OVP: The Amityville Horror (1979)

Film: The Amityville Horror (1979)

Stars: James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger

Director: Stuart Rosenberg

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

Horror films, while they are oftentimes inspired by real-life figures or events, rarely underline this for myriad reasons.  For starters, while ghost stories are common (you ever have conversation lagging at a dinner party, just ask if anyone there has ever seen a ghost, and suddenly you'll have hours of conversation), they aren't something that a legal team can substantiate, so by-and-large when you see a horror movie, it's at best inspired by a real-life incident, and to a large extent that's true of The Amityville Horror...but the beginning of the movie is very real.  Unlike virtually every other film we're profiling this month, Amityville talks about an actual murder, that of Ronald DeFeo, Jr's entire family, at the beginning of the movie, and then talks about real-life figures George & Kathy Lutz, who claim they lived in a house of horrors in Amityville, NY.  The movie itself, though, doesn't necessarily prove that real life is stranger than fiction, and while it makes for interesting drama, is one of our duller horror entries this month.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie tells the tale of George (Brolin) and Kathy Lutz (Kidder), an attractive young couple who live in a house with their three children, all kids from Kathy's first marriage.  The house is cheap because it was home to a series of murders many years prior, but the family, strapped-for-cash, can't turn away such a real estate steal.  The house, though, starts to impact them both.  Kathy's friends and family, including her clergyman Father Delaney (Steiger) become violently ill when they are at the house, and the longer he stays there, the more sullen & disheveled George gets.  The film seems to imply that George is turning into Ronald DeFeo, Jr., the man who killed his family, and wants the audience to think that George might inflict the same impact on Kathy & her children.  In the closing act, he does attempt to kill one of the kids as demons start to possess the house, but he stops short, with the family fleeing the house, never to return.

The movie is, I'm going to be honest, of questionable taste, particularly considering the series of tasteless sequels that it would inspire.  After all, Ronald DeFeo, Jr., who is a character in this presumably fictionalized story, was a real-life killer who had actual victims.  Putting that aside (but it needed to be said), the movie's best attributes are the non-horror elements.  Brolin & Kidder play a sexy couple (Brolin increasingly getting shirtless, disheveled, walking around in tighty-whitey's, and entering peak "daddy" mode as the movie progresses works really well, and is definitely carried forward in the remake where Ryan Reynolds enters his peak abs era), but they also struggle in terms of how George folds into an already established family, particularly one with financial troubles.  Virtually every corner of the movie is talking about the Lutz's money woes, and it brings an element of realistic drama into the movie that you don't always get from horror flicks.

But the film's horror quotient is so limited that it frequently goes from sturdy into dull.  The setup for jump scares feels fruitless, there's very little payoff with people like Steiger's Father Delaney, who is ancillary to the point of being in a different movie, and it isn't as masterful as most of the other horror classics of the era.  Carrie was about the way we torture young women who can't conform, Halloween was about evil lurking in the suburbs...but The Amityville Horror doesn't have enough depth to really be about much.  It's not a bad movie (the first hour is good if it leads nowhere, and I liked the Oscar-nominated score, even if it's repetitive & a little bit derivative to some other classic horror music like Halloween or The Innocents), but with a tacked-on ending & the limitations of real life...it's not really a classic.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween