It's that time of year again when I sit down and watch and review an entire horror movie franchise. This time around I'm looking at the Amityville Horror series, which is just a little bit longer than previous franchises I've done - 18 films long, in fact, according to this Wikipedia page. This month's going to be a long one...
In November 1974, a man kills his entire family with a shotgun while they sleep in their Amityville, Long Island home. One year later, newly-married couple George and Kathy Lutz buy and move into the same house. From almost the very moment they move in, however, strange things begin to happen - they keep being woken at 3:15 am for no apparent reason, daughter Amy finds an imaginary friend named Jody, and every time a priest or nun tries to enter the house they become suddenly and violently ill, often with a swarm of flies buzzing around as well. By far the most disturbing thing, though, is how George Lutz's personality begins to change - as the days go on he becomes more and more sullen and aggressive. Is he being affected by spirits from the family murders a year previous, or is there something even more ancient and sinister at work?
The Amityville Horror is "based on true events" - in that George and Kathy Lutz really did move into 112 Ocean Avenue in late 1975, only to promptly move out again 28 days later, claiming the house was infested with demonic forces. These claims later became a book written by Jay Anson in 1977, upon which this movie was - albeit loosely - based. There is, of course, a lot of controversy over whether the events the Lutz family described really happened, or whether it was all just a hoax concocted to get out of a mortgage they couldn't afford, but I'll leave what side of the story you believe up to you.
Then again, it's not like the film seems all that interested in the supernatural aspects of the story either. You could easily remove all the supernatural parts of the story - and the subplot with the priest - and you'd end up with a Lifetime movie about domestic violence. It's almost as though the film was embarrassed to be seen with the supernatural plot threads.
Maybe it's because The Amityville Horror (this version at least) was made in 1979 - making it the same age as me - but it either hasn't aged well at all or is just very badly paced and, unfortunately for a horror movie, not very scary. It's just under two hours long, and most of the "good" stuff doesn't happen until the final half-hour or so - walls bleeding, tar erupting from an underground well in the basement, George Lutz doing his best Jack Torrance impression and so on. Everything else is either very underwhelming - at one point the house apparently eats $1500, but it's presented in such a way that it could have just been an accident on someone's part rather than ghosts wanting to go on a bender - or doesn't even connect with the rest of the film. This is the case with the whole subplot involving the priest - as I already said, it could be removed from the film and it would barely affect the story, and it doesn't go anywhere either and ends abruptly. He goes blind and that's the last we see of him. It's a terrible waste of Rod Steiger.
We never really see what's haunting the house either, aside from one shot where Kathy Lutz sees two glowing red eyes staring into a bedroom window (which apparently just caused star Margot Kidder to laugh hysterically rather than look scared) and maybe one shot at the film's climax that I've never been able to spot myself. There are, however, plenty of shots of the iconic quarter-crescent windows of the house, framed to look as though they're gazing sinisterly down on people as if the house itself is an evil entity. The real threat in the film is made out to be George Lutz who, when he's not chopping enough firewood to heat the entire town, is sullen, moody and eventually shown to look exactly like Ronald DeFeo Jr, the man who killed his family in the house the previous year You'd think with that revelation that the evil in the house stemmed from that act - but then the film brings in a hidden "Red Room" in the basement that might be connected to a man allegedly run out of Salem in 1692 for being a witch and also alleges that the house was built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Of course, none of this matters in the end as the Lutzes just flee the house and don't look back, but it's yet more storytelling to introduce so many plot points and then not bother to resolve most of them.
The Amityville Horror did well on release, eventually grossing $86 million, and there is an oppressive atmosphere to the film - it's just not really connected to any of the supernatural happenings. Still, it caught a great many people's imaginations, and it wasn't long before one film became a franchise...
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