THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
1979
Directed by Stuart Rosenberg
Written by Sandor Stern (based on the book by Jay Anson)
When October comes, one likes to celebrate with some horror movies, so why not the Amityville franchise?—if there is, in fact, such a thing as an Amityville "franchise," as opposed to a mostly-disconnected swarm of films that have "Amityville," in their titles because IP laws don't protect the name of a municipality in a movie title, nor events you've claimed "happened." As a matter of housekeeping, let's be clear that the totality of that swarm is not our task. Tim Brayton decided to do that once (he still missed some, and there have been several more since, including an "Amityville" werewolf movie, and, I shit you not, an "Amityville" zombie apocalypse movie), and while I had fun, I don't think he did, because, as noted, it's not even a real film series, and in many cases (you won't be surprised) they were only barely real movies. I figure to keep things small. Ironically, Amityville affords us a chance to be modest, because while that brand name sprawls outwards into seeming infinity, there aren't so many "real" Amityville movies, and either an equal number or fewer that are about the house in Amityville, rather than e.g. a haunted lamp from the house in Amityville. We'll be keeping to those for now, though everytime I think of the phrase "haunted lamp" I get curiouser about it, which I hope is only natural.
That sprawl is already one good reason to dislike The Amityville Horror, but only one. Probably the overriding one is that it's slightly evil. Now, I don't like to think of movies as having the capacity to be meaningfully evil, because I don't tend to think of them as having actual power, but sometimes we can make exceptions. Amityville Horror might be one of them, being something like the confirmation of the revival of American Christianity's collective hallucinations regarding the existence of devils, a process that had certainly been helped along, if not outright inspired, by Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist a few years earlier. Amityville marks the fourth culturally-important work on those lines (The Omen being the third horseman of this apocalypse), and it's altogether redolent of a Satanic Panic, beginning in earnest. The part that seems evilest, though, is that its tale of demonic infestation, oppression, and possession is, or so its source material purports, actually true.
Well, the true part is that around 3:15 a.m. on November 13th, 1974 five inhabitants of 112 Ocean Ave in the Village of Amityville, New York*, were murdered by the sixth, Ronald DeFeo Jr, the family's eldest son, who over the years trotted out every exculpatory explanation besides demonic possession; then, in December 1975, the house was sold to George and Kathy Lutz, who remained on the property for only 28 days before abandoning it, ranting about paranormal activity, and subsequently seized upon by Tam Mossman who brokered the deal that became Jay Anson's 1977 book. We might as well call Anson's work a novel (like the movies, it also has unauthorized sequels, some of which were clearly prompted by the movies, and some of which were turned into the movies, notably the one about the lamp), but in either case a book that the Lutzes themselves didn't own as accurate, though to the best of my knowledge they never fully admitted that (affording them the utmost charity) they'd simply frightened themselves into a state of breakdown over living in a murder house, prior to allowing first DeFeo Jr's own attorney, William Weber, and then Mossman after they rejected Weber's deal, to inveigle them into conspiracy to defraud the public. Apologies if I sound closed-minded.
That book, a hit, was rapidly snatched up by Samuel Z. Arkoff for American International Pictures, because of course it was, and the movie was outright huge, though it didn't come soon enough to save AIP from ceasing to exist. (It wasn't an altogether cursed house, but Filmways completed its purchase of AIP fifteen days prior to Amityville's release. This did allow Arkoff to conclude his two decades of savvy exploitation at AIP on the highest possible note, punching well above the mini-major's weight, as opposed to Meteor, from later in 1979, an attempt to bust blocks on purpose, which Arkoff probably already recognized was going to flop.) The upshot is that Amityville was the second-highest grossing movie of 1979, with $86 million in receipts, and second only because of the unstoppable juggernaut of... Kramer vs. Kramer, because things were clearly very different in 1979.
Which helps explain the whole Amityville phenomenon, honestly. The biggest reason to dislike it is that it's simply bad—a genre entry into a genre that didn't really exist yet, so it's groping around trying to figure it out, and as a result it sucks in ways that are hard to comprehend almost five decades and hundreds of similar movies later. For this reason I don't hold as much of a grudge against it as I otherwise might, because it had to invent itself as it went along. To the extent it rests on a tradition of haunting movies—such as, for instance, The Haunting—that tradition wasn't even really that old itself, and it tended to approach the subject matter of ghosts (now often demons, which can't be negotiated with) rather differently. For instance, pre-Amityville haunting movies more-or-less invariably situate themselves in much larger, much older houses, rather than a Dutch Colonial revival built in 1927 that's admittedly a little big for a working-class family, even in 1975, but that's the kind of discount you get on a property when five people get annihilated in it. Stephen King reviewed Amityville in his rambling book of horror history and criticism, Danse Macabre, and famously declared that the new horror that Amityville brought to the table, the secret to its success, was the idea of being chained to an unexpected disaster of a home in a disintegrating economy. But then, King also saw it with a crowd of forty year olds in a second-run theater in Maine, and I don't really believe that the audiences who propelled it to its box office heights in 1979 were thinking about their mortgages; money worries are "in" the movie, but only sometimes what it's obviously or consciously "about," and while, admittedly, that may be a special case of it kind of not being obviously or consciously about much of anything (including itself), its purpose is, principally, just to ensure they stay there. So I don't know: the innovation of Amityville, in 1979**, is that it happens inside a house that would be owned by mortgagors, familiar and cozy, and sure, big enough to accommodate a film crew, and to have shadowy expanses, and to still come off a little bit gothic (colloquially-speaking), but still resolutely middle-class, a house that's not at all otherwordly, but instead familiar, quite possibly much the same as the house you grew up in. So I don't blame audiences for not realizing that Amityville was crap—critics didn't like it even at the time, but they also seem to have been primed more by its cultural failures than its cinematic ones—or that it was going to be done way better, dozens of times.
Still, that doesn't let the people who made the movie off the hook, who might've delivered a hit but plainly did so by mostly-accident. The story I've pretty much already summarized. At the outset our director, Stuart Rosenberg, a director best-known for movies that had a sense of socially-valuable self-importance (though he's only really well-known, besides Amityville itself, for Cool Hand Luke), threatens to get all classy on us. This has been prefigured already with an opening credits sequence that suggests that this shall be a slow, steady burn—nothing besides an iconic shot of the home (or the mock-up made for this movie, which redesigns it to emphasize the "sad-eyed ghastly face" effect of its side), done up with color filters that capture something like a dawn in hell, though it would be even cooler if it weren't so blatantly a still photograph. Then the movie offers its prologue, the night of the DeFeo massacre, witnessed, for now, only as flashes of light in each window intercut with oblique images of firearms. For now, but not for very long: in the very next scene, George and Kathy (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) are touring the property, and as they marvel at what a steal it is, the restraints come off, and as they visit each room, we're treated to a much more up-close-and-personal rendition of the massacre, and I'm not offended by it, except it's so lousy. Even on a brass-tacks technical level: the cross-cutting is genuinely defective, and Rosenberg and editor Robert Brown Jr had some kind of trouble with the sequence that required them to hold a frame of Brolin and Kidder so long that you'd think your blu-ray broke. Which isn't even getting at how strategically weird this is, because, while I understand why you might not want to shy away from a less-abstract flashback to the events threatening to repeat themselves with George, that seems a whole lot more like a third act gambit, while what we get is slotted-in at, I think objectively, the single worst possible moment it could've been slotted-in if you were going to keep that prologue. We just haven't arrived at a place that such nastiness can be functional yet. It's also wonky just as a matter of staging, because in this movie DeFeo Jr was being helped by a demon, rather than (I believe) repositioning his families' bodies after he shot them, thus although that means it "makes sense" why his victims don't wake up, because we don't know about any demon yet it looks fake and stupid.***
So the elder Lutzes move in along with the three kids (Natasha Ryan, K.C. Martel, and Meeno Peluce), and they start getting haunted, 110 more minutes elapse, and the movie ends. I mean, that's it. I belabored the first eight-or-so minutes because they really do encapsulate the movie in miniature: pretty nasty, little story, and hardly any structure whatsoever. In theory, this could be offset by the personalities of 112 Ocean's new inhabitants—a study of a family—and this isn't really in the offing, in no small part because the amount of "normal life" the Lutzes get to have onscreen is approximately two scenes' worth after the home tour (a moving-in scene and a sex scene), nor is it even noticeably well-acted. Brolin gets the worst of it because he's the human incarnation of the film's inability to figure out how to escalate itself in a coherent way, and accordingly he's just swinging back and forth between a very vague evocation of post-hippie bluecollar decency and disheveled madman being reshaped by a demon into its new DeFeo Jr, and most of his screentime is just spent staring angrily into the middle distance, sometimes effectively for the individual moment but not for the film as a cohesive object; Kidder accomplishes proportionally more with much, much less to do, and accrues a degree of personality but mostly on the basis that she's being costumed and styled to be in several different 70s porno scenes. The children are damn near afterthoughts for the movie, at best (exclusively with Ryan) props that have some level of affect, or notionally creepy lack of affect.
But by the same token, a blank stand-in family could be perfectly useful (maybe not this blank, but it mightn't hurt), if the haunted house was working, and for all its historical importance Amityville's just isn't. Everything is very arbitrary, and not in a way that magnifies the horror, and more in the way that you could—I might mean this absolutely literally—reshuffle every scene in the middle hour of the movie and it wouldn't make a difference. Hell, by random chance you might make it better. Nearly the first move that Amityville's demon ever makes is somehow one of its strongest (physically, I mean, it's actually not that scary), attacking Kathy's priest (Rod Steiger) with flies and slamming doors and harsh words, basically giving the clergyman come to bless the house the bum's rush, and pretty trivially (though Steiger's exit is laughably non-urgent, and he tries to make up for this later by bellowing). This inaugurates a whole B-plot regarding the priest's crusade to exorcize the Lutz house, that goes a surprising amount of motherfucking nowhere considering the amount of screentime that's devoted to it, almost a last-chance expression of 1970s realist/"realist" messiness—in this case indicting the church for hypocrisy, or uselessness, or something. Anyway, this soon stops interacting with the A-plot in any way (even if it still has screentime) when that demonic evil reaches out all the way down a Goddamn state highway and wrecks Steiger's car, which is where you may ask why it doesn't just throw everybody through a window or something.
That's the most dysfunctional material, but even when confined to the Lutzes' experience, it's still just haunted house slop throughout, with everything being surprisingly interchangeable until the finale (where it feels like Amittville's screenwriter Sandor Stern and the writers of Alien must've been sharing notes, in anticipation of screenwriting manuals being written about them, though it turns out "saving the cat" was immortal but "the dog" less so). So, would you bet that the toilets spitting out gallons of black viscous tar would happen towards the beginning, or towards the end? Would you bet it's the former, and it's forgotten about by the next scene? And so, in no particular order, and not always for any particularly identifiable purpose, the demonic house does stuff: smashes one of the kids' hands in a window; magically locks a babysitter (Amy Wright) in a closet, which sends her stark raving mad, as a result of what looks like a childish prank, within sixty seconds (now add some tension-draining rather than tension-heightening cross-cutting); pickpockets $1500; wakes George up at 3:15 every night and (sometimes) seems to have a psychic hold; becomes the daughter's invisible friend, calling itself "Jody," as a total sideshow; gives George erectile dysfunction; rips the doors off; and just so on and so forth. Most haunting movies do something like this! Amityville's descendant usually pretend it's structured better. There's very little sense of rising horror here, and sometimes it's not parsable what the horror is. (Kidder, once or twice, is rendered for a half-second shot in very bad aging makeup, somewhat-reflecting one of the Lutzs' accounts, accomplishing nothing besides unproductive confusion.) When it does feint towards structure, it's somehow even more frustrating, like with the priests, or with the arrival of the new ager wife (Helen Shaver) of George's business partner (Michael Sacks, between the two of them giving the movie its most-likeable, if unnecessarily-compact, performances). Promising to be a lively ally, who seems intrigued by the (phony) lore of the house and its hidden (not actually) red room, she even persuades George to start tearing down basement walls to reveal the house's secrets, and then I think... vanishes? That doesn't seem right; yet I'm pretty sure it is. A lot of this can probably be blamed on the (real) Lutzes: if Rosenberg and Sandor were film professionals inventing the modern haunted movie, these grifting civilians were spitballing the modern haunted house story, and forcing a collection of spooky anecdotes down the film professionals' throats. The closest thing to structure comes from outside the movie proper, with "day X" title cards that perhaps feel like "escalation" if you remember exactly how many days the Lutzes stayed, though that'd also mean you know none of them died.
What it has going for it, at least, is that it's one terrifically autumnal film, with cinematographer Fred K. Koenekamp essentially disregarding that it's actually December, and in concert with the art department tuning the visuals more towards an Octobery sort of vibe, with nicely blown-out skies and a color palette of oranges and grays in the frequent establishing exteriors which pop even more because of the downright ashen complexion of the set interiors. Sometimes, Rosenberg and Koenekamp find visual ways to impose structure with repeated camera set-ups, notably a lateral dolly that thanks to the interior layout can take in the kitchen and foyer and staircase, which does give it a faint feeling of grindingly "getting worse," even if the actual content doesn't; though I'd not go so far as to say it's "well-crafted," even if I approve of Lalo Schifrin's "creepy child moaning" score for what it is. The ending at least feels like "an ending," going as far as possible with special effects to depict the Lutzes' claims of walls leaking slime and/or blood (I kind of dig the woozy composite of the demon's pig-face in the window, even), and it's commendably loud and brash; but even on its strengths, it's remarkable just how much better at exactly this that Poltergeist would be three years later, so that even the things that grant Amityville its undeniable iconicism are turned against it, its overtly creepy suburban house standing apart from its neighbors (and a frankly ugly one, as a gambrel roof will make a house look like a fucking barn) becoming the completely nondescript suburban house on an anonymous street, which is even scarier. I don't hate it, but I don't think I'd have liked it even in 1979, and it's hard to watch The Amityville Horror, today, and give a shit at all.
Score: 5/10
*108 Ocean today. Can you guess why? (And because New York is goofy, it's also part of a town, named Babylon, and how has no one made hay of that?)
**Or at least the innovation it popularized and codified.
***I daresay the most insightful thing King had to say about The Amityville Horror was as regards the validity of "true story" movies: "it just doesn't matter; either way it's fiction."
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