The Amityville Horror - Part I

This movie scared the ever-loving hell out of me when I was a kid. In many ways, I consider it the definitive haunted house movie, right up there with Burnt Offerings. I know for some odd reason, it's not as appreciated as it ought to be, but I've always liked this movie even years after being traumatized by it as a kid.

The movie is based on a book and true story of a family who moves into a New York house they got for a great bargain. That's because nobody wanted it after the real-life DeFeo murders that happened in it, in which 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo blew his whole family away with a shotgun in their sleep.

While it seems like a dream home to the Lutz family, things quickly go awry as they are perpetually terrorized by strange occurrences in the house until they end up running for their very lives not even a month after moving in.


This is why I believed in ghosts as a kid. This is why I was afraid to go in my basement when the lights were off. My family had always joked that the townhouse I lived in was haunted because some kid who lived there died, and when a few bizarre similarities struck a chord with me, it made me even more afraid of this movie because of all those "true story" parallels. Today, I can attribute those strange happenings as simply some very unlikely and creepy coincidences, but a few of them still linger with me today.


The Amityville Horror has a few great things going for it. The architecture of the house is inherently creepy. The house used in the film was made to look similar to the real house, only dressed up to make it look more ominous with those windows that look like eyes.

The score for the movie is fantastic. I'd practically shit myself when I heard it as a kid and it always gave me chills.

A movie like this wouldn't work without a good cast and performances. I think Margot Kidder and James Brolin have great chemistry and I've always thought of them as one of the best couples in horror history. As the madness progresses, James Brolin starts going nuts and dreams of hacking his family to bits with an axe, and this predates The Shining movie in that sense (the Shining book was published a few months before the Amityville book though).

Sure, a bit of this movie was glorified to make a better story, cashing in on some popular trends of the era like crosses and holy water stuff and the inability of religion to counter the effects of evil. Real exorcism type stuff, but not nearly as much as in the second movie!

A big draw of this movie is how subtle it is. It knows that showing too much is the absolute wrong thing to do in a ghost story, but tell that to the fucking 2005 remake which shows you everything you didn't need to see and then some. Now that is one god awful movie. If you put that turd in your dvd player, you'll be hitting the eject button saying, "For God's sake, get out!"



What's your take on The Amityville Horror 1979? Do you love it or hate it?