Studio: AIP/MGM
Director: Stuart Rosenberg
Writer: Sandor Stern
Producer: Ronald Saland, Elliot Geisinger
Stars: James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger, Murray Hamilton, Don Stroud, Michael Sacks, Val Avery, Helen Shaver, Irene Dailey, Amy Wright
Review Score:
Summary:
Paranormal activity plagues a family that moves into a haunted Long Island home where six brutal murders were committed.
Review:
As a young horror fan who also grew up a skeptical Catholic, supernatural fright films “based on a true story” fascinated me. Imaginary authenticity heightened the horror in my head in ways that a “made up” movie such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street” couldn’t come close to. Thrillers like “The Entity” and “The Exorcist” presented uniquely terrifying implications because I naively thought like only an astonished kid could, “these things actually happened!” I wanted to believe ghosts and demons were real. These movies provided validation.
The story behind “The Amityville Horror” always seemed particularly credible because of how deeply it permeated mainstream media. My parents even knew about it. Good Housekeeping, a magazine my mother read, published the first article on The Lutz Family’s experience at 112 Ocean Avenue. Popular 1980s reality show “That’s Incredible!” profiled the house on ABC-TV. This wasn’t a typical urban legend only whispered about by crackpots. This supposedly true tale garnered widespread coverage, sold millions of bestselling books, and spawned a hit film starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. It had to be real, right?
Of course, common sense and a couple of whistleblowers eventually confirmed it wasn’t. If you want an informative primer on the controversy regarding whether or not “The Amityville Horror” warrants its “true story” status, track down the History Channel’s “Amityville: Horror or Hoax?” Their 42-minute broadcast does a terrific job identifying every strand in a convoluted web of residents, mediums, attorneys, journalists, and parapsychologists each making uncorroborated claims regarding what did or did not happen.
Everyone involved, from convicted killer Ronald DeFeo Jr.’s trial lawyer to paranormal debunker Stephen Kaplan, was either planning to publish a book, promoting a public profile, burnt over a handshake business deal, or embroiled in one of a dozen lawsuits. Questionable motivations everywhere make it impossible to fully believe anything anyone says on either side of the argument. It wouldn’t be filled with much action, but there’s enough drama behind the scenes of the story to warrant a movie of its own.
Discovering that people like George Lutz as well as Ed and Lorraine Warren, who infamously investigated the house, were at best opportunists and at worst complete frauds soured my once favorable impression of “The Amityville Horror.” Disappointed over being duped, I’d love to disown the 1979 feature film adaptation as total trash. However, objectivity compels me to upturn a thumb toward the movie because, fictional fabrication or not, “The Amityville Horror’s” iconic impact on haunted house horror is simply undeniable.
Consider this laundry list of scary movie moments that feature in the film: a dog barking at unseen evil, a child talking to a malevolent imaginary friend, a priest paranormally tormented while praying, a resident slowly descending into madness, a secret room hidden behind a wall, cursed by a Native American burial ground, a library research montage that includes scrolling through microfiche, walls bleeding blood, even a hollow jump scare where a cat pops up from offscreen.
Without doing in-depth research, I don’t know which of the above “The Amityville Horror” invented. Maybe none of those things. Lalo Schifrin delivers one of horror’s top ten most memorable themes with his Academy Award-nominated score. But Dario Argento similarly evoked aural eeriness using a la-la-la-ing children’s chorus four years prior in “Profondo Rosso” aka “Deep Red.” Perhaps previous productions colored Schifrin’s work too.
Regardless of what may or may not be original, “The Amityville Horror” can at least be credited with turning all of those elements into commonplace clichés. Hollywood can’t spin a contemporary haunted house yarn without including four or more items from that list and those lines trace directly back to or through “Amityville’s” everlasting influence. Again, “The Amityville Horror” may not have been first to put date stamps on scene segues for instance, but “Paranormal Activity” (review here) only emulates that styling because “Amityville” cemented it as standard vocabulary for this kind of movie.
Other featured inclusions earn exclusive associations. Can you ever see quarter-moon windows and not instantly think of “Amityville?” A ghost pig with glowing red eyes, swarming flies, and toilets overflowing with ooze all contribute to the indelible imprint “The Amityville Horror” continues to leave on pop culture’s consciousness.
This longevity offers testament to how effectively the movie overcomes its relative dryness. With suspense stretched thin by a too long two-hour runtime, “The Amityville Horror” becomes most haunted by a bloated B-storyline concerning literal ills befalling Rod Steiger’s priest, who never interacts with the other two leads. Val Avery intermittently appears as a police sergeant similarly struggling to figure out how he fits in.
By following “true events” largely to the letter, this adaptation gets stuck repeating nonsensical plot beats invented by amateur fabulists who were concocting a way to escape debt and explain wife-beating. That’s why exposition can’t agree on an origin for the events. Was the Ocean Avenue home built on a cursed burial ground, over a warlock’s portal to Hell, or merely haunted by a mass murder? A proper horror story would pick a lane. “The Amityville Horror” just fills up on disconnected asides concerning slamming windows, music from an invisible marching band, and doors inexplicably bursting off their hinges. Collectively, everything seems kind of unsettling. Individually, nothing stands up to scrutiny, much like the “true story” itself.
Because there is always a “but” when boomeranging back to justify a positive rating, credit should still be given where credit is due. That credit begins with James Brolin’s anchoring performance. Brolin flips between smiling family man and possessed POS so smoothly, he genuinely reads like a different person when embodying the irritable incarnation of George Lutz. Accompanied by Kidder and Steiger, fully committed acting lends the movie believability it shouldn’t necessarily have.
That credit ends with how genre entertainment was permanently shaped going forward. Critics can moan all we want about hollow plotting and hokum source material. The fact remains that even if the film didn’t write all of it, “The Amityville Horror” became the template followed by all haunted house chillers since. Unlike Jay Anson’s novel, that’s a claim horror cinema repeatedly proves to be irrefutably true.
Review Score: 75
If you don’t get major “The Last of Us” vibes from “Elevation,” it’ll only be because you didn’t play the games or watch the HBO series.