THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (1979)

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.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

November 13, 1974 – Amityville, Long Island – With no apparent motive, Ronald DeFeo Jr. uses a shotgun to kill his parents and four siblings while they sleep inside their Ocean Avenue home named “High Hopes” at 3:15am.

One Year Later – Newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz buy the waterfront house and prepare to move in with Kathy’s children Amy, Matt, and Greg.

One Month Later – While the family is out boating, Father Delaney stops by to bless the house. Delaney falls suddenly ill as flies spontaneously swarm one room. Delaney leaves abruptly after hearing a disembodied voice say, “get out.”

Father Delaney later tries phoning Kathy with a warning, but his call cuts out. Blisters form on the priest’s hand.

George begins feeling oddly cold as he starts a slow descent into madness that involves chopping wood with an ax and keeping the fireplace lit. Strange sounds and nightmares also begin waking George at 3:15am.

4th Day – Thursday – George becomes uncharacteristically angry with Kathy while chopping wood. Kathy feels an unseen presence in the kitchen. Amy mentions an imaginary friend named Jody. Toilets overflow with black slime.

Kathy calls the rectory to ask why Father Delaney didn’t show up for the blessing. Father Bolen explains that Delaney did go to Kathy’s house, but has since fallen terribly ill.

Aunt Helena, who is a nun, comes to visit Kathy. Helena leaves abruptly when she becomes sick inside the house.

5th Night – Friday – George continues growing more irritable. Kathy wakes screaming from a nightmare at 3:15am.

6th Day – Saturday – Father Bolen drives Father Delaney back to Kathy’s house. However, Bolen inexplicably loses control of his car and crashes before they can get there.

While inside the house, Kathy’s brother Jimmy mysteriously loses $1,500 in cash for his wedding’s caterer. With his physical condition worsening, best man George promises to pay the caterer with a check instead.

The Lutzes leave their babysitter Jackie to watch Amy while everyone else attends Jimmy’s wedding. Jackie becomes locked in a closet. Amy refuses to let her out.

At the wedding reception, Kathy talks to Aunt Helen about the sicknesses plaguing people at the house. Kathy also witnesses George threatening the caterer over his payment.

George frees Jackie from the closet when the family returns home. George points out that there wasn’t a lock on the closet door. Amy claims she didn’t open the door because Jody wouldn’t let her. Amy adds that Jody doesn’t like George.

8th Day – Monday – Father Ryan and Father Nuncio angrily dismiss Father Delaney’s suggestions that something demonic haunts the Ocean Avenue home.

11th Day – Thursday – George’s business partner Jeff comes to talk to George because he hasn’t been seen for days and creditors are calling. Jeff’s wife Carolyn, who is psychic-sensitive, refuses to go near the house.

Greg is rushed to the hospital after a window violently closes on his hand. Kathy tries talking to George about the strangeness in their house, but George ignores her.

George wakes at 3:15am to find Kathy’s art room swarmed with flies. George calls the police after the front door and basement door suddenly burst from their hinges.

Sgt. Gionfriddo is struck by how much George resembles Ronald DeFeo Jr. Gionfriddo notes that the doors broke as though someone was trying to get out. George admonishes his dog Harry for pawing at a stone wall beneath the basement staircase.

Kathy has a breakdown. Kathy tells George they need to do something about what is happening to their family.

12th Day – Friday – Amy tells her mother that Jody told her about a little boy who died in Amy’s room. Kathy tries calling Father Delaney, but their call cuts out again. Kathy feels another paranormal presence. An odd neighbor briefly stops by outside.

George meets Jeff for drinks at Witches Brew. The bartender notes that George resembles Ronald DeFeo Jr. Jeff heatedly confronts George about his spiraling personality causing their business to fail. George punches Jeff, but they reconcile.

Amy tells Kathy more about Jody. Kathy sees a pair of glowing red eyes outside Amy’s window.

Looking through a local history book George stole from the library, Carolyn notes that John Ketchum, a witch who was run out of Salem, built his house at the Ocean Avenue location. Devil worship reportedly took place there.

Jeff proposes babysitting the children so George and Kathy can get out of the house to clear their heads. When George returns home with Jeff and Carolyn, Kathy tells George about the eyes.

Carolyn is strangely drawn into the house’s basement. Carolyn tells Jeff that the Shinnecock tribe used to abandon their mentally ill to die on the surrounding land. Carolyn and Jeff find Harry’s paws bloodied from digging at the stone wall. Carolyn feels compelled to take a pickax to the wall.

George takes over for Carolyn and discovers that a small red room was walled off in the basement. George sees a vision of a bearded man like himself in the room. Speaking in another voice, Carolyn screams that the room is a passage to Hell. Elsewhere at the same time, Father Delaney gets a migraine.

Desperate to do something, Kathy and George say prayers throughout the house while holding a crucifix. The crucifix burns Kathy’s hand. Kathy sees her reflection growing old in the mirror.

17th Day – Wednesday – While praying over the church altar, debris from a statue crumbling overhead blinds Father Delaney. The crumbling statue turns out to have been a hallucination.

18th Night – Thursday – George hears a marching band downstairs. Kathy has a nightmare of George murdering Amy with an ax.

19th Day – Friday – George continues unraveling. Kathy finds what looks like teeth marks on George’s leg. George smacks Kathy when she argues with him.

Kathy tries to see Father Delaney. Father Bolen explains that Delaney went away, but refuses to give Kathy any more details. Sgt. Gionfriddo trails Bolen to a location where Delaney sits entranced, but Bolen avoids Gionfriddo’s questions too.

Kathy goes to the library to research the DeFeo murders. Upon discovering that George resembles Ronald DeFeo Jr., Kathy rushes home fearing for her family’s safety.

The Last Night – Possessed with murderous intent, George sees a pig with glowing red eyes in an upstairs window. Kathy shakes George from his delusion before he can attack the kids with his ax. George briefly sees Kathy as a wrinkled old woman.

The red room explodes in the basement. The house’s quarter-moon windows also shatter as a storm rages outside. The Lutzes flee while walls bleed and the house continues shaking violently.

George runs back inside the house to rescue Harry. George falls through the basement staircase into a pool of black slime. The dog pulls George free. George escapes the house with Harry. The Lutzes leave their belongings behind as they drive away, eventually moving to California.

---

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

---