|
Synopsis: At 3.15 a.m.,
13th November, 1974, in Amityville, Long Island, a young man
murders his parents and four siblings during a violent thunderstorm. One
year later, a newly married couple, George (James Brolin) and Kathy Lutz
(Margot Kidder), inspects the house where the murders were committed.
Although troubled by their knowledge of what happened, the two agree
that they would never be able to afford such a house otherwise and
decide to buy it. They move in shortly afterwards, along with Kathy’s
three children from her previous marriage, Greg (K.C. Martel), Matt (Meeno
Peluce) and Amy (Natasha Ryan). At Kathy’s request, Father Frank Delaney
(Rod Steiger) comes to the house to bless it. Although he cannot find
the Lutzes, the priest thinks he hears voices and goes upstairs to
investigate. Through the window of a second floor room, Father Delaney
can see the family out by the river. He begins the blessing where he is,
but stops when the room begins to fill with flies and the door swings
shut behind him. Suddenly, Father Delaney is overcome by violent nausea.
As the door swings open again, a harsh, disembodied voice orders him to
get out. He flees the house, being violently sick before driving
away. Later that day, the priest telephones Kathy, but the line becomes
distorted before he can tell her what happened, while the hand with
which he was holding the phone develops stigmata-like burns. Meanwhile,
George Lutz finds himself unable to get warm, despite the fact that the
central heating is on high. Kathy suggests that cold air from the
basement might be responsible. George goes to investigate, and is
disturbed to detect an icy draught in the seemingly enclosed room. Later
that night, George wakes for no reason at 3.15 a.m. He gets up to
determine what may have woken him, and discovers the windows in Amy’s
room wide open, and her doll sitting in a chair, instead of in bed with
the sleeping child, where he left it earlier. George also finds himself
drawn for no apparent reason to the boathouse…. The next day, Kathy
returns from shopping to find George obsessively chopping wood, even
though they have plenty. As Kathy puts the groceries away, Amy tells her
about her new imaginary friend, Jodie. Kathy phones Father Delaney to
find out why he did not come to bless the house, and learns from Father
Bolen (Don Stroud) that he has been taken very ill. She also learns, to
her confusion, that Delaney did set out to perform the blessing. Kathy’s
Aunt Helena (Irene Dailey), a nun, comes to see the house. Before she
arrives, the house’s toilets fill and overflow with a vile black
substance. When Helena enters the house, she immediately becomes
physically sick and, to Kathy’s mortification, runs away. Kathy begins
to suffer nightmares about the murders committed in the house. Although
still very ill, Father Delaney asks Father Bolen to drive him to the
Lutz house, but the two men are almost killed when their car goes
inexplicably out of control. Delaney then goes to the church
authorities, to try and convince them that the Lutzes are in mortal
danger from a supernatural presence in their house….
Comments:
I am one of those people – ushers hate me – who always watch
right to the end of the credits when I see a movie. And if you watch the
credits of The Amityville Horror right to the end, you will find
the following statement, delivered in what I am afraid I can only call
“the fine print”:
Based upon the book
‘The Amityville Horror’. Some characters and events have been changed to
heighten dramatic effect.
Indeed.
After an interval of thirty years, during
which a news report became an investigative series, and then a
best-selling book, and then a movie, which in turn spawned a prequel, a
stream of increasingly ludicrous sequels, and finally, inescapably, a
re-make, all of this supporting a veritable cottage industry of duelling
documentaries and battling books, there seems little necessity for any
further statement on what may or may not have occurred at 112 Ocean
Avenue, Amityville, during December and January of 1975-1976. This
review of the original version of The Amityville Horror will
therefore confine itself principally to considering the movie as
a movie – and as an adaptation of the book, from which it occasionally
deviates in quite telling ways. I myself received a copy of Jay Anson’s
account of the supposed haunting of a Long Island house for my
fourteenth birthday, and at that time the story quite frankly scared the
crap out of me. (I actually had it in my mind that the book was a
thirteenth birthday present, but as I look at it today – and yes, I
do still have the same copy – I realise that it is the movie tie-in
edition, which dates it later. My thirteenth must have been when I got
‘Carrie’….) Considering the book today, I can recognise it for what it
is: a manipulative piece of pseudo-journalism, with bad writing
masquerading as verisimilitude; as crude as a ghost story told around
the campfire – and just as effective. Despite – because of? – its
literary shortcomings, the book was an enormous success; transference of
the story to the screen was inevitable, and finally happened in 1979.
The Amityville Horror proved to be the final production of the
legendary American International Pictures, which by the late seventies
had gotten itself into major financial difficulties by (forgetting,
apparently, the philosophy on which the company had been founded in the
first place) overspending in an attempt to keep up with the majors. The
huge financial success of The Amityville Horror was not enough to
stave off disaster. Even before the film was made, AIP had, figuratively
speaking, sold its soul to the devil, entering into a doomed partnership
with Filmways. When the crash came, the pair were taken over by Orion,
which was itself in turn swallowed up by MGM – to which, unbelievably,
in time just past, we have also had to bid a kind of farewell.
Requiescat in pace – all of you….
The Amityville Horror is a
film fatally divided against itself. On one hand, it desperately wants
to be a big, important film; an event, like
The Exorcist.
(The book was widely advertised as “More hideously frightening than
The Exorcist – because it actually happened.”) It wants both
box office success and critical approval; it wants, in a word,
respectability. The film is unmistakably pitched at a mainstream
audience, at people who generally wouldn’t be caught dead going to a
mere horror film; to the people, in short, who read and believed
in the book. To this end, the screenplay by Sandor Stern is careful not
to stray too far from its source – not always to the benefit of the
film. Almost all of the incidents depicted in The Amityville Horror
are taken directly from the Anson-Lutz account of things, although
curiously their order has been shuffled – perhaps to, uh, heighten
dramatic effect. Similarly, the film maintains the book’s episodic
nature, rather than trying to structure an actual story.
Consequently, things happen, and then they stop happening. People sit
around and talk. Things happen again. People argue. People go to bed.
More things happen. This might be how things were – or not – but as
drama, it is disastrous; and the problem is further exacerbated by the
film’s overgenerous running-time. Trying, presumably, to win itself a
place in the trickiest sub-genre of them all, that of the stately horror
film, The Amityville Horror takes way too much time to get where
it’s going – which, when we get right down to it, is nowhere very much.
This problem of pacing finally climaxes, or anticlimaxes, in a horribly
misjudged sequence in which, after the family finally has fled the
house, George Lutz goes back to rescue the dog. (This, by the way, is
not in the book, and seems to be yet another example of that trope
so beloved of bad screenwriters, the “step-father wins over reluctant
step-children” scene. I found more entertainment value than usual in it
this time around, however, because on DVD clarity inspection, I could
swear that the prop head used to represent Harry the dog at certain
points in this sequence is the same one that starred as Zoltan, Hound
Of Dracula the year before.) At almost two hours, The Amityville
Horror is easily fifteen minutes too long. Its individual incidents
are effective, but spread too thinly. The film’s intervening longuers
both try the patience of the experienced horror watcher, and give
everyone else far too long to think about what is happening – and
possibly to put another interpretation upon the story as a whole….
On the other hand…. When all is said and
done, The Amityville Horror is, at heart, very much an AIP film,
a Sam Arkoff production; all the way through, you can feel the sleaze
trying to ooze its way out from behind the veneer of respectability.
Ultimately, one feels that the film might have been better off if the
sleaze had been allowed to have a little more of its own way. As it is,
we are left with an essentially staid and ponderous film studded with
brief eruptions of crassness. The Amityville Horror opens with a
recreation of the shocking DeFeo murders, the real-life tragedy that
underlies the entire Amityville mythology. Not content with this, it
then proceeds to re-recreate them, as the Lutzes are being shown
around the house by their real estate agent. Still – at least the
murders are treated seriously. This is more than can be said of the
film’s other lapses in tone, such as the out-of-nowhere shot of Kathy
Lutz doing balletic exercises in knickers and an open shirt (leading to
the film’s one genuinely enduring mystery: why on earth just one
white leg-warmer…?); and, most notoriously, the puking priest and the
nauseous nun. It is in the depiction of these characters that the film’s
warring production philosophies are perhaps most evident. In the book,
Kathy Lutz’s aunt is a former nun, who at the time of Kathy’s marriage
is herself married with children. She visits the house as promised,
becomes disturbed by the vibes she picks up from the boys’ playroom and
the sewing-room, and chooses to cut her visit short. In the film she
shows up in full conventual regalia, and has barely set foot in the
house before, in a cold sweat, she turns and runs, pausing only briefly
to edify the audience by throwing up in the road. And this, of
course, comes hard on the heels of our introduction to Father Frank
Delaney, who in one of the film’s most famous sequences is driven from
the house by a swarm of flies, a demonic voice and, yes, a fit of
nausea. He makes it only so far as the Lutzes’ driveway before
succumbing – which does rather beg the obvious question: didn’t any of
the Lutzes notice the mess…?
One of the major deviations of the film
from the book lies in its handling of the Church. Six years earlier,
The Exorcist had demonstrated with a vengeance that Catholic ritual
could translate into major box office. Desiring public endorsement, that
film had been careful to depict its church officials as thoughtful,
courageous and open-minded. The Amityville Horror, in contrast,
chose to ignore the book’s largely sympathetic presentation of Father
Delaney’s superiors, and to depict instead a cold, uncaring church
hierarchy, sneeringly dismissive of the notion of supernatural
phenomena. (The casting of Murray Hamilton in a small but crucial role
is a dead give-away.) This alteration was not, I feel, merely an example
of the “bad priest” card that became so common in horror films during
the increasingly cynical post-Exorcist era, but rather was made
in order to provide a better, or at least bigger, showcase for
the film’s Name Guest Star. As Father Delaney, Rod Steiger is
hilariously awful, simultaneously the worst and one of the most
memorable things about the entire production. His performance,
particularly when Delaney is begging for church help, reaches such a
level of unabashed hysteria that it becomes embarrassing. You really
don’t blame the other priests one bit for not believing a word he says.
(Murray Hamilton’s Father Ryan, entirely against the film-makers’
intentions, wins the audience to his side by demanding bluntly of the
self-righteous Delaney, “Who the hell do you think you are!?”)
And while Delaney suffers the same “punishment” for trying to help the
Lutzes as his print equivalent – permanent severe flu, stigmata-like
blistering of his hands – the film-makers weren’t content to leave it at
that. Instead, they gave Steiger one more opportunity to devour the
scenery, cooking up an insanely melodramatic sequence in which Delaney
is stricken blind while in the midst of saying a mass (“Ohhhhhhhhh,
LORRRRRRRRD!!!!”). The last we see of him, he is both sightless and
(mercifully) silent, sitting by a lake wearing a monk’s robes (!?) and,
presumably unintentionally, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ralph
Richardson in Tales From The Crypt.
One wonders if the reason that Rod Steiger
allowed his performance to go so far over the threshold of pain was
because he felt threatened by the film’s other major star – and
by that I mean neither James Brolin nor Margot Kidder, although they are
solid and believable as George and Kathy. (Kidder’s combination of
schoolgirl outfits and baby-doll hairdos is, however, incredibly
distracting.) Nor am I referring to the three children. Neither K.C.
Martel nor Meeno Peluce has much to do in the film, but Natasha Ryan is
really very good as Amy, leaving us, in her general demeanour and her
interactions with her “imaginary friend”, disturbingly uncertain as to
which side she is actually on. (“Jodie doesn’t like George,” she
announces at one point, ominously.) The film is technically proficient –
although these days it looks almost old-fashioned. Still, those of us
with an anti-CGI bias – or at least, an anti-overused-CGI bias – may
find ourselves thinking more, not less, affectionately of it for that.
The slow, gliding cinematography by Fred Koenekamp does help to suggest
a presence; I particularly like the moments when something seems
to peer down over the railings at the beleaguered Lutzes. Lalo
Schifrin’s score is also effectively creepy, but undercut somewhat by
being so terribly derivative. (With its ever-increasing use of ominous “dah-dahhs”,
it even steals cues from Jaws!)
But none of this ultimately matters.
The Amityville Horror’s human stars and creators may do their best,
but even in combination their contribution pales beside that of the
film’s one great legacy, not just to the horror film, but to pop culture
in general. I refer, of course, to The House. Never mind that the
structure is merely the work of a shrewd and gifted designer, and bears
very little resemblance to its real-life counterpart: the iconic power
of the thing is utterly extraordinary; perhaps even to the extent of
being, in and of itself, sufficient to account for the sheer tenacity of
the Amityville mythos.
As far as The Amityville Horror
works, it does so purely because The House looks like the kind of place
where such things could and would happen. As for what does
happen…. It is pointless saying “This film is scary” or “This film is
not scary”. Reaction to a horror film is too individual a thing. For
myself--- Okay, I admit it. Even after so many years and repeated
viewings, bits of The Amityville Horror still get at me. The
plain fact is, I am peculiarly susceptible to this kind of story; and I
react to it in a most Pavlovian manner, quite independently of the
quality of the film. Perversely, however, the scenes here that tend to
leave me the most unnerved have nothing overtly supernatural about them.
The first is the sudden appearance on the Lutzes’ doorstep of a
dishevelled stranger, who announces that he has come to “welcome them to
the neighbourhood” – and who vanishes the moment Kathy’s back is turned,
never to be seen or referenced again. The other – and I know I’m
not alone in this one – is the scene in which Amy’s babysitter gets
trapped in the darkened closet. Nothing happens to her, not really; and
yet….and yet…. (Never mind the otherworldly implications: heaven help
you through this scene if you are to any degree claustrophobic….)
Most of the so-called demonic
manifestations that we witness are fairly innocuous, not to say
gigglesome. (In the book, the house exudes a green-black slime; the
translation of this to the infamous “bleeding walls” just makes it look
as though they’re being attacked by the Blob.) The repeated flicking
over of the clock to 3.15 a.m. has a certain power about it, however, as
does George’s increasingly threatening relationship with his axe. The
one thing that does work for me--- Well, they say that confession
is good for the soul. As long as I’m embarrassing myself, I might as
well do it thoroughly. The one thing that does work for me is –
those red eyes at the window…. Even to this day I can remember
reading that passage in the book for the first time, all alone in my
room, too scared even to glance towards the window, just in case.
These days--- I’ve seen this film over and over, I’ve seen that
sequence over and over, I know exactly what’s coming – and
yet it gets me every single damn time. (Prefacing the moment with
a chorus of ‘Jesus Loves Me’ – not in the book – was a brilliant
touch.) Otherwise, the one thing that gave me a pleasant little
frisson this time around was the scene in which George, his partner,
and the partner’s mediumistic girlfriend discover the proverbial portal
to hell down in the basement. Says the girlfriend – another moment not
in the book – “It comes and goes through here.” And perhaps this
explains what really never makes sense to me in stories such as these,
even with my extensive powers of suspension of disbelief: if you’ve got
hell’s back door under your house, why is so little actual damage done?
Is it, perhaps, because the people in the house are never the real
targets? Perhaps the house itself is just a conduit, hell’s highway, the
way by which Evil goes out into the world at large; and the
manifestations merely what occurs as it…brushes by you in the dark….
The horror film is all about text and
subtext; the overt nightmares, and the unspoken, unpalatable truths
lurking behind them. I cannot help wondering whether the initial success
of The Amityville Horror, and perhaps even the lingering and
largely unearned affection in which many people seem to hold it today,
are due to factors entirely other than the lure of the supernatural.
Being of an age to have succumbed to the story behind The Amityville
Horror in print, I am also of an age to have adopted Stephen King’s
‘Danse Macabre’ as an early genre bible. This wide-ranging, comfortably
rambling volume contains a brief but discerning analysis of The
Amityville Horror, in which King reports his observation that the
film seemed to appeal to an older than average audience (for a horror
film, that is); and also, most astutely, I think, tags the project as an
economic horror story. The House is not just a place where Evil
dwells; it is what a great many people today would consider an even
greater horror: a Money Pit. Consider the scene (one highlighted by King
as a brief moment of genuine drama in a maelstrom of nonsense) in which
Kathy Lutz’s brother loses the money he is due to pay to the caterer of
his wedding. The anger, the panic, the frustration that swirls around
this prosaic but inexplicable event is something that anyone can relate
to, regardless of his or her thoughts on the supernatural. After all, if
you were to ask people what would upset them more, losing $1500 or
having red goop sliding down their walls, what do you think most of them
would say? Behind The Amityville Horror’s horrific overtones
lurks a story guaranteed to hit a nerve with anyone who ever bought a
fixer-upper that never was entirely fixed; or who felt their
relationship starting to crumble under relentless financial pressure; or
who committed themselves to a mortgage that they couldn’t really
afford – and who afterwards lay awake night after night telling
themselves that everything will be okay, really it will, if only the
kids don’t get sick, or the car break down, or the company get downsized
– or the interest rates go up another quarter of a percent…. (This
reading of the film is one likely to hit home with some force to
Australian viewers in particular, given the national obsession with home
ownership at all cost.)
Wheels within wheels within wheels. The
Amityville Horror is not just a story of the perils of buying a
house in general, but the very specific story of what happened to George
Lutz when he tried it. The film does go some way towards acknowledging
the financial hole in which George found himself, serving up an
exasperated business partner who finally loses his temper over George’s
ongoing neglect of their mutual enterprise. “I told you this
would happen!” he says angrily. “You marry a dame with three kids, and
you're up to your ass in mortgages---” – and George punches him out….
The film treads fairly lightly around this subject, never questioning
the essential rightness of George’s choices, and chalking up everything
that goes wrong to The Big Bad House. The book, in contrast, is quite
staggeringly blunt about just how much trouble George was actually in,
not just in terms of the emptied out bank accounts and the bottomless
mortgages, but the business’s (his business’s) investigation by
the IRS, finally providing a very simple answer to the inevitable
question, “So why didn’t they just leave?” – they couldn’t
afford to.
Who could ever have imagined that, thirty
years after that initial news report, I’d be re-visiting the first film
version of The Amityville Horror preparatory to seeing the
re-make, and all the while debating which of my unfortunate relatives
would have the honour of supplying me with The Amityville Horror
Collection box set once my birthday rolled around? Not George Lutz,
I suspect. We human beings tend to cling the delusion that we are in
charge of the world, but the plain fact is that a great many things,
stories included, have a frightening tendency to take on a life of their
own, spiralling up and away and out of our control almost as soon as
they are born. Read today, with both perspective and hindsight, the
description of the Lutzes’ mounting financial woes in Jay Anson’s book,
which winds in and out of the account of their alleged haunting, looks
very, very much like a pre-fabricated and ready-made apology.
Except, of course, that by the time an apology might have been in order
– the whole thing had, to put it mildly, gotten rather out of hand….
Footnote:
The mind plays funny tricks sometimes. Even though I have watched this
version of The Amityville Horror numerous times, I had somehow
managed to forget between the last viewing and this one that unlike the
book, the film never specifies just what Amy’s invisible friend, Jodie,
actually is – namely, a demonic pig. Alas, this “artistic”
choice deprives viewers of a couple of the book’s most fondly remembered
passages, such as George Lutz being thoroughly stomped by invisible
cloven hooves – and, best of all, the marks of those hooves in the
snow…. (Of course, the film version, although supposedly still set in
December and January, mysteriously features a number of very beautiful
sunlit shots of The House surrounded by a garden in full bloom, so I
guess we’d have lost the tracks in the snow in any case.) It isn’t hard
to figure out the reason for the film-makers’ reticence on this point.
Jodie the pig might be all very well on the printed page, but it is hard
to imagine that a visual representation could inspire anything but
giggles.
Perhaps the final word
on this subject goes to reviewer Anton Bitel of
Movie Gazette who – in a
crack I sincerely wish I’d made myself – points out in his recent review
of the re-make just how appropriate it is that in many people’s minds,
the tale of what supposedly went on in Amityville is irrevocably linked
to the idea of a flying pig….
Want a second opinion of The
Amityville Horror? Visit
Stomp
Tokyo. |
Director: