The Amityville Horror (1979)
I am not some pink-cheeked seminarian who doesn't know the difference between the supernatural and a bad clam!
These days, the house that used to be at 112 Ocean Avenue (now 108), is a decent five-bed, four-bath 1927 Dutch Colonial on an almost 11,000 square foot lot, boasting an additional boathouse and slip access to Amityville River. Back in November 1974, it was less marketable, the site of a mass murder committed by twenty-three-year-old Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr, who shot and killed his four brothers and sisters and his parents in their beds with a .35 calibre rifle, and then tried to pin the murders on a mob hitman. A year later, DeFeo was found guilty on six counts of second-degree murder and given a sentence of twenty-five-to-life for each. Two weeks after this, the Lutz family moved into the Ocean Avenue house, taking advantage of the low, low price of $80,000. They would last just under a month in residence before apparently fleeing for their lives, recounting tales of fly infestations, green slime oozing from the walls and ceiling, mangled locks, a broken front door, a priest intimidated by a ghostly voice telling him to get out, and even a phantom brass band. So began the chilling story of The Amityville Horror.
Well, actually no. The real story began in the meeting between Geraldine DeFeo (Butch’s wife), George and Kathy Lutz, and DeFeo’s defence attorney William Weber. A meeting where, over several bottles of wine, a weird plan was conceived to help DeFeo get a new trial with an unorthodox defence: “the Devil made me do it.” After all, Satan was big business in the mid-1970s – The Exorcist (1973) had scared the bejesus out of Catholics and non-believers alike, Mike Warnke’s memoir The Satan Seller (1972) was a bestseller - and it would only get bigger with the release of The Omen (1976), the Son of Sam killings and the 1980 release of Michelle Remembers, a lurid account of Satanic ritual abuse. The Lutzes just had to persuade the general public that there was something rotten in the Amityville house; a horror, if you will.
On the face of it, the plan was win-win. DeFeo would get a new trial; the Lutzes would get a new house and plenty of royalties. According to Geraldine DeFeo,1 “George was all business and kept insisting moving into the house to corroborate the existence of a force would help Butch in the upcoming trial … The plan was for them to move in and say they were having murderous thoughts and uneasy feelings living in the home. George Lutz also wanted to know about Butch’s beard, so that he could make sure to cut it like his. I had enough when Kathy began rubbing her head, insisting she was getting psychic impressions at that moment. At that point, I got up and told them that this was the worst bullshit I had ever heard and that they could count me out.” Undeterred, the Lutzes moved in, spent a month there, concocted some nonsense, and then provided some forty-odd hours of tape recordings to writer Jay Anson, who turned their story into a book, The Amityville Horror, which was an immediate hit and netted George and Kathy some $200,000 in royalties by the time the inevitable movie came out in 1979.
Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff was not a man of high artistic ideals. The co-founder of American International Pictures and originator of the ARKOFF Formula, he had recently taken the reins of AIP after the other co-founder James H. Nicholson left to set up Academy Pictures Corporation and Roger Corman jumped ship to form New World Pictures. Arkoff kept it simple: action pictures, horrors, the occasional misguided comedy. Prestige was not on the menu. “We have so goddamn many arty-farties and pseudointellectuals in this business,” he said. “Not only that, we have so many in the field of printing, publishing, writing, comment, and criticism. Just loaded with arty-farties. Our whole civilization, unfortunately, has become one of half-baked people.”2 The Amityville Horror was a no-brainer; it had a built-in market. A bullshit “true” story has never been an obstacle to commercial success – just look at The Conjuring (2013)3 – and Arkoff clearly anticipated a hype machine in the making (even if the Lutzes’ claims had been largely debunked by this point), so he could afford to splash the cash to secure a decent director and a recognizable cast.
That director was Stuart Rosenberg, who’d helped steer Paul Newman to bona fide star status with Cool Hand Luke (1967) and continued their working partnership with WUSA (1970), Pocket Money (1972) and The Drowning Pool (1975), despite being described by one uncharitable circuit buyer (via Janet Maslin) as “the Otto Preminger of grade-B movies.” James Brolin was already a rugged leading man by the late ‘70s thanks to Westworld (1973) and Capricorn One (1978), while Margot Kidder had parlayed an early career in landmark horrors Sisters (1972) and Black Christmas (1974) into mainstream success as Lois Lane in Superman (1978). Supporting them was the powerhouse method ham Rod Steiger, who had recently undergone his second open-heart surgery and was suffering from cardiac depression: “I did everything I was offered. I had no idea how the film would turn out. I only wanted to show everyone I was still capable of hard work.” And by God, would he work hard.
Most of the cast played ball with the producers and continued talking up the Amityville Curse which had originated with the book4 – cars and houses mysteriously caught on fire when people came into contact with either the manuscript or the Ocean Drive house – and pretty soon Brolin was blaming everything from a sprained ankle to a stuck lift on it, while Kidder danced around: “When we did Amityville the producers told us we should say all these terrible things happened on the set. It was all bullshit. Nothing happened, but it was funny.” Only Steiger appeared to take it seriously; but then, Steiger took everything seriously, especially his career.
But then, there’s only so much even the most gifted of casts can do to elevate such schlocky material. The plot of The Amityville Horror is less a story, more a series of unfortunate events: the Lutzes (Brolin and Kidder) move into their bargain dream home and suffer a litany of horror clichés, including the prerequisite “imaginary friend that’s probably a demon” and George’s mental unraveling, which presents itself largely as a nasty dose of pinkeye and a lot of staring. Steiger’s Father Delaney acts as a kind of remote martyr after his initial visit to the house, mostly there to look sick, get blinded by phantom plaster dust - “I’m bliiiiiiiind!” - and bellow about God to a dumbfounded Don Stroud (most recently seen here as the unfortunate delivery boy in Games). By the time Helen Shaver turns up as the wife of George’s business partner, we’re less concerned about her discovery of a “passage to hell” and more about how much longer this movie has to go.
Pity poor Sandor Stern, the screenwriter who had to arrange the slurry of the Amityville case into a coherent script.5 And pity poor Rosenberg, who clearly has no facility for building the kind of tension required for a horror movie. Saddled with the restrictions of the “true story,” things just happen to the Lutzes, and no amount of lacklustre jump scares and quivering from Kidder can make it frightening. Like any other genre, horror movies require internal logic to succeed: Pazuzu wants the priests to doubt their faith; Damien has plans for world domination; even the Overlook follows the standard haunted house template of wanting to claim troubled souls. The Amityville house has no such grand plan and poses no real immediate threat. Sure, it isn’t keen on Catholics in uniform (though it’s surprisingly tame towards Kathy, who comes from a large Catholic family) and it probably wants George to take an axe to his family, but the other manifestations appear indiscriminate, the house seems incapable of actual harm (even the boy who gets his hand crushed by a window suffers no lasting damage)6 and the “Jody” figure – a large, purple demon pig with glowing eyes – is nonsensical.
Some might call the whole enterprise stupid, simplistic, and transparent – and indeed, Stephen King did just that, though he later recanted in Danse Macabre by suggesting that “stupid, simplistic, and transparent are also perfectly good words to describe the tale of The Hook, but that doesn’t change the fact that the story is an enduring classic of its kind – in fact, those words probably go a long way toward explaining why it is a classic of its kind.” He goes on to offer the most agreed subtext for the film, that The Amityville Horror is fundamentally a financial horror story about economic unease: “Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged-up toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way; for every child who ever jammed his fingers and felt that the door or window which did the jamming was out to get him.” It is essentially a horror version of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) for Baby Boomers.
Then again, with all due respect to the maestro, to call The Amityville Horror a folk tale is to misunderstand folk tales, which are typically rooted in some kind of local history or – like The Hook – reflect a moral, usually conservative, argument. While it certainly taps into the contemporary fear of witchcraft and Satanism, the story is essentially an ill-conceived grift designed to monkey-wrench a murder conviction and make money. And while the subtext certainly hit a nerve with the filmgoing public, then suffering through an energy crisis, record inflation, and eyewatering interest rates, it’s difficult to say it was intentional – money is a constant, pressing worry in The Amityville Horror only because it was a constant, pressing worry in the lives of the overextended Lutz family. And financial concerns are rarely, if ever, a good substitute for scares.
All of this conspires to make The Amityville Horror a relentlessly dull, aggressively mediocre film, hamstrung further by a non-ending and some special effects (Hey, Jody!) that would have looked ropey even in Arkoff’s B-movie heyday. Reviews were universally poor, with many noting that the film was all build-up and no climax. I’d argue it’s no build-up and no climax. Nevertheless, The Amityville Horror was AIP’s biggest film and became one of the highest-grossing independent movies of all time, proving the old adage of “there’s a sucker born every minute.”7
Most suckers won’t hang around for another trim, though. The Amityville Horror spawned some seven sequels that tested the limit of diminishing returns (an evil lamp, a cursed mantle clock, a demonic mirror!) and a shrug of a remake in 2005,8 while the “haunting” itself inspired a huge number of awful Amityville-themed, not-feature-length knock-offs, including – and I am not making these up – Amityville Vibrator (2020), Amityville in Space (2022), Amityville Christmas Vacation (2022), and (shudder) Amityville Emanuelle (2023). None of these would have required George Lutz’s involvement (both he and Kathy were dead by this point anyway), but there’s a certain poetic justice in people making money from dogshit low-budget movies based on someone else’s half-arsed con.
Next Up: “A CHILL-FILLED Festival of HORROR!”
From Ric Osuna’s fascinating book The Night the DeFeos Died: Reinvestigating the Amityville Murders, which has its issues (like most true crime books purporting to be the truth), but is a fine look at the Lutz scam.
From King of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System, ed. Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn.
The infamous Ed and Lorraine Warren (the subjects of The Conjuring) became involved in the Amityville case in February 1976. Lorraine Warren claimed to encounter Butch’s spirit: “The encounter was so awful and he was so sinister that she felt there was absolutely nothing she could do to help or eject his spirit from the house.” This must have been news to DeFeo, who was very much alive and incarcerated at the time. The Warrens went on to cash in on Amityville, claiming that the land was used by the Shinnecock tribe as an asylum (the tribe were located some fifty miles east of Amityville) and had connections to the devil-worshipping surveyor John Ketcham, both of which make it into the movie.
And was no doubt heavily indebted to The Exorcist Curse, which was a mix of Warner Bros. and Hurricane Billy’s savvy marketing more than anything else.
Stern was primarily a television writer with occasional feature credits, including the Gabe Kaplan basketball comedy Fast Break (1979), before writing and directing the genuinely unsettling horror movie Pin (1988).
Outside of the flashback murders and one brief nightmare sequence, The Amityville Horror is perhaps most notable for being a horror movie with a zero body count.
Which at least tries to be coherent, but ultimately suffers from the insidious mediocrity that is the hallmark of the Ryan Reynolds filmography. It does also star Melissa George, who I always think of as a solid horror presence, despite only appearing in a handful of horror films. And of course The Legend That Is Philip Baker Hall. So it can’t be all bad.
Brilliant one, Ray.
I am a little sad now - we all believed the Amityville story actually was 'based on actual events'. When I see houses with the curved upper windows, 'It looks like the Amityville House" still crosses my mind. It may have been schlock - but man how it captured the imagination of still impressionable teens.