‘Elf’s Touching Finale Was Filmed in a Horrifying Abandoned Mental Health Facility

More than 20 years after it was first released, Jon Favreau’s Elf is as beloved as ever. The fact that people still enjoy this modern holiday classic, even after being screamed at by Home Depot’s cursed animatronic replica of an apparently strung-out Buddy the Elf, is a testament to its greatness. 

Elf is a very New York-centric Christmas story: Buddy’s dad works in the Empire State Building, Buddy and Jovie go ice skating at Rockefeller Center and Buddy seemingly gives concussions to several children with snowballs in Central Park. 

But not all of the movie was filmed in Manhattan, or even the United States for that matter. A lot of Elf was shot in Vancouver. Even the “World’s Best Cup of Coffee” diner was really a Canadian seafood restaurant, which was shut down in 2009 following “allegations of drug trafficking by the proprietors.”

Odder still, a not insignificant portion of the movie was filmed at Riverview Hospital, a partially-abandoned psychiatric facility that doesn’t exactly look super-Christmassy. 

Built in 1913, Riverview has a horrifying history that includes operating a farm that exploited patient labor, as well as administering electroshock treatment and forced sterilization. 

Production designer Rusty Smith called Riverview “one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been in my life.” Some of the scenes filmed there included the fight between Buddy and Artie Lange’s imposter Santa Claus at Gimbels, the department store chain that, in reality, closed down in 1987.

According to Favreau, the original plan was to film in Macy’s flagship store in New York, but the company had some notes on the script. “Macy’s was willing to let us shoot there, use their Santaland, even incorporate us into the parade. That was a big deal for a tiny movie that didn’t have any expectations,” Favreau told Rolling Stone in 2020. “However, one of the stipulations was, we would have had to remove the Artie Lange scene, where Santa is revealed to be a fake, because their Santa has to be real.”

The solution? “We ended up filming it in the cafeteria of a mental hospital in Vancouver instead of Macy’s because we had to build our own version of it because we were unwilling to change the content.” Then they swapped the setting from Macy’s to Gimbels, their Miracle on 34th Street rival. 

Elf wasn’t the only movie to film at Riverview, but most other productions have been horror movies looking to take advantage of its innate creepiness, such as Final Destination 2 and Halloween: Resurrection. Favreau noted that, when they were making Elf, Freddy vs. Jason was filming in the same building. Although at least one other comedy was made at Riverview — it was the crooked seniors’ home run by Ben Stiller in Happy Gilmore. 

It turns out that much of the sing-a-long climax at Central Park was shot, not in New York, but at Riverview. “We shot some of it in New York, but a lot of it was Vancouver. To double for Central Park, we used a grassy field that was on the grounds of a mental hospital,” Favreau explained. “One of the buildings, I think, was still open and had patients in it. How weird it must have been for them to look out their window and see Santa Claus and a guy in an elf suit running around with reindeer. It may have been counterproductive to their treatment.”

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that Riverview’s controversies weren’t all in the distant past. As Favreau was alluding to, there were still patients on-site when Elf shot there. And the hospital was still receiving blowback for using shock therapy on elderly patients in 2000, just three years before Elf came out.

Presumably, though, all the bad vibes were eradicated by Christmas cheer.