THE AMITYVILLE HORROR — America’s most haunted home

The most famous haunted house in America is a large Dutch Colonial family home that became a bestseller, super-successful horror movie and a franchise that has spawned over 60 movies (and counting). And it’s all based…on a con. Together with horror critic Jenn Addams, FANGORIA editor-in-chief Phil Nobile Jr. and Bloody Disgusting critic Joe Lipsett, who is possibly the only person in the world to have watched all the Amityville films, guest host Anna tracks how one haunted house movie became a modern folk story.

Season 6, titled Haunted Homes, explores how haunted house movies have mirrored our relationship with our homes. Each episode visits a horror movie that changed the way we imagine a haunted house, from the crumbling Gothic mansions to white picket fences, what it says about the people who live in the houses and what scares them the most.  

Guest written and hosted by Anna Bogutskaya. Find her book on horror films and feelings, FEEDING THE MONSTER, online and in all good bookshops. You can also listen to her horror film history podcast The Final Girls and subscribe to her movie newsletter Admit One.

To watch some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

Read all of Joe’s Amityville IP reviews HERE.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes Hellmouths, slime, rising mortgage rates, adult language, and also spoilers. But it doesn't include me, your regular host Rico Gagliano. For the next few episodes leading up to Halloween, I'm handing over my hosting reins to a horror expert <i>par excellence</i> you're in good, creepy hands with her. Enjoy. What if I asked you what the most prolific horror franchise is? The one with the most movies attached to it? You might guess <i>Halloween</i>, which keeps reviving Michael Myers. Maybe <i>Saw</i> which has been putting out roughly a film a year since 2004. Or <i>Dracula</i>, the one that's been getting remade consistently since 1931. Good calls, all of them. But actually, it's a haunted house flick from the late 70s, which has 60 films and counting. I don't think most people actually know how many titles there are. Every single time I talk to folks about this, their immediate reaction is one of disbelief and like, "Oh, why are you putting yourself through this?" That's Joe Lipsett, horror critic and co-host of the podcast Horror Queers, and the only person in the world who's taken it upon himself to watch and review every single film in The Amityville Horror canon. There's something a little bit masochistic about it, but it also feels like the Mount Everest of horror franchises, right? This is a hill I could quite literally die on. I've been working on this project for nearly two years, bi-weekly columns, for the most part, and I'm still more than ten films away. And every time I check, there's a new one in production. Because there's so many of them, the franchise has somewhat diluted the value of the original 1979 film that terrified America, blending true crime with the supernatural, and that transformed a nice three-storey Dutch colonial house in a nice neighbourhood, in a nice town in Long Island, into the most notorious haunted house in America.<i>It's the kind of house they don't build anymore.</i><i>A relic of a time when the world wasn't in such a hurry.</i><i>When there was still time for a little charm and elegance.</i> Whether I want to admit it or not, given its relative lack of prestige compared to other 1970s horror classics,<i>The Amityville Horror</i> has influence on the haunted house genre has been enormous. As Jenn Adams, film critic at Bloody Disgusting, puts it, it's the grandfather of the genre. There are so many things introduced in this film that will continue to filter through modern horror and modern pop culture.<i>The Amityville Horror</i> set the template for <i>The Conjuring</i>,<i>Insidious</i>, and in a way, even <i>Get Out</i>.<i>In</i> The Amityville Horror <i>the ghost told them to get out of the house.</i> That's Eddie Murphy in his 1983 stand-up special <i>Delirious</i>.<i>Why people stayed in there, now that's a hint and a half for your ass.</i><i>A ghost say "Get the fuck out." I would just tip the fuck out the door.</i> Most of all, <i>The Amityville Horror</i> was the start of a true modern folk story that in a way, contains in itself the promise and the lies of the American Dream itself. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI is the streaming service that champions great cinema, and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. I'm Anna Bogutskaya and I'll be your host for this season. I'm a film critic, host of The Final Girls podcast and the author of the new book

<i>Feeding the Monster: 4:01

A Deep Dive Into Why We Love Watching Horror Films</i>. Which I've made a career out of doing. And it's also why the good folks at MUBI asked me to guest host this season. We're calling it 'Haunted Homes' and for the next five episodes leading up to Halloween, I'm diving into the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made. Your regular host, Rico Gagliano, will be back with a new season in November. But for now, let's take a look at how one family's bad real estate investment created a horror phenomenon that melded true crime and fiction, and will apparently continue spawning movies forever. In fact, two days after we first recorded this episode... a new one was announced. One thing that will for sure ruin the resale value of a home is a multiple murder.<i>Next is the master bedroom.</i> The story of The Amityville Horror begins with a true crime case, the DeFeo murders. I won't go into too many grisly details because this isn't a true crime podcast after all. Ronnie DeFeo, who was the oldest child, kills his parents and his four siblings, his two younger brothers and two younger sisters. In just kind of a murderous rage, he goes through and he shoots them all in their beds, and he was pretty quickly apprehended. Shortly after this. We're talking less than a year. The Lutz family, that's dad, George, mom, Kathy and her three children buy this property for $80,000.<i>There's nothing like it on the market. Not at this price.</i> By the way, today it's worth $1.9 million. Which is just another way the story becomes more horrific after years. The Lutzes moving to this dream home, which they can just about afford, and they even take the furniture that was left behind. So their children are sleeping in the beds that the DeFeo children had died in. There really wasn't a whole lot of difference between the home that this family was murdered in and the home that the Lutzes moved into, but they buy it for a song. It's so cheap. It's like, and it's a really nice house. It's got a pool, it's three storeys, it's on the waterfront. It's got a boathouse. Within 28 days, they flee the house. Leaving all of their belongings behind.<i>Find the well.</i><i>It's the passage to hell!</i><i>Cover it!</i> That is just the start of their story. In 1977, journalist Jay Anson publishes a book about their experience called <i>The Amityville Horror</i>, and it becomes a sensation. The Lutzes go on international tours like they are world famous. They're using their real names and they have changed the names of the children in the film. They've changed the first names, but they are still using the last names. Within two years the book is a movie starring James Brolin as George, and Margot Kidder as Kathy. It was a fairly recent true crime story that captured the imagination of a lot of people. That's Phil Nobile Jr. Editor-in-Chief of Fangoria magazine. As far as the popular culture consciousness was concerned, what happened in that movie is what happened.<i>The Amityville Horror</i> opens on the image of a house that if you're in the right frame of mind, looks like it's leering at you. It's got these cat like windows and it's all illuminated in red. It's giving evil. We know this, but in the film it's the embodiment of the American Dream. The Lutzes are lifelong renters. They have never owned a house.<i>I love it, but honey...$80,000?</i><i>It might as well be $800,000.</i> At this point in time, and the economy,$80,000 for a three storey family home is too good a bargain to pass up. Murders and all. This is their big chance at owning a piece of the home ownership dream. Phil Nobile Jr says modern audiences can relate. I definitely can. There are Millennials and Zoomers who are becoming aware that they're not going to be able to afford to buy a house, and one of the ways that manifested in the horror crowd was,"Well, now I understand the Lutzes, now I understand...""I get why they didn't leave that house." You know, it became relatable because of our current housing crisis. Listen, as a Millennial in another housing crisis in London, I would take a ghost if it meant that I could have that house. Yeah, like what kinda ghost are we talking-- Like, you know, I think we sort of would have, like, we would bargain with ourselves about what our ghost threshold might be as it relates to the asking price of the house. This family has lucked into this opportunity to get what they've always wanted and what they've been told they're supposed to want. You know, I live in Nashville. I have grown up with this idea of like when you are an adult, you get married, you buy a house, you have 2.5 children. That is the American dream. That is how we define success. And so I think it introduces that element into the haunted house story. This is not an ancestral castle that you can flee. This is something they have put all of their money into. And they know from the start what had transpired in the house. It introduces this really interesting idea of what do you do? Where are you going to go if you flee? You know, it takes the downfall of one family for another family to rise. And what happens when maybe a lower class family tries to move into a neighbourhood that they don't quite belong in, but also just the relatability of taking on more than you can really afford. But when you're going through an economic recession, a deal is a deal, right?<i>A guy kills his whole family. Doesn't that bother you?</i><i>Sure, but... Houses don't have memories.</i> Except, they do. Very soon, weird stuff starts happening. The Lutz's youngest daughter starts talking to an invisible girl called Jody.<i>Why didn't you unlock the door? You heard Jackie knocking.</i> Jody wouldn't let me. George the dad starts getting way into his axe.<i>Don't ever do that.</i><i>Not to a man with an ax in his hand.</i> There's green slime coming down the walls. A priest comes to bless the house and gets surrounded by flies and advised in the film's most iconic scene to scram by demonic voice.<i>Get out!</i> And although it was not on the floor plan, there was a hole in the basement full of black bog water that is the entrance to literal hell, which tries to drag George Lutz into it. It always kind of cracks me up too,'cause there's absolutely no reason for this pit of, I guess, goo or blood to exist.- Demon goo.- Demon goo! Exactly. It doesn't connect to anything. It's just like, well, there's a red room that clearly means Satan and that means red goo.<i>There's an explanation for all of it.</i><i>We're not in the habit of blaming Satan for every phenomenon.</i> It's that addition of demonic elements that places <i>The Amityville Horror</i> at the centre of the 1970s horror Satan-ssance. The 70s landscape of horror was a shifting one. It was one that was trying to sort of figure out its place in pop culture, because the 60s did a lot to kind of put the nail in the coffin, so to speak, on this sort of haunted, spooky gothic. The Universal Monsters and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. What happened from there is that the movies tended to get a lot more realistic. So you had <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, and you had some more grisly kind of films happening in the 70s as a result of this new threshold that I think the public had for for violence and for terror and mayhem, from reality. And in that new landscape of mayhem, there was also a return to the supernatural. Horror was not just replicating the horrors of what had been seen daily on the news. A new big bad was also coming to the forefront. Satan himself. Although we associate the Satanic panic with the 80s, it was the 1970s horror films that started planting the seeds. Satanism was kind of something people were curious about and curious to explore in a way that probably cinema hadn't seen before that. Released in 1979,<i>The Amityville Horror</i> comes on the heels of the holy trinity of horror...<i>Rosemary's Baby</i>, and <i>The Exorcist</i>, and <i>The Omen</i>, which is this idea of the devil is taking over. The devil is going to come into our lives in our most intimate places. We're talking about like in <i>The Exorcist</i>, it's a mother and child in their home. In <i>The Omen</i>, it is a child that you've adopted. And then in <i>Rosemary's Baby</i>, it's literally inside your own body. Amityville became a classic by association. It's been swept up in the glory of films like <i>The Exorcist</i> or <i>The Shining</i>. It's like, well, if you can't watch those or you've watched those too many times, maybe give <i>The Amityville Horror</i> a try. The supernatural and the Satanic became a new, reliable source of on-screen evil, and one that could be vanquished, but only by the Catholic Church. There's a whole subplot in the film about a priest, Father Delaney, played by a wonderfully over-the-top Rod Steiger, who tries to convince his higher ups that they are the only ones who can save the Lutzes from the demon goo.<i>I am not some pink cheeked seminarian who doesn't know the difference</i><i>between the supernatural and a bad clam.</i><i>I am a trained psychotherapist.</i><i>I went into that house and what I saw there was real.</i><i>What I felt there was real and what I heard there was real!</i><i>Now, gentlemen, I have a family in my parish that's at great risk,</i><i>and they are facing real danger.</i> The role these priests are playing is what really ties it to 70s horror. And maybe one of the reasons it doesn't hold up so well now, because we're not so concerned with that. Also, we're not looking at priests like heroic figures the way we were in the 70s. Here the priests are the authority, the establishment, our protectors, but they're also vulnerable. If even they are susceptible to this evil. If it can get Father Delaney even when he's not in the house anymore, then this is a really powerful being, and it can get me anywhere. In a way, <i>The Amityville Horror</i> really puts its authority figures through the wringer. Father Delaney's persecuted by the forces of the house, but the most affected member of the family is George Lutz, the patriarch.<i>Oh, no.</i><i>Oh, no!</i><i>I'm coming apart!</i><i>Oh, mother of God, I'm coming apart!</i> Neither of them win. The house wins at the end. The house is bad and that's it. And that's all we need to know. And it doesn't matter what we do. This house is going to continue to be bad. And so allowing them to escape the house, but not really exact any change, allows this house to continue being evil, no matter who moves into it. While he's trying very hard to keep it together and protect the family, George starts losing it and he becomes the threat. I can't really relate to a house besieged with flies or a, you know, blood running down the walls, but a dad who's sort of losing it, and a parent who is supposed to be your safe space, becoming an unknowable threat that you can't connect with. The idea that you're protector becomes your predator is certainly the purest horror there is. At the end of the film, George has failed. He has to be pulled out of the demon bog, and it's Kathy who drives everyone away to safety. The film was a runaway success. It grossed over $86 million on a budget of only $4.6 million. Huge numbers for an independent horror film. If you look at the time span between the actual murders happening in that house to the book being written to the movie coming out, it feels like a much longer period of time than you'd think. But it's only a few years. So when you went to see<i>The Amityville Horror</i> in 1979, it was a fairly recent true crime story, and I think that captured the imagination of a lot of people. It meant that people could come out of the cinema and buy the book. They could hear from the actual paranormal investigators who worked on the case. They could see the Lutzes on talk shows. They could watch James Brolin and Margot Kidder give interviews too. There was a way to kind of gorge yourself on that story that you couldn't with other horror movies.<i>The Amityville Horror</i> became larger than just one horror movie. It became modern folklore. I had a gang of older brothers who would go see these movies and then scare me with the stories of these movies, like <i>Halloween</i> was a bedtime story before it was a movie to me. And, <i>Amityville Horror</i> was definitely one of those. People wanted to believe it was true. After all, there was a book and a movie and real people involved. It was a shame then that it was all a scam. There were no demon voices. There was no satanic goo. What allegedly happened was this: the Lutzes did buy the house where the DeFeo murders had happened. They did leave 28 days later after some creepy but totally Satan free experiences. But then they got contacted by the DeFeo murderer's defence attorney. He had an idea the Lutzes should write a book saying that they'd experienced a violent haunting in the house. Then he'd used that to defend his client. The Lutzes saw dollar signs and sold the rights to their amped-up story to journalist Jay Hanson for about a hundred grand. When his book and then the movie and then its first few sequels started earning gazillions, George Lutz felt short changed. Soon everyone involved was suing each other. Lutz actually took Dino De Laurentiis, the producer of the original movie, all the way to court. He argued, you can't keep making these movies based on our experience, and that what ends up happening is he loses because the judge says, well, people don't associate Amityville with the Lutzes. They associate it with the real life murders of the DeFeos as well as the supernatural properties. The case got thrown out, and that opened the floodgates for basically anyone to make Amityville movies. You can make one too listeners, as long as the films don't reference the Lutz family or their alleged real life experiences, you can use the image of the house and even the town's name. So if you go into the Lutz territory, you're going to get sued. If you just say Amityville and the house or anything supernatural, or the DeFeo murders, then you are clean and gold, and all of a sudden now we've got the supernatural vibrator movie. More on what that means and how we got from two family tragedies to the <i>Amityville Karen</i> after the break. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them. We release them in theatres. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs and brilliant first timers. We've always got something new for you to discover, and regular MUBI Podcast host Rico Gagliano is here to recommend some of those brilliant gems that populate the MUBI-verse. Yes, it's always nice to pop into the middle of your episodes. Thanks for having me. It's like I'm letting you come into your own show, isn't it? You know, I mean, it's like if I was renting you an Airbnb, I wouldn't just presume I could pop in willy nilly. But let me tell you. So the thing that I want to point you to this week is a group of films that we are calling 'Featured on the MUBI Podcast'. You can find this at MUBI.com and it's pretty self-explanatory. It's movies that we've featured previously on the MUBI Podcast, so <i>Perfect Days</i> I did an interview with Wim Wenders, the director of that amazing film.<i>Priscilla</i>, did a great interview with Sofia Coppola about that amazing film. I just realised that we have like, some of the best movies of the last year are on MUBI.com, and I'm pretty proud of it. Do you know what? Actually the film that I absolutely was obsessed with when it came out and saw in its original screening at the Cannes Film Festival, was <i>Aftersun</i>, the debut feature by Charlotte Wells. I will always cherish the memory of a whole roster, about 200 film critics in France. Coming out of the screening, everyone weeping and calling their father almost at the same time. Oh, <i>Aftersun</i> melted the hearts of the most hardened critics. That movie, too, is part of the collection'Featured on the MUBI Podcast' in many countries. To find out which titles are playing where you live, you can check the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to the basement hellmouth. What are the main ingredients of an Amityville Horror movie? Let's make this into a list.

One: 22:49

a haunted house. Maybe the original one in Long Island. Or just any house.

Two: 22:55

a cursed object of some kind.

Three: 22:58

the word Amityville somewhere in the title. And four... I found all of the best Amityville films have this element. Which, Anna, you're going to love this.- Hmm?- Incest. The films that have incest in them are often the weirdest, wackiest, most gonzo enterprises. Wait, how has it taken us almost 40 minutes to get to incest? That debuts in the sequel, so <i>Amityville 2: The Possession</i>, which, of course is a sequel, but it's actually depicting the original murders of the DeFeo family, and it's very much brother and sister are getting down. The original Amityville film was one of the most successful independent films ever made. But no one could have predicted that its profitability would actually transform it into one of the most amorphous, sometimes pervy and often derided horror "franchises". Horror fans don't even like calling it a "franchise". People really want to disavow any of these independent, sort of straight to streaming, VOD releases. So when you hear me call it a "franchise" assume that I'm doing quotation marks every time I say it. There is the canon, which lasts until about the 90s, and a remake from 2005 starring Ryan Reynolds as George Lutz.<i>Well, houses don't kill people.</i> This remake has become known in the horror community as a story about Ryan Reynolds abs. And I'm not really kidding. Like, that is what this movie is known for. Oh my goodness. It's like a 12 pack and he's just constantly walking around in the rain shirtles, ooooh. The Amityville films sort of fizzled out after this. But despite Amityville essentially becoming haunted house public domain IP after George Lutz lost his case against the producers of the original film, the floodgates didn't open until the late 2010s. The vast majority of these Amityville films come after a particular point, when Frank Khalfoun's<i>Amityville: The Awakening</i> gets announced in 2011, and ultimately it wasn't shot until 2014. It wasn't released until 2017, but this was the title that sort of reactivated the franchise because we get all of the knockoffs where it's like,"Amityville is popular again, we should make a direct to video knockoff that we can use to profit" like the couple of years preceding the pandemic is when all of a sudden, we just get this influx of what appear to be about 5 to $10,000 movies that are just like Amityville: Whatever. There's a lot of them. Too many for one episode, but it is a fun Wikipedia deep dive.

Some favourites: 25:54

favourites in quotation marks, of course. There's the <i>Amityville Vibrator</i> from 2020... A softcore porn like there's full frontal nudity, there's simulated sex acts. It's quite raunchy, but it also has a kind of meta awareness where it is actually poking fun at previous Amityville films in a very knowing way.

There's also <i>Amityville: 26:19

Karen</i><i>God! Good help is so hard to find.</i><i>I might have to just fire you right now.</i> Which is riffing on, you know, the whole idea of a Karen who lives in the suburbs. And <i>Amityville Ghost Toilet</i> where someone dies strangled by a possessed roll of toilet paper. In lieu of a clip let's just take a moment here to digest that image. There's <i>Amityville in Space</i> and<i>Amityville Werewolf</i>, <i>Amityville Vampire</i><i>Amityville Cult</i>, you get the point. We're not on Long Island anymore. We're not even on planet Earth. And most of these films get somewhere between a half star and 1.5 stars out of five for me. So they are unabashedly, often not good movies. The increasing ridiculousness of these films has become a running joke in the horror film community. My magazine, Fangoria, does an annual awards show called The Chainsaw Awards, and in 2023, we installed a new category called 'Best Amityville'. Because there were 40 something Amityville movies to choose from just that year alone. The contenders were wide and varied. Anybody with a dollar and a dream can make an Amityville movie.<i>We now introduce a brand new Chainsaw Award in a category that has had</i><i>undeniable impact on the genre, inspired by a franchise</i><i>as old as Fangoria itself.</i><i>A rallying cry against corporatism and a firm statement</i><i>on the iron fist of IP driven media.</i><i>The groundbreaking first ever nominees of the prestigious Chainsaw Award</i><i>for Best Amityville are...</i><i>Amityville Christmas Vacation</i>, won, by the way. In 2024 if you see a movie with Amityville in the title, you know you're in the hands of some kind of huckster who is trying to get over. And I don't say that as a negative. Horror, historically, is rife with hucksters who are looking for a gimmick to get their movie out and get asses in seats, right? In the 1930s, there was producer Carl Laemmle, who'd keep nurses on standby in movie theatres when he screened <i>Dracula</i> and <i>Frankenstein</i> in case people passed out from fear. And in the 1950s, gimmick king William Castle installed buzzers in some seats of showings of <i>The Tingler</i> to incentivise people screaming in fright. As Joe Lipsett says, in a way, the Amityville franchise exists in this weird IP vacuum where anything is possible. I wanted to see what people do with a kind of intellectual property free for all. Like you can make an Amityville film. What will you choose to do with it? And in some ways, when we introduce something like a vampire into the mix or when we take the franchise into space, there's something kind of fun about that, because everybody gets to put their own unique take on it. Every time I see an Amityville movie, I think that the spirit of the horror huckster is alive. Making the Amityville films in their own way, a triumph for independent film. But even though the Amityville ghosts were a sham, there were real people involved. And while some of them benefited hugely, like the author of the book and the movie producers and the real estate market, others didn't. George Lutz, in particular, was so concerned with continuing to profit off of this and continuing to take ownership of this story. But the rest of the Lutz family, particularly the children, not so much. I think the people who did not benefit from this are the children. And, you know, Christopher Lutz has talked extensively like he changed his name back to his mother's name because he did not want to be associated with this anymore. And another party that definitely didn't love to be associated with a haunted house was the town of Amityville itself. The success of the movie brought murder tourists to their town, attracted by both the grisly real life DeFeo murders and the film. It's not something that they, understandably, wanted in their city brochure. But now, over 60 movies in, it's impossible to disassociate the little Long Island town and this cat eyed house from the ghosts and the bleeding walls. Now and forevermore. Amityville means horror. It set a template for horror, and now we are continuing to evaluate that. The Amityville horror capitalised on a real tragedy and did what Hollywood does best. It made a story out of it. The housing market may be as bad now as it was in the 70s, but at least we don't have to deal with Satan goo.<i>Okay, let's go home.</i> And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to hear more stories about houses and how they haunt us at the movies. Next week we explore <i>House</i>, the cult Japanese psychedelic horror. I remember the reaction, especially from the kids. Oh, finally. This is a movie for us. Follow us so you don't fall into the digital basement hellmouth. Until then, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me, Anna Bogutskaya. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Christian Coons is our editor. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, even if it's from the basement satanic bog. And if you've got questions, comments, or just want to tell me about what's lurking in your basement, I would love to hear it. Seriously. Email us at podcast@mubi.com This show is executive produced by Rico Gagliano, John Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca. And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned on this very podcast subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening. Stay out of the basement.