The Amityville Horror - the book version
Having done recaps of franchises like Hellraiser, Children of the Corn, and Puppet Master, I’m moving on to a new address: 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville.
I’ve only seen the Ryan Reynolds shirtless version, and that was… 2006? I think I remember liking it, but I also know this franchise has a bad reputation. Grady Hendrix talked about it on his book tour for the spectacular How To Sell A Haunted House, laughing that the book is still shelved in the nonfiction section despite sequels having, like, time travel and stuff. Which sounds silly and stupid and centered in my wheelhouse. So I impulse-bought ten movies with Amityville in the title and a paperback copy of the 1977 book.
And then I did more research and ooof, check out this Slash Film article: this franchise isn’t protected by copyright laws, so anything can call itself Amityville, even The Amityville Vibrator and The Amityville Death Toilet, and yes, I very much want to see those two but I don’t want to feel the pressure of completism in this recap project. They counted sixty unique Amityville movies. Sixty. Nothing needs sixty movies. There are entire religions that don’t need sixty movies. So I’m committing to ten.
And I started by reading the original book. Which still says nonfiction on the back cover, but it used to look like this:
And now looks like this:
It’s been solidly debunked. The author is dead, but the kids have admitted that what he wrote isn’t what happened. So I read this as a found footage ghost story instead of a true crime.
Not only did it fail to deliver anything more than the occasional uneasy feeling, it made me actively hate the generation of people who believed this crap.
The brief summary: in Amityville, New York, this guy named DeFeo drugged his family and murdered them in the house at 112 Ocean Avenue. But it’s a big house in a desirable zip code, and the murder means it’s cheap, so newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz get it for 80,000 dollars, and I do not care if it is haunted or located on the surface of the moon, if I could buy a house that size for that price, I would. Boomers cannot relate to college grads looking to just live somewhere.
The couple, along with Kathy’s three kids from her former marriage, move in a week before Christmas but over the course of twenty-eight days, enough spooky stuff happens that they just abandon it.
Some of the spooky scenes are legitimately spooky. The parents start beating their kids when they’d never done that before. Scratches and burns appear on Kathy’s skin and go away within a day. Dad sees a spooky giant pig and then the young daughter talks about her new friend Jodie, the spooky giant pig. Rooms stay freezing, clouds of flies show up, a ceramic lion statue teleports around the house, and sometimes Kathy levitates out of the bed in her sleep. Windows and bannisters break, like, all the time, and there’s even some flooding. Ed and Lorraine Warren have a cameo at the end where they show up and say yep, this place is definitely haunted and in no way relates to a family in severe money trouble that will say anything to get the heck out of a crippling mortgage.
But some of the spooky scenes are ridiculous. Green slime appears on the wall in week three and George hasn’t learned enough not to eat it so he can tell his family it doesn’t taste like anything. I don’t care what it tastes like, don’t eat mystery slime. There’s a third of the book spent on a priest who keeps getting sick when he thinks about helping them, and they keep begging for his help, but in 28 days, including Christmas and Epiphany, they don’t show any indication they’re even Catholic, and the priest never rejoins the main plot before transferring out West. It’s just cheap mysticism allowed in the 70s.
And even worse, because it’s found footage, the author has to say where everybody was every day. So it’s obvious and irritating to a 2024 audience that these people never go to work, or get their own groceries, or spend time with their children, or go to church. It’s Christmas Eve and they have no decorations or preparations, but family brings them a tree, and then her brother gets married the day after Christmas. The kids barely spend a day at school. George flat out embezzles money from his company and dodges an IRS audit on page and no one cares. And all told with the grim authority of an author who wants you to think he has totally interviewed all these people and pieces this story together even though no he has not.
So I don’t know how this is going to fit with the ten, just ten, movies I am going to watch. But it’s not off to a great start.