopened it's carried with it a bit of the former lives. It might not be a ghost, but it’s certainly a memory. The ghost of experience that we seek as asylum in film, the recorded image turning permanence into impermanence.

When the Vogue reopened in 1995 it wasn’t for film, it was for envisioning the future. Equally visionary but without the popcorn.

The psychics that moved in and briefly used the space for engaging with the supernatural claimed that the Vogue was absolutely host to its own share of paranormal activity.

But it seems in actuality the real phantom is the Vogue itself. It closes. It dies. It opens. It’s reborn.

As if the theatre was a living entity, going through the cycles of dead and rebirth with as much ease as buying a ticket.

Now the theatre displays relics of the past as if Hollywood were exposing its ribcage to us.

Whether ghosts, especially the ghost of Felix haunts the aisles in between the chairs or the empty space in the cases displaying these old bones. We bear witness to the past. To everything dead and reborn in our minds.

So when you visit you ask yourself, “Which phantom is it before me?”

Surrounded by ghosts and history you realize there is no way to discern between the two.

We are haunted no matter what.