The Ghost and Mr. Chicken

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

G-G-GUARANTEED! YOU'LL BE SCARED UNTIL YOU LAUGH YOURSELF SILLY!

Luther Heggs, a typesetter for the town newspaper, pitches an idea for a story about a local haunted house where a famous murder/suicide occurred 20 years earlier. After the editor assigns Luther to spend one night alone in the mansion, Heggs has a number of supernatural encounters and writes a front page story that makes him a hometown hero...until the nephew of the deceased sues him for libel.

Date of release
1966-01-20
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (107)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Comedy, Family, Mystery, Romance
Director
Alan Rafkin

Casting

Interesting facts

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is a 1966 American comedy horror mystery film starring Don Knotts as Luther Heggs, the town dunce and a newspaper typesetter who spends a night in a haunted house, which is located in the fictitious community of Rachel, Kansas. Don Knotts' first major project after leaving The Andy Griffith Show, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken uses a similar small-town setting and involved a number of alumni from the sitcom, including director Alan Rafkin and writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum. It was a box office success, paving the way for a string of other Knotts-fronted comedy films. The working title was Running Scared.

Production

This film was produced by Universal Studios, which produced numerous classic horror films. Actor Don Knotts was best known at the time of the film's production for his Emmy Award-winning five seasons on the sitcom The Andy Griffith Show as small town deputy sheriff Barney Fife. Knotts planned to leave the television series at the end of the 1964–1965 season in order to pursue a film career. He had already starred in The Incredible Mr.

Andy Griffith, Knotts' co-star on The Andy Griffith Show, suggested expanding on an episode from the television series involving a deserted house (the old Rimshaw house in the episode "Haunted House" aired October 1963) in which Barney, Gomer, and Andy retrieve a baseball of Opie and his friend from the house.

After he learned that the film had a shooting schedule of just 17 days, Knotts suggested Alan Rafkin for the director's seat, since Rafkin had directed several episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and impressed Knotts with his efficiency.

Universal contract star Joan Staley was known by Rafkin from their work together on the sitcom Broadside. Normally a blonde, she had to wear a dark wig, because the producers felt she was "too sexy" as a blonde and the role called for a brunette. She wore the same wig previously worn by Claudia Cardinale in Blindfold (1966). Al Checco, Knotts' Army-days comedy partner, had an uncredited appearance in the film.

The "Simmons Mansion", a three-story Second-Empire Victorian house, stands on Colonial Street on the Universal Studios lot in California and was built for the film So Goes My Love (1946). It appeared as the Dowd house in the film Harvey (1950), and, with several alterations to the architecture, served as the home of Gabrielle Solis in Desperate Housewives (2004–2012).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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