MAY 24 - The Amityville Horror

            Oh, Amityville. When The Conjuring was just a glimmer on the cinema horizon and the Warrens just a footnote in a based-on-a-true-story, here you came to clean up at the box office and inspire deep resentment in the good people of Amityville, a very real place, for generations to come. And what gifts you brought with you, all the bounty of the ‘70s horror film – dysfunctional heterosexual marriage, vague mumblings about cursed Indian land, economic anxiety, a murderous spouse, Margot Kidder, priests. It’s all here, a veritable ‘70s buffet.

            It’s the classic haunted house tale, distilled to its core components. Kathy Lutz, a good Catholic girl with three kids, and her brand-new husband George, buy a house, cheap thanks to the very nasty murders that took place there a year before. Before long, Kathy’s daughter is playing with a creepy imaginary friend, and the house is making its evil known in the pettiest of ways. It slams doors, drops windows on innocent hands, locks babysitters in closets, and steals a wad of cash. The veritable parade of priests and nuns who drop by become mysteriously ill. Worst of all, George becomes increasingly ungroomed and disheveled, sporting a shaggy beard and reddened eyes. In other words, he looks like he’s been in quarantine for three months. George, like the dad from The Witch, discovers a passion for chopping wood, and Amityville residents tell him he has a shocking resemblance to the guy who did those murders not so long ago. Does George have murder on the mind?

            George and Kathy, like the erstwhile lovers of Don’t Look Now, start off as a surprisingly appealing couple with a sense of humor and a healthy mutual sex drive. But as George becomes increasingly disturbed by the house, he develops a nasty case of the Toxic Masculinities, snapping at Kathy and the kids and refusing to help carry in groceries. Before too long, he goes full Jack Nicholson. It doesn’t help matters that George and Kathy have money troubles. Cementing the modern haunted house tale as a story of financial anxiety, Kathy is proud to be the first homeowner in a family of renters but anxious to impress her family with her precarious prosperity, while George is running from the financial decline of his business by buying a house he can’t afford. A nasty haunting turns out to be the hidden cost of buying cheap.

Those great windows from the inside

            And just as George and Kathy are in debt to some anonymous bank, The Amityville Horror is in debt to other horror movies, not least of all The Exorcist. Here’s another saintly priest, one who never even has a chat with the Lutzes but wanders in to bless the house and gets a face full of flies. It’s not quite as much a gung-ho pro-Catholic flick as its predecessor; the priest valiantly struggles against the Church’s unwillingness to acknowledge the danger of the house. Meanwhile, a supernaturally aware friend of George’s has a bad feeling about the place and discovers its relationship to a grab bag of historical atrocities, including, yes, some made-up crap about Native Americans and of course the Salem witch trials, yet again. The film, as these films love to do, sets up a debate between rationality and superstition where superstition wins, of course, and Satan is behind it all. The haunting feels almost incidental, unrelated to the problems of George and Kathy’s family, which are entirely caused by the external house and its vague but profound evil. While Margot Kidder is radiant as always, other than their haunting and their brief moments of happiness in the opening fifteen minutes, George and Kathy are pretty thinly drawn, just a pair of ordinary, upwardly mobile suckers in for a bad month.

            This is the rare based-on-a-true story film where the true story sounds weirder and scarier than the fiction. Not the haunting itself, probably faked but who knows, but the circumstances around it. You don’t have to squint hard to see the movie as the story of a couple that bought a drafty house, had some serious marital troubles, and then blamed a haunting for  man’s bad behavior. Satan becomes the ultimate scapegoat. You have to wonder, what compelled the Lutzes to either concoct a load of nonsense or tell everyone about their ordeal, and what happened after the cash-in. The poor town of Amityville is infamously grumpy about the unwanted reputation this franchise brought them, and boy would I love to be in the room when curmudgeonly local historian types go off about that. And what about those poor kids whose real lives get distorted and turned into Hollywood fodder. Not that I want to keep gawking, but the human story here is far more compelling than anything the supernatural has to offer.

            If I’ve sounded overly negative about this film, I apologize. It’s a perfectly serviceable creepy two hours, although one that could have spared those priestly digressions. The iconic shot of the house, with its glowing windows in the red light, and the eerie children’s choir singing the theme song (which is still stuck in my head) are atmospheric and memorable. The film packs in some good jumps, and some close-ups of flies that are genuinely unnerving. But it’s most interesting not for anything within the film but for its place in the culture – as the ultimate based-on-a-true-story, the archetypal haunted house thriller, and a characteristic slice of its era.

Some home renovation

Vibecheck: As someone who, since renting my first apartment last summer, has obsessively drooled over weird historical apartments on Zillow before scoring one of my own (a rental, I mean), my favorite part of the movie was when George and Kathy get a tour of the house from the nosy realtor. This house is neat! Too bad about the ghosts and shit.

Scare Factor: A good jump or two, some gross bugs, some mild discomfort, but overall, tame even by the standards of the day.

Pairs Well With: You could pair this with any of its contemporaries that it either borrows from or is similar to – The Shining, The Exorcist, Poltergeist – and have a lovely long-’70s night. I think haunted house also-ran Burnt Offerings is its best approximate in terms of quality and occasional goofiness; while it gets a lot weirder than Amityville, its family horror focus is similar. And its climactic scene reminded me of The Haunting of Hill House’s opening episode; the Netflix show is arguably more inspired by Amityville than the book it shares its name with, what with its homicidal parent figure and subplot about a sibling who writes a book about the haunting. It answers the what-happens-next question in interesting ways.

But how gay is it?: Another ’70s horror film, another ambivalent heterosexual coupling. Oh well.