Dis­cov­er the para­nor­mal chills of this clas­sic haunt­ed house horror

Stu­art Rosenberg’s The Ami­tyville Hor­ror resides in a strange and ambigu­ous cor­ner of US his­to­ry. It was based on Jay Anson’s con­tro­ver­sial 1977 book of the same name, which in turn was drawn from the equal­ly con­tro­ver­sial expe­ri­ences of the Lutz fam­i­ly, who had by then become a cause célèbre in the media. Hav­ing fled their Long Island home only weeks after first mov­ing in, the Lutzes were regard­ed by some as sur­vivors of a para­nor­mal encounter, by oth­ers as vic­tims of their own dys­func­tion and delu­sion, and by yet oth­ers as manip­u­la­tive, atten­tion-hun­gry hoaxers.

It’s impos­si­ble to say where the truth lies, but that is not enough to pre­vent a good sto­ry being exploit­ed both for genre thrills and for a snap­shot of the fault lines in ​’70s Amer­i­ca. Despised by crit­ics but loved by cin­ema­go­ers, the film grossed over $86 mil­lion at the US box office.

Right from the start, the icon­ic appear­ance of the house at 112 Ocean Avenue – actu­al­ly a New Jer­sey home con­vert­ed to resem­ble the orig­i­nal after the film­mak­ers were refused per­mis­sion to shoot on loca­tion – comes to the fore, shown in an exte­ri­or wide shot with its two illu­mi­nat­ed attic win­dows serv­ing as the eyes for what is real­ly the film’s main char­ac­ter. ​“Hous­es don’t have mem­o­ries,” George (James Brolin) assures his new bride Kath­leen (Mar­got Kid­der) as she frets about the mur­ders that took place there a year ear­li­er. Yet Robert Brown Jr’s edit­ing, vio­lent­ly inter­cut­ting present scenes in which the new­ly­weds view the house for the first time with past scenes of bru­tal slay­ings in those same rooms, sug­gests the con­trary: that this house echoes with its own bloody history.

“I can’t get the sto­ry right,” says Sergeant Gion­frid­do (Val Avery), as he tries to get to the bot­tom of what is going on. He was the inves­ti­ga­tor on the scene after the DeFeo mur­ders of 1974, and now he has returned to the house after two of its doors were inex­plic­a­bly blown off their frame from inside the house. While he tries to ratio­nalise what is going on, his old friend Father Delaney (Rod Steiger), a priest but also a trained psy­chother­a­pist, has suf­fered one freak mishap after anoth­er since vis­it­ing the house to bless it.

The Lutzes too notice that some­thing is not right about the house. The tem­per­a­ture keeps drop­ping. Win­dows open and close by them­selves. Flies swarm out of sea­son. A black goo floods the toi­lets. Mon­ey goes miss­ing. The fam­i­ly dog digs obses­sive­ly at a base­ment wall. Strangers appear at the door – and then dis­ap­pear. A cross on the wall inverts. Amy (Natasha Ryan), Kathy’s young daugh­ter by a pre­vi­ous hus­band, acquires a new imag­i­nary friend, Jody, whose pres­ence Kathy her­self begins to sense. And as ill­ness (or worse) takes over, George, so lov­ing at the start, becomes dis­tract­ed, mean-tem­pered and even violent.

While San­dor Stern’s script cer­tain­ly nev­er shies away from the super­nat­ur­al, it comes deliri­ous­ly overde­ter­mined with addi­tion­al frames of inter­pre­ta­tion to sup­port its nar­ra­tive struc­ture. Delaney appears to be suf­fer­ing a demon­ic attack insti­gat­ed by the house, but it might just be a broad­er cri­sis of faith brought on by the col­lapse of reli­gion in a sec­u­lar age (the one time we see him preach­ing, it is to a con­spic­u­ous­ly emp­ty church), or even a men­tal break­down (“I believe we cre­ate our own demons in our minds,” he is told by a younger, more scep­ti­cal colleague).

Mean­while, George’s rugged beardy look places him some­where between the mas­cu­line ide­al of the 1970s and the unhinged appear­ance of Charles Man­son (in a film where much is made of George’s close facial resem­blance to a past psy­cho killer). It is of course not impos­si­ble that George becomes pos­sessed by what­ev­er bad juju there is in a house said to have been both the site of a Shin­necock trib­al ​‘expo­sure camp’ and of a Salem refugee’s Satan­ic rituals.

But it is also pos­si­ble – indeed it is made explic­it – that we are watch­ing a man being torn apart by finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties, impo­tence and the emas­cu­lat­ing pres­sures of hav­ing to liv­ing with three chil­dren who are not his own. We cer­tain­ly see the para­nor­mal at work in the film, but its man­i­fes­ta­tion at one point as a lit­er­al fly­ing pig hints at its prover­bial implau­si­bil­i­ty as an expla­na­tion, cast­ing promi­nence instead on inter­pre­ta­tions of a more psy­cho­log­i­cal or soci­o­log­i­cal bent.

The Ami­tyville Hor­ror is also trapped between two pieces of cin­e­mat­ic hor­ror his­to­ry. It bears the obvi­ous imprint of William Friedkin’s The Exor­cist from 1973, as lit­tle Amy falls under the malign influ­ence of a friend­ly seem­ing spir­it that seeks the family’s ruin, and the Catholic church strug­gles to deter­mine its own posi­tion in the affair. Yet with Amy claim­ing that her play­mate Jody ​“wants me to live here for­ev­er and ever”, and with George’s dete­ri­o­ra­tion into a dead-eyed bad dad (even at one point tak­ing an axe to the bath­room door where his fam­i­ly is hid­ing), it is clear that the film had its own influ­ence on Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, released the fol­low­ing year.

In truth, The Ami­tyville Hor­ror is not as good as either Friedkin’s or Kubrick’s film. Its pac­ing is off, there are too many go-nowhere sub­plots, and it seems just to come to a clunk­ing halt at the end with lit­tle real res­o­lu­tion. At the same time, the film’s lack of com­mit­ment to any sin­gle read­ing of its nar­ra­tive archi­tec­ture is pre­cise­ly, in the final analy­sis, what makes it so uncanny.

The Ami­tyville Hor­ror is released by Sec­ond Sight on Blu-ray in a Lim­it­ed Edi­tion Steel­book on 26 June.