The Amityville Horror (1979)
On November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronnie “Butch” DeFeo Jr. shot and murdered his parents, two brothers, and two sisters with a high-powered rifle as they were sleeping in their Amityville, Long Island home. DeFeo pled insanity, claiming he was commanded by voices from demonic spirits within the house. Nevertheless, he received six consecutive life sentences for his crimes. Unsold for a year due to the grisly nature of the murders, the next residents of that Amityville home, George and Kathleen Lutz and their three children, soon found out that their dream house was really the home of their nightmares. They fled after a month of experiencing what they called demonic phenomena.
Around this time, writer Jay Anson was researching for a documentary on The Exorcist for Professional Films. Professional Films, run by Ronald Saland and Elliott Geisinger, specialized in making “behind the scenes” featurettes for movies, and Anson had worked as a writer for them for fifteen years. After meeting Father John Nicola, the Roman Catholic church’s American occult investigator who served as a technical adviser on The Exorcist, they discussed collaborating on a book called, “Psychology of the Devil,” but it never got off the ground. However, Tam Mossman, a friend of Anson’s who worked as an editor for Long Island publishing company, Prentice-Hall Books, introduced Anson to George and Kathy Lutz about their experiences with evil within the DeFeo home that was making waves within their Amityville community.
Lutz wasn’t trying to sell his story but agreed to talk to Anson, hoping he could clear up the record publicly. Anson recorded twenty taped interviews with the Lutz family. Anson remained skeptical about the story but also felt that George Lutz wasn’t someone who seemed to possess enough imagination to make up a bunch of nonsense with such vivid detail. After discussing the Lutz account with Father Nicola, Nicola connected him with the family’s priest, Father Ralph Pecoraro (renamed to Mancuso in the book and Delaney in the film), who corroborated certain aspects of the Lutz story. The priest was brought in by Kathy Lutz to bless the house. As he did, he felt a coldness overtake him, a slap in the face, and a disembodied voice telling him, “Get out!” The priest tried to call the Lutzes after leaving immediately, but static interference kept ruining the communication. He developed boils on his hands that his doctor didn’t have any explanation for other than anxiety.
Anson knew with this corroboration that, as incredible as it sounded, there was definitely something to the story that the public needed to know. Whether their story was all true, he couldn’t determine, but the Lutz family and the priest seemed to believe what they reported to him. Anson felt he now had enough material to write a book on these experiences, his first. He compiled the most compelling parts and began to type while staying in the home of his widowed sister as he recovered from a heart condition. He felt that his book, which he titled, “The Amityville Horror – a True Story,” could be more sensational than the hottest best-seller of the 1970s, The Exorcist because this terrifying account actually happened.
After showing Prentice-Hall the first two chapters he’d written, they signed Anson to a contract that included him having TV and film rights to his story. Anson’s Professional Films colleagues, Saland and Geisinger, bought out these rights from him and began shopping the concept around to several major movie studios, who all rejected it. Television network CBS thought it had potential and bought the rights with Saland and Geisinger for a TV movie budgeted at $800,000. Around this time, film producer Samuel Z. Arkoff read the book in one sitting and became a huge fan, entering into an agreement with CBS to transfer the rights to his outfit, American International Pictures, an independent label working in partnership with MGM. They bought the rights for $200,000 and a profit percentage, while CBS paid $1.7 million to air the first two network showings after its theatrical run.
When it was finally published in 1977, “The Amityville Horror”, topped the best-seller list longer than any book since “The Exorcist,” AIP determined that the Amityville Horror could be the vehicle to turn around the b-movie image of their company, offering a budget of $5-7 million and Anson the first crack at turning his book into a screenplay. While the Lutzes had a share of the book sales, their contract didn’t cover ancillary rights, so they would receive nothing from the film. After Anson did an additional revision to his screenplay, AIP decided to hand it to someone with more experience, Laird Koenig, writer of the 1974 novel, “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane” and its 1976 film adaptation.
AIP looked for top-name talent. They initially offered the director’s chair to Nicolas Roeg, who turned it down. They later landed Stuart Rosenberg, best known for Cool Hand Luke. Rosenberg brought in some of the crew who he worked with on the Charles Bronson vehicle Love and Bullets: cinematographer Fred Koenekamp, Academy Award winner for The Towering Inferno, and his go-to composer Lalo Schifrin. He brought Bullets co-star Rod Steiger as well. Schifrin would go on to earn an Academy Award nomination for his score, which utilized child choir voices, which became a staple for horror films for years to come.
Rosenberg wasn’t keen on Koenig’s latest revision, which he felt emphasized more cheap scares than character relationships. He handed the screenplay duties to Canadian doctor-turned-writer Sandor Stern. Stern happened to be a friend of Anson and asked him if he believed the Lutz story. Anson said he only related the story he was being told and didn’t judge it. Knowing this Stern concerned himself little as to what’s true and just decided to use what was written before to make a compelling, albeit embellished, version of the Lutz story.
Stern developed narrative throughlines into the story, such as George beginning to lose his mind or the priest’s thwarted attempts to visit the home. Sandor wasn’t concerned with adherence to facts; he wrote to make a good movie. He built his revision on prior screenplays, not on the book or any consultation with the Lutz family. He also bolstered the family life touches: Marital dynamics, financial pressures, and familial relationships, connections to neighbors and friends were accentuated while removing elements he felt that broke away from groundedness, like beds levitating, a marching band appearing in the living room, and a horned white devil that chases the Lutzes away. He preferred occurrences that could be ambiguously observed as coincidental or experiences that could be chalked up imagination because it was only experienced by one character, at least until the conclusion.
In the completed story, a young man ends up shooting his parents and siblings while they slept. The horrific events shocked the small town, but the house was still deemed worthy for sale. Enter the Lutz family, who buy the house because it is going for a much cheaper rate because of its history. Not long after moving in, weird things start happening, starting with the fact that the preacher who comes to bless the house is scared out of his wits, suffering mysterious ailments that he feels has been inflicted by the evil within the house. The Lutz family themselves start exhibiting strange behavior themselves, with the father, George, always feeling cold, and having little motivation to do anything more than chop wood for the fire. Doors and windows open and close, the daughter starts talking to an unseen friend, and the dog starts sniffing around the cellar trying to dig up something only he knows is there.
Deviations to the script occurred that Stern wasn’t keen on. Some of the sequences he felt would elicit the biggest scares were altered in favor of elements he considered to be cliche. For instance, Stern wrote in a babysitter character who would end up trapped in the closet of the childrens’ bedroom. We would be there in the dark with her, only to be startled by the sight of evil-looking dolls falling on her. The babysitter remains in the finished film, as does her being trapped in a closet, but the dolls are removed and her experience is limited to just not being able to get out of her predicament for hours while one of the children ignores her cries. The green slime in the walls in the movie was an embellished effect taken from Lutz’s discovery of a gelatinous substance he found on the carpets around the house he thought the kids might have spread. In Lutz’s account, the water in the toilet wasn’t black sludge but the porcelain itself turned black within the water. A mysterious side room painted red within the house because a hidden room with pools of blood, presumably a gateway to hell.
As for the casting, they pursued several leading men before hiring James Brolin, at that time mostly known for appearing as Dr. Steven Kiley on TV’s “Marcus Welby M.D.”. Brolin wasn’t interested in doing another “cheapo horror flick” after 1977’s The Car but his agent mentioned how well the book was selling and encouraged him to reconsider. There wasn’t a script yet so Brolin’s agent handed him the book to read. Brolin started reading around 7 pm one evening and found himself still reading by 2 am, riveted by the sensational story. When a pair of pants he’d hung on a door fell, Brolin jumped up from his chair in terror, and that’s when he knew this story was a real grabber and would likely be a success.
Brolin took the role hoping for a hit film to catapult his status as a leading man. Ironically, his portrayal of George as he begins going off the deep need was so unflattering that he struggled to find work for the next several years, though Albert Broccoli contemplating making Brolin the first American James Bond when Roger Moore held out for more money to make Octopussy. He had just paid $750,000 for an estate near Santa Barbara, CA, so he could now relate to the Lutz predicament. He did, however, look into the history of the house before purchasing.
Although many associate Margot Kidder with the Superman films, she came to early prominence in the business doing horror flicks that became cult classics, such as Brian De Palma’s Sisters and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. She said that she took horror films because they offered good money and they were fun to make. She called The Amityville Horror her paycheck movie after rising in the public eye by becoming Lois Lane in Superman. She thought it a terrible movie but amused her with how silly it gets. Kidder, an atheist, couldn’t believe the amount of “crazy Christians” that took it seriously. She felt that these people believed in the lies because demonic possessions and haunted houses proved their religious beliefs weren’t all lies too.
The actors weren’t concerned about playing the Lutz family as they were. The story was from the book, but the personalities of the Lutzes were theirs to flesh out, despite portraying real people. Mostly they were putting themselves into the roles because the producers encouraged them to make the parts their own. Kidder and Brolin first had an instant rapport; they liked each other the moment they met on the set. Things changed dramatically as they acted in front of the camera, where their approaches to acting clashed dramatically, with Brolin wanting to do every scene exactly as it was meant and Kidder wanting to explore dialogue and situations beyond the script, which Brolin despised.
Amityville townsfolk didn’t want negative publicity by allowing filming in their town. The actual house wasn’t ideal, regardless, given its tricky layout and the crew’s superstitious feelings toward it. Plus, the producers concluded that if anything tragic happened during the shoot, they could feel morally responsible, and if nothing happened, it disproved the demonic house story. Geisinger scouted similar homes from Maine to South Carolina. They secured a similar three-story Dutch Colonial house in Toms River, NJ, they rented for $12,000 and remodeled to resemble the Amityville house, relocating the residents to a nearby town. Additional work for the interiors was done at MGM Studios in Culver City to handle the ‘haunted house’ effects.
Things went without incident during the production. Brolin called it the smoothest film he’d ever worked on thanks to Rosenberg, who had everything planned and prepared in advance for the actors. Kidder found the schedule too rigid on occasion; she hoped to go to the UK premiere of Superman and meet Queen Elizabeth II but was denied because they were breeding thousands of black houseflies in a special insect laboratory and couldn’t change the hatch date. Rosenberg usually let the cast and crew off early for the day, and the shoot finished under budget, two weeks ahead of its nine-week schedule. Ironically, AIP was chagrined at the lack of complications, encouraging the actors to invent strange things occurring when talking to the media.
AIP launched a $6 million advertising campaign. A 90-minute Merv Giffin should was dedicated around “The Amityville Horror” with stars of the movie and the Lutzes making an appearance. AIP also supplied theaters with a pre-showing horror soundtrack to play containing a symphonic score filled with screaming, eerie creaks, and thunderclaps to get audiences in the mood for the frights they were about to witness.
The film became a hit, breaking the box office record for independent films with $86 million domestically, and only trailing Superman for grosses in 1979 (Kidder costarred in both). It was also a big hit internationally.
Although not a very scary film as demonic possession flicks go, the film struck a nerve with some who find that the American dream getting savaged gave it that extra edge; seeing everything strives for in life decimated by forces one can’t control is every adult’s nightmare. Not that there aren’t eerie happenings, with sudden fly infestations, blood oozing through the walls, mysteriously aborted phone calls, icy chills in a warm house, body disfigurations, and a giant red-eyed pig ghost. But one of the recurring horrors in the film lies not in the supernatural but from the very grim reality of financial insecurity and seeing one’s dreams implode – the loss of cash, the inability to perform one’s job, and the difficulty of keeping one’s home were all things many were experiencing as real-world issues in the recession of the late 1970s.
There are also issues of George’s feelings of failure as a father, provider, and protector of the family. He can’t pay the bills, the kids haven’t accepted him as their father yet, he can’t hold down a job, he suffers sexual dysfunction and ultimately does more harm than good. Skeptics claim that the real-life George’s anxiety about these things is what caused him to make up a story and sell it, once it seemed like the answer to all of his problems, just as the purchase of the house had been a promise of a better life a month earlier. George associates material possessions as the way to success, happiness, and the love of his family, and his nightmare is his realization that he’s gone into debt achieving none of it. He married a widow with three children, then bought a giant house in a neighborhood he likely couldn’t afford the property taxes for, without the means on how to pay for it. His only way out is to lie about the reasons for his total implosion being not his doing, and in so doing, he finds the way out of his predicament – the lie that catapults him to a best-selling book, smash hit film, and national notoriety.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Amityville Horror is its staying power, spawning at least a prequel, a multitude of official and unofficial spin-offs, and a remake in 2005. The reason why this is surprising is that this original 1979 film isn’t particularly good. Yet, it did creep certain audiences out – people who enjoy stories of demonic possession, even if it is rather dreary.
Although the creep factor is high, the crap factor is comparable, in this overblown and underdeveloped attempt at an Exorcist-style horror film. While haunted house flicks are rarely logical or realistic, it’s never clear what the parameters are as far as the powers that be within the house. Sometimes the house lets its intentions be known to a person right away, and others, not for a long time. For some reason, the house is also able to haunt people that aren’t even on the premises, such as when they are driving in a car miles away, or a faraway church, or when they are on the phone with someone from the house.
Rosenberg can be good depending on the material, having helmed such classics as Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, and The Pope of Greenwich Village. However, he seems quite befuddled within the atmospheric horror genre, never building adequate suspense, focusing instead on unpleasant imagery whenever the film loses momentum.. Although there’s a solid cast, the performances are all over the place due to issues with the source material.
The Amityville Horror is schlock adapted from a misguided book. Remove the assumption of truth, it’s rigidly straightforward and more than a bit cheesy, filling a cultural void where The Exorcist ended and The Shining began.
Qwipster’s rating: C+
MPAA Rated: R for disturbing images, violence, sexuality, and language
Running Time: 117 min.
Cast: James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger, Don Stroud, Murray Hamilton, John Larch, Natasha Ryan, K.C. Martel, Meeno Peluce, Michael Sacks, Helen Shaver, Amy Wright, Val Avery
Director: Stuart Rosenberg
Screenplay: Sandor Stern (based on the novel, “The Amityville Horror – A True Story”, by Jay Anson)