Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
When the Lutz family sold their story to author Jay Anson of their account purchasing a home in Amityville, Long Island, that they left after 28 days due to demonic goings-on, they neglected to secure ancillary rights that covered TV and film adaptations of the book. Anson sold those rights to his friends at his company, Professional Films, who then sold it to CBS for a made-for-TV movie. CBS sold it to American International Pictures for a feature film shortly before the company’s merger with Filmways Inc. The Lutzes did, however, retain rights to anything that happened to them after leaving their Amityville home. Their agent immediately began shopping around their story of continued paranormal experiences beyond Amityville to various publishers.
Meanwhile, Hans Holzer, one of the parapsychologists who investigated the home during the Lutz controversy, was busy writing up several Amityville-related books. The first of these efforts, Murder in Amityville, was published in 1979, covering the events surrounding Ronald “Butch” DeFeo, who killed his parents and four siblings in the Amityville home in 1974, prior to the Lutz family moving in. Holzer researched the history of the home and the land it resides on. He also interviewed Butch DeFeo in prison and obtained court transcripts. DeFeo’s defense claim was that he committed the murders while possessed by a demonic spirit within the house that spoke to him. In late 1979, AIP scooped up the TV and film rights to Holzer’s novel for a six-figure sum. As the events were a matter of public record set prior to The Amityville Horror, AIP could proceed with a cinematic follow-up without needing permission from the Lutzes.
Around this time, Dino de Laurentiis came upon a fictional horror movie script idea he loved by fellow Italian Dardano Sacchetti called, L’Orco. Dino flew Sacchetti to his London office to work on the script in English as The Ogre with British novelist Colin Wilson. Dino attached a director he had under an expiring contract, Damiano Damiani. Sacchetti had worked with Damiani before on a never-produced adaptation of the Richard Condon novel Mile High. He respected Damiani but felt obliged to inform Dino that Damiani was the wrong choice. He preferred serious, intellectual films, not horror. Dino said Sacchetti’s job was to make sure that Damiani directed the story the way it’s written.
Meanwhile, the Lutz family successfully sold the rights for three different books to their post-Amityville experiences to John G. Jones and Paul Kimatian in coordination with Gotham Press Publishing. Simultaneously, a script by publicity agent Chuck Moses (under his pseudonym, James Betts) had been completed in mid-1980 called Unwanted Company, relating how the Lutzes have been followed by the evil spirits from Amityville to their duplex overlooking the coast of Southern California. This was intended to be the natural sequel to The Amityville Horror because it featured the same family.
With George Lutz intending to make an Amityville Horror sequel, Dino wondered how that AIP (now called Filmways) could be making a prequel. After some inquiries, he learned a valuable fact: nothing legally prevented them from making any Amityville-related movie so long as it wasn’t about the Lutzes or anything specifically invented for Anson’s book or the 1979 film, The Amityville Horror. While Filmways developed the prequel, Dino entered into his own agreement with them to work on a sequel featuring a fictional family moving into the Amityville house. Dino hired novelist David Ambrose to script and John Hough to direct what was then called Death in Amityville. The script underwent a slate of contentious revisions, with Ambrose replacing his name with a pseudonym, William Wales.
By early 1981, Dino had suffered a couple of major financial setbacks with Flash Gordon and Ragtime which forced him to close his London office temporarily. Sacchetti and his family relocated to work in Dino’s New York offices on revisions where he changed the setting of The Ogre from England to Nantucket Island. When Damiani arrived, Sacchetti’s qualms were confirmed. Damiani had no interest in doing a horror movie, feeling that it would diminish his reputation among prominent Italian film critics. Damiani determined to persuade Dino to let him develop a different film idea surrounding the American porn industry. After working on The Ogre by day, Damiani dragged Sacchetti out at night to New York’s red-light district to porno theaters, strip bars, and fetish clubs. Once he had more concrete ideas, Damiani fought for this idea, but Dino resolutely shot it down.
In July of 1981, Dino’s son Federico died in a plane crash during an Alaskan snowstorm, resulting in Dino shutting down his New York office for a spell to return to Europe. Despite his mourning, Dino continued working to replenish his finances with less expensive efforts. When Dino discussed his stalled Amityville project and other proposals with John Carpenter, Carpenter recommended a couple of talented writer friends looking for a break who were young, talented, and inexpensive. Dino initially brought in and picked the brain of Dennis Etchison, who specialized in novelizations of Carpenter’s screenplays including Halloween II (a De Laurentiis production) and then Carpenter’s childhood friend and USC film school classmate Tommy Lee Wallace.
Wallace told Dino that he despised The Amityville Horror and considered the Lutz story a hoax. He thought the more interesting story was the real-life DeFeo murders. A family rotting from side out was far more riveting than some fake haunting. Dino went to Filmways and told them he wanted to take over their prequel idea first. If it worked out, he would use Death in Amityville as a sequel.
After reading Holzer’s book, Wallace visited Amityville to soak in the atmosphere. He also went to the Museum of the American Indian in Harlem to research the Indian lore Holzer mentioned and then began writing his first draft. This first attempt was told in flashbacks, with a news reporter interviewing Ronald “Butch” DeFeo on the events leading to the murder of his family. We also flashback to the 17th century and experience the desecration of a Native American tribe in the area, which cursed the land the house was eventually built upon. The spirit of the tribal chief possesses Butch and commits the murders to keep them off the land.
Dino found Wallace’s script too complicated and esoteric. Horror fans preferred a simple story that set up effective scares and there wasn’t a need to overthink it. De Laurentiis had such a screenplay already that provided a linear approach for Wallace to follow. When Sacchetti reconnected with Dino a year later to work on The Ogre, he found that it had been completely repurposed by Dino and Wallace into the Amityville concept. What was once an ogre living in a cursed house’s basement was now this unseen demon who possesses a young man. Sacchetti was upset at the missed opportunity to cross over into American filmmaking and determined not to take credit for what they made from his script.
Damiani returned after casting had completed, assisting Wallace with final revisions. He found the new script a ridiculous story fostering fabricated notions of demonic possession invented by people unable to explain human behavior. Damiani hadn’t seen the first Amityville film or know much about the story. He treated Amityville II as any other screenplay, not caring about the facts of the case or its setting. He brought in more exploration into the Catholic church’s involvement and their use of exorcism. He wanted a theme centering on evil as energy from which no one, not even the church, can escape the consequences. The family would already be dysfunctional, with an authoritarian, abusive, father that pushes everyone to the brink. The presence of evil pushed bad people to do worse and the weak to surrender. Leaving the home won’t solve the problems because evil destroys from within once infected.
Because the Lutz script title didn’t include “Amityville” and also wasn’t set there, Dino called his Amityville II to ride the coattails of The Amityville Horror to financial success. In 1982, the Jones-written book sequel to “The Amityville Horror” was released, under the title “The Amityville Horror Part II”. It became an instant best-seller. Meanwhile, Dino could use Ambrose’s Death in Amityville script as a sequel follow-up, Amityville 3D, further cementing his films as the “official” franchise. Sacchetti, who refused credit for Amityville II, would revamp L’Orco as a Lamberto Bava TV film in 1989 released internationally as Demons III: The Ogre.
As Damiani took artistic liberties, they avoided using real names to sidestep unforeseen lawsuits. The DeFeo’s became the Montellis, moving into their recently purchased three-story dutch colonial house. The father, Anthony, is abusive, foul-mouthed, and owns a ton of guns. The mother, Delores, discovers blood coming out of the kitchen faucet and a basement compartment filled with rancid filth and flies. The eldest son, Sonny, hears a voice talking to him through his Walkman telling him to do things like kill his family or seduce his sister Patricia. Paintbrushes float in mid-air and paint disturbing messages on the walls, crucifixes fly about, and unseen demons lurk around the family, drumming up all forms of trouble. Delores brings in a priest, Father Tom Adamski, to bless the house, but the evil that lurks within tries to thwart his advances as much as possible. The final act of the film gets particularly gruesome as Father Adamski trying to exorcise the demon from within the grotesquely metamorphizing Sonny who made him commit heinous acts he claims to not remember doing.
Demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren were hired as advisers to assure supernatural events occurring within Amityville II were authentic, as they publicly criticized The Amityville Horror book and film for misrepresenting the nature of demonic possessions. The Warrens claimed they did extensive research on the house and discovered that it was built on land that Native American ancestors claimed was inhabited by devils. Executives at Orion Pictures, which had absorbed Filmways in 1982, found the Warrens were convincing enough to give Amityville II respectability, sending them on talk shows to increase interest in the film. Lorraine would hype Amityville II as the most theologically sound film on the supernatural since The Exorcist
Two weeks of exteriors were filmed at the same house used in the prior film in Toms River, NJ. Two months of interiors were done in Churubusco Studios in Mexico City to try to save union costs. Damiani communicated with his actors in English, his crew in Italian, and others brought on board locally in Spanish through a translator. The crew was mostly American but Damiani brought over some Italian technicians he trusted, including cinematographer Franco Di Giacomo. Damiani wanted continuous movement throughout, using hand-held cameras and dollies. Long takes and live effects evoked the aura of unseen entities roaming about the house.
As for the cast, Burt Young was cast because Dino De Laurentiis saw that the role required a middle-aged actor to play someone hardheaded and aggressive and Young sprung immediately to mind. Although his character was an obnoxious abuser the rest of the cast loved Young because he was funny, caring, and not at all like the characters he portrays Young compared his portrayal of Anthony Montelli to Robert Duvall’s in The Great Santini.
Jack Magner, due to the nature of his role, was much more reclusive, so he remained enigmatic to the other actors. This would be Magner’s only movie role, outside of a small role in 1984’s Firestarter. Unlike his character in the film, Magner put family first and gave up his acting career to be with them.
Latvian-born actress Rutanya Alda was brought in for Delores via the casting director, Riccardo Bertoni, who thought her a fabulous actress on stage and screen. She deliberately chose not to see the first film because this was a prequel and she wanted to avoid picking up Margot Kidder’s performance style. In addition to her acting, she also saved the life of Jack Magner’s wife, May, who had been complaining of stomach pains. Alda had a dream of seeing May’s name in the obituaries. When she woke up, she implored Jack to take her to a hospital where it was discovered that May’s appendix had ruptured and might have died from blood poisoning without immediate treatment. The Magners liked Alda so much they moved into her neighborhood to be closer after finishing the movie.
Diane Franklin competed with Elizabeth Berridge through several auditions before being given the Patricia role. Berridge would beat out Franklin two years later to play Constance Mozart in Amadeus. Franklin played Patricia as a pure and innocent character that had a passionate side that could be channeled if done in the right way. The difficulty in playing the role comes not only from viewing her brother as a lover, but also in that her brother is disappearing, and something scary is taking over, further causing a conflicted feeling. As this is a family that has kept secrets of abuse hidden for years, this would be no different.
Franklin would go on to marry Dino’s nephew Ray in 1989. She also would return to Amityville by portraying Louise DeFeo in the 2018 film, The Amityville Murders, reuniting her with Burt Young, who plays her father again.
Abusive scenes of Anthony and Delores in the bedroom were removed that were deemed too exploitative, one involving anal rape. Damiani wanted to show how a marriage could go wrong with the manipulation of evil around them. Reportedly, one element removed from their sex scene was having them appear in porcine make-up, in an allusion to the father as a pig. Young says the hardest part of his portrayal was being abusive to the children, which affected his headspace in ways he didn’t enjoy. The incest portion remains in the film but less lurid than it might have been. Dino found Franklin so beautiful he wanted full nudity but she refused. This element came from allusions to a deeper relationship between Butch DeFeo and his eldest sister. Another reported deleted scene involves the younger Montelli daughter attempting to drown her brother in the bathtub; more disturbing is that they’re played by real-life siblings Erica and Brent Katz.
Amityville II topped the US box office in its first week of release and hovered in the top five for the first month. Its total haul in the US was $12.5 million – only a fifth of what the first film took in, but enough to make money on a budget under $5 million.
Wallace was initially disappointed in Damiani’s take because it wasn’t as minimalist as he envisioned and hit too hard on religious themes. Over the years, Wallace has acknowledged the film has held up well. The third act is less interesting to follow though it contains most of the gore that may please lovers of such icky visuals. The demonic possession sequences get some praise for the makeup job employed, led by Dick Smith-protege John Caglione in his first production as a supervisor. We watch Sonny’s torso physically collapse and then his skin bein to crack up and peel away to reveal the physical manifestation of the demon within. The exorcism sequence is grotesque but lacks the shock value of The Exorcist, perhaps because we lack sympathy for Sonny. It also was released the same year as Poltergeist, which was much more popular and broadly accepted as great entertainment.
The Lutz family sued for $25 million claiming Amityville II created public confusion and damaged the financial viability of their story rights through its deceptive actions of not only using the word “Amityville” but also attaching the Roman numeral, “II” to attach as the official sequel to The Amityville Horror. The courts determined in 1982 that copyright laws generally do not extend to the title of a work and dismissed the case after ordering Orion to redo the posters to replace mention of the Lutz family with one stating the film has no association with them. In 1989, an appeals court reversed the dismissal, but the Lutzes did not prevail in their argument.
While not nearly as good as The Exorcist, it’s more effective at unnerving audiences than the first film.. Fans of the original 1979 film may find annoyance at narrative inconsistencies, but this prequel works well as a standalone piece. It plays like a giallo, with surreal events and a haunting musical score by Lalo Schiffrin, the only carryover from the 1979 film other than the house. The first-person camerawork mesmerizes and credible actors give weight to the style. Although the film’s climax peaks before the third act, the exorcism sequences provide the requisite creepiness to sate horror fans.
Though the incestuous relationship has had most of its luridness stripped out it is quite racy. Along with witnessing a family turn to violence, sensationalism is high throughout. resulting in some good, tawdry trash, if you like that sort of thing. Despite better performances than most found in the subgenre, Alda received a Razzie nomination the previous year for Mommie Dearest and received another for her work here. Outside of her final scene, her performance is one of the highlights. Diane Franklin is also very strong, working well with Magner in his first and only significant film role, especially exploring the tricky chemistry between siblings, lovers, and evil. Olson, who becomes the film’s star during the last half of the movie, lends credibility and internal conflict amid fantasy elements.
If you prefer the eeriness of Poltergeist and The Exorcist, you might be entertained by the events of Amityville II, arguably the best film in the series. It’s over the top and unintentionally campy, but while it’s on, the prurient subject matter and bizarre events make it hard to avert your attention as they transpire.
Qwipster’s rating: B-
MPAA Rated: R for gore, strong violence, disturbing images, sexuality, brief nudity, a drug reference, and language
Running time: 100 min.
Cast: Jack Magner, Burt Young, Rutanya Alda, James Olson, Diane Franklin, Erika Katz, Brent Katz, Moses Gunn, Leonardo Cimino
Director: Damiano Damiani
Screenplay: Tommy Lee Wallace