The Amityville Horror [2005]

Whatever happened or did not happen to the Lutz family during their 28 days in residence in the house on 112 Ocean Avenue in 1975 remains a subject for lively if tedious dispute. The sequelae are easier to assess, if just as complicated: an account of the alleged haunting was published as The Amityville Horror under the byline of Jay Anson [who may or may not have written all or any of the book] and became a paperback best-seller which led inevitably to a film directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring James Farentino and Margot Kidder as the troubled George and Kathy Lutz. This, in turn, inspired more cash-in books, ranging from purported true crime to outright fiction, a couple of theatrically-released sequels cut from whole cloth by producer Dino de Laurentiis [Amityville II: The Possession and Amityville 3-D] and a trickle of barely-related TV movie and straight-to-video entries that tapered off ten years ago with Amityville: Dollhouse. As early as 1980, the dominant theory of 'what actually happened' was used as a springboard for 'The House That Bled to Death', an episode of the Hammer House of Horror TV series in which a haunting is revealed to be faked by a financially-troubled family who hope to make a cash killing from ancillary rights to their ordeal.

As a book, The Amityville Horror was and remains junk; as a film, the 1979 version is mediocre at best [it's probably best-remembered for the bit with priest Rod Steiger pestered by flies, spoofed as recently as Scary Movie 2] but both were cross-over hits with a wider demographic than the teen crowd who usually pay attention to every horror release. In his non-fiction study Danse Macabre, Stephen King – who incorporated the nugget of the story into his far more susbtantial and satisfying The Shining – suggests this is because the story trades on a set of fears about home-ownership ['think of the bills'] and parenting more common among adults. But the marketing ploy, used in 1970s horrors as varied as The Exorcist [as book and film] and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, was that The Amityville Horror could not be dismissed in the way many [stupidly] dismiss horror fiction because it's a true story. The notion that any incarnation of The Amityville Horror is scarier, more truthful or more interesting than any incarnation of, say, The Shining is self-evident nonsense, but remains persistent. 'After Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we looked at what audiences responded to in the marketing of that film,' says Andrew Form, who co-produced the 2003 remake of the Tobe Hooper film. 'What we found was that people were most frightened by the fact that it was inspired by a true story.' Conveniently ignoring the fact that neither Massacre has any more connection with a truth beyond the 'no, this really happened' opening caption used on everything from Plan 9 From Outer Space to The Blair Witch Project, Form and partners Michael Bay and Brad Fuller hit on the notion of rehashing Amityville, leaving the only other based-on-a-true-story paranormal property [The Entity] to Hideo Nakata.

Scott Kosar, who wrote the Chainsaw remake but also the excellent The Machinist, crafts a screenplay which admits to being based as much on Sandor Stern's 1979 script as the Anson book. Carrying over from Chainsaw, the film chooses not to go the update route and establishes an understated 1970s period atmosphere [though women back then didn't tend to be as anorexically thin as actresses put into midriff-baring hippie chick costumes these days] while hauling in a first-time director [Marcus Nispel there, Andrew Douglas here] from the world of commercials. This is almost a working definition of film as product, but there are some new wrinkles. The 1979 film made the Lutzes a TV movie typical family, glossing over the fact that George was not the father of the children; here, the fracture in the Lutz home is a theme from the outset, with the kids resentful that their dead father has been replaced and a spikiness to the domestic scenes that suggests the family's lives wouldn't be smooth no matter what house they moved into. Ryan Reynolds works hard in the central role, though he slides too easily into 'bad Dad' mode, an act almost impossible to pull off after Jack Nicholson's definitive rampage in Kubrick's The Shining. The wholly made-up Amityville sequels deliver body counts, but this is stuck with the dull fact that though the Lutzes lived in a house where a massacre had taken place none of them were even seriously injured by ghosts. A babysitter is rendered catatonic as a substitute sacrifice, and there's a moment when it seems the film will depart from the 'facts' when George sinks his axe into Kathy – but this turns out to be a brief fantasy, which crucially shocks him to his senses long enough for the family to escape.

Mixed in are all the ghost clichés, ancient and modern: the briefly glimpsed corpse figures who deliver routine frights, the sleuthing in the local library that turns up a nasty backstory, the child endangered by her imaginary friend [once in a bit of precarious roof-walking], the pet who comes to a bad end, the repeated moans that 'all our money is tied up' in the house, the ominous bits of information handed out by the local priest [Philip Baker Hall, not even trying to compete with Steiger's scenery-chewing], the nervy real estate agent trying to offload the property cheap without giving anything away, the dead indians in the walled-up part of the cellar, the nasty colonial glowerer in a puritan hat [cf: the Poltergeist sequels], repeated shots of the house trying hard to look evil, playthings left behind by ghost children [a one-eyed teddy bear], the sullen and soaked ghosts who move in jittery time [as seen in A Stir of Echoes, the House on Haunted Hill remake and all the Ring films]. If staying true to the spirit of the original is an essential quality in any remake, this Amityville Horror must be counted a success – it's just as tediously ordinary, exploitative of the gullible, professionally slick and fundamentally unfelt as the book and the earlier film.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight and Sound June 2005

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