The Amityville Horror (1979)
Directed by Stuart Rosenberg
George Lutz, his wife Kathy, and their three children have just moved into a beautiful, and improbably cheap, Victorian mansion nestled in the sleepy coastal town of Amityville, Long Island. However, their dream home is concealing a horrific past and soon each member of the Lutz family is plagued with increasingly strange and violent visions and impulses.
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What critics compared The Amityville Horror to
That The Amityville Horror is generally considered a classic horror flick is somewhat baffling, though it certainly looks a whole lot better when compared to its sequels.
They play a couple named George and Kathy Lutz, whose experiences inspired a bestselling book named, of course, "The Amityville Horror," and who moved out of their house and left their furniture behind and moved to San Diego, fulfilling all of our dreams.
Like The Exorcist and The Omen, the real baddie of The Amityville Horror is Satan, who drove a boy to kill his parents and four siblings in cold blood, and whose wicked spirit, one year later, possesses new occupant George Lutz (James Brolin) and convinces him to do away with his new wife Kathy (Margot Kidder) and her three annoying kids.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, The Amityville Horror is pure grade B Wisconsin cheese, and for the 17-24 demographic, it works like a charm.
As the tale unfolds, a debt to not only '80s horror films, but also Rosemary's Baby, The Amityville Horror , and Hammer's gothic '70s classics also emerges: food (specifically, pizza) is a source of fetid disgust; murderous mysteries are discovered in the remote mansion's nooks and crannies; and Satanism is revealed as a malevolent force with which Samantha must ultimately reckon.
College student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), all feathered hair and mom jeans, might remind you of Margot Kidder in The Amityville Horror — which seems about right, given this film’s ’80s-set creepy-house tableau.
The Warrens would become more famous later, when they busted ghosts in a house in Amityville, the story that led to The Amityville Horror, a classic movie from 1979.
From The Old Dark House (1932) to The Haunting (1963) to The Amityville Horror (1979) to Poltergeist (1982) to recent hits like Sinister, Paranormal Activity, and Insidious — to say nothing of their sequels — audiences never seem to tire of things that go bump in the night, especially when it happens in a location that seems familiar, safe, and comfortable.
Ever since The Amityville Horror made an unexpected splash at the box office in 1979, very few movies about demonic houses have strayed far from the template.
Los Warren se han hecho incluso más conocidos gracias al caso de Amityville (véase el clásico de 1979, “The Amityville Horror”), pero muchos todavía dudan de su veracidad.
A postmodern American Gothic bouillabaisse, The Conjuring 2 opens with what seems to be a sequel to The Amityville Horror, with the Warrens investigating the house made famous by a half-dozen films, including Stuart Rosenberg's 1979 classic.
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Whannell’s script ties together a number of tropes that will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Exorcist (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Amityville Horror (1979), and Poltergeist (1982), but let’s be honest: We don’t go to horror movies for originality.
There’s something faintly disappointing about the way that Flanagan turns the indefinable terrors of the Overlook into a mashup of 13 Ghosts (1960), The Amityville Horror (1979) and American Horror Story: Murder House (2011).
Goo pours down walls, as in “The Amityville Horror.”
Encased in an almost claustrophobic 1.33:1 Academy aspect ratio, Ramsay’s film begins much like a horror film, not dissimilar from The Amityville Horror.