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It’s Halloween season and so to honor the holiday, I thought it would be fitting to write about a horror movie. But which one? I’ve recently acquired an interest in the nostalgia catnip that is 1980s slashers. I could choose one of the landmarks or an overlooked curiosity of that genre. Or I could indulge the classic movie fan and go with one of the lesser-known gems from the early 1930s horror boom which turned Dracula and Frankenstein into the instantly recognizable faces they are today.
However, I don’t like writing about good movies. I like writing about movies that are interesting, and I don’t mean that in a “this film really makes you think” sort of way. Sometimes a movie is interesting because of what it says about the time and place in which it was made (what I call a time capsule movie). Sometimes it is interesting that a movie ever got made in the first place. Sometimes it is interesting that a movie was popular despite not being very good. That last one often says as much about the state of society at the time as it does about the movie, if not more so. The Amityville Horror is interesting for this reason.
The Amityville Horror is a movie that very few people watch anymore and justifiably so. It is a very bad movie, it is not very scary at all, and it’s not that it sucks in hindsight. It has always sucked. It was savaged by critics even at the time.
But good God, was it popular upon release. Think of some of the most iconic horror movies of the era: Halloween (1978), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Alien (1979), Friday the 13th (1980), The Shining (1980), or A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The Amityville Horror made more money on initial release than any of those movies. The Amityville Horror was the second highest grossing movie of 1979 behind only the multiple Oscars winner Kramer vs. Kramer. The movies The Amityville Horror outperformed at the box office that year include all-time classics such as Apocalypse Now, Rocky 2, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Muppets Movie, and Moonraker; films that are still widely enjoyed and revered today.
So what did The Amityville Horror have that those other movies didn’t? How could it leave such cinematic legends in the box office dust despite being a bad movie? Was it the star power? Well, the film does feature Margot Kidder hot off the success of Superman (the #2 movie of 1978), as well as familiar TV star (as he was best known of at the time) James Brolin, which I’m sure helped but doesn’t explain the success. And sure, the fact that it was based on an enormously popular book published the previous year which no doubt greatly aided in generating pre-release hype. But this does not explain why the film’s momentum survived the first wave of bad reviews.
The secret of The Amityville Horror’s success was that it was supposedly based on a stranger-than-fiction true story about a real haunted house in Long Island, New York. The reason why hardly anyone watches The Amityville Horror anymore is because hardly anyone now believes that story is true.
Or rather, I should say that no one believes the second part of the story, because when you are talking about the mythos around the house located at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, you are talking about two things. First, there is the grisly 1974 murders that occurred at that residence, and then there are the claims by the home’s next owner that paranormal activity abounds within its walls. Let us take these in turn.
Even without the haunted house brouhaha that followed, the 1974 Amityville murders would likely still be remembered, albeit to a lesser extent, by true crime aficionados for it’s gruesomeness and numerous peculiarities. On November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered his parents and four siblings with a high-powered rifle for what appeared to be no reason whatsoever. Beyond that, there are other oddities about the murder. All six murder victims were reported to have been lying face down when fatal bullet stuck, none on their back or their side. There are questions as to how DeFeo could have killed all six without any of them seeming to have woken up. There are conspiracy theories about whether DeFeo had an accomplice or whether he did it at all. The Amityville murder is arguably more interesting than the paranormal stories that followed.
What follows are the beginnings of an urban legend, and urban legends are often influenced by pop culture. People who say they were abducted by aliens will claim they flew spaceships that sound a lot like the spaceships in a popular sci-fi movie and their description of the aliens will sound a lot like the aliens in a certain episode of Star Trek. As such, in understanding the story that follows, it is helpful to that the movie The Exorcist was released in 1973 and was a monumental success.
So when Ronald DeFeo Jr. claimed that the reason he killed his family was because he heard voices in his head, possession by the devil was the first thing that came to a lot of people’s minds. It also came to light that six months prior to murderers, DeFeo Sr., (no doubt inspired by the movie) had a priest come and perform an exorcism on the house. This added fuel to public speculation that there was something demonic going on in that house.
The following year, George and Kathleen Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue with Kathleen’s three kids from a previous marriage. After 28 days, they moved out due to what they claimed was constant harassment by dark supernatural forces alive in the house. They reported hearing disembodied voices, doors opening and closing on their own, invisible hands pushing them, and most dramatically, black ooze coming out of the walls. In addition to the Lutz family, a local priest reported being chased out by spirits and a friend of the family claimed to have been overcome with an irrational yet overwhelming fear when in the presence of the house. A slew of psychics and parapsychologists were brought into the house and they confirmed that in their totally-not-quack opinion there was indeed something rotten in Amityville and one of them even claimed to have caught a picture of the ill-fated John DeFeo’s ghost.
The Lutz story was turned into the book The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson, which became a cultural phenomenon selling 10 million copies. I’ll admit that I haven’t read the book, but from my research even skeptics concede that it is well written and legitimately scary. The movie rights were picked up by American International Pictures, an independent studio hitherto best known for putting out exploitation films, and yet here it was with the rights to the most talked about book in the country.
The Amityville hauntings became more than just a big news story or urban legend but almost a cause célèbre among Christians. In a world sliding into atheism, new age gobbledygook, and soulless capitalist materialism, here comes this story that seemed to affirm the existence of the supernatural and did so in a Christian-compliant way. Several people would have had to have had to be “in on it” for it to be a hoax. In addition to the Lutz family, their friend backed up their story and they had a priest. Are you going to call a priest a liar?
In the 1970s when traditional social norms were falling apart and new age religions were increasing in popularity, the Amityville case about a house being possessed by Satan was, ironically, a huge moral boost for Christians. When you factor in the extent to which Christians across the country were emotionally invested in the story, you can see why a cinematic adaptation of the story would perform beyond the wildest expectations. It was also PG, so churches brought bus-loads of people to see this movie that they hoped would reignite the fear of God in kids.
Alas, almost immediate after the movie’s release, cracks in the story began to show. The Lutz family used for their contract negotiations a guy named William Weber, who was also the defense attorney for Ronald DeFeo Jr. Weber and the Lutz clan ended up suing each other. In the ensuing lawsuit, Weber claimed that the entire haunted house story was a hoax invented as a money making scheme. The Lutz family, on the other hand, stuck to their story until their deaths in the 2000s.
So far, it’s just a matter of “he said, she said”. Weber had a motive for lying: he was trying to get more money and claiming to be an author of the story was one way to do it. What really drove a nail in the coffin of the Amityville mythos is that the house on Ocean Avenue has changed hands numerous times and none of the subsequent owners have reported anything unusual.
That is the tragedy. We can never know what it is like to have watched The Amityville Horror in 1979. Anyone watching it today does so with the knowledge that they are watching a story that is not true. Most of the scary events in The Amityville Horror are thing that a rational mind could easily put down to coincidence. Swarms of flies appearing suddenly might be odd sure but is hardly beyond the laws of physics. There is one scene where an open window falls on a kid’s hand, crushing it, and the father has great difficulty lifting the window again. The father’s personality starts to change and he becomes more irritable while one of the daughters gains a mysterious imaginary friend whom the film implies is really a spirit that only she can see.
This is a reminder superstition is on a spectrum. Some Christians might not be superstitious in the black cats and broken mirrors sense, but might suspect that a series of unlikely misfortunes in quick succession might be the result of having skipped Mass last Sunday. Maybe finding five dollars on the ground isn’t God’s work, but if you win the lottery, God probably had something to do with that. For much of the movie, the Amityville residence seems more like a cursed house than a haunted one. Lots and lots of really unlucky but not impossible things happen inside the house. But for God-fearing Christians of the 1970s, that was compelling evidence of the supernatural.
There are only two nice things I can say about The Amityville Horror. The first is that James Brolin and the always likable Margot Kidder make a valiant effort to polish this turd. The second is that you can see its influence on later, far superior movies. James Brolin’s slow descent into madness foreshadows Jack Nicholson’s performance in The Shining the following year. There’s even a scene where the mad father starts hacking away at a door in an attempt to get to his family which bears more than a little similarity to the climactic scene in Kubrik’s classic.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Oscar Wilde’s theories of aestheticism and how art is improved by one’s willingness to deviate from realism. The Amityville Horror’s limitation is that it tries to portray a realistic haunted house which would consist mostly of flukey coincidences, odd sounds, and “self-closing” doors. Poltergeist is The Amityville Horror given the full aesthetic treatment with realism thrown completely out the window. It’s the similar premise but with wormholes to other dimensions, toys that come to life, levitation, and all sorts of fantastical things. If The Amityville Horror had taken the Lutz story as merely a template, it might have been a decent story. That it presents its story as an accurate representation of fact means that it loses its power now that the facts have been disproven.
It’s only at the end when The Amityville Horror throws realism out the window that you get its one memorable scene. The father, his mind now completely overtaken by the evil spirit, staggering home with an axe to murder his family but comes to his senses at the last minute. As the family makes their escape, the house rumbles, and blood starts to come out of the walls.
I think I should end this article on a spooky note. Over 30 years after skeptics won the debate over the Amityville hauntings, a curveball was thrown into the debate. In a 2012 documentary entitled My Amityville Horror, Danny Lutz, the eldest Lutz child who was only nine-years-old during his one month at Ocean Avenue, broke his silence on the matter. Danny Lutz claims that not only was the paranormal activity at the Amityville house real but that he remains traumatized by his experiences half a century later.
67 comments
‘Skeptic’ magazine debunked the Amityville claims in the mid-80s. The priest depicted as ‘Father Mancuso’ repudiated the role Anson assigned to him, and rejected the claims of demonic infestation.
Similarly, it was recently revealed by acquaintances of Ronald Hunkeler, [June 1, 1935 – May 10, 2020] (the Maryland boy who inspired the The Exorcist) who later became a NASA engineer, & just died of a stroke, that his supernatural descriptions were tall tales that the only child shared with his wacky, Ouija board using, spiritualist Aunt.
Rod Steiger is the actor that played the main priest in the movie. I saw an interview with him back in the nineties. He said that as an actor, sometimes you will do a bad movie if it pays well, especially if you need the money.
This movie generated a mind-boggling amount of buzz. The “Indian burial ground” trope was born. Amityville was all anyone in my third-grade classroom talked about for weeks, and these factors probably account for some its inexplicable success. Despite a good cast and potentially interesting material, the film commits the cardinal sin of the horror genre: it’s boring.
I forgot to mention the “Indian burial ground” trope because yes, that turned up again in Poltergeist.
A very boring horror movie was The Fog. Though, I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies as a kid, The Fog was an exception. (Hunting for a forbidden curse word within the dialogue was what kept me awake.) Meanwhile, all my friends watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
I’ve always had a soft spot for John Carpenter. In the Mouth of Madness is definitely worth checking out. When I first watched The Shining back in the 80s, I didn’t much care for it, and oddly I did enjoy The Amityville Horror. Seeing them again 40 years later–as an adult–I realized I had it backward.
John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is not only among the greatest sci-fi and horror movies of all time but among the greatest films of all time. It’s in my top 20. It terrified me in 8th grade because of its plausibility. Its effects are berserk and serve the narrative beyond one’s imagination, even in the digital era, and the performances are perfect. The cinematography set standards. Genius.
The Fog isn’t as great as the rest of John Carpenter’s early films but the overall feel and the atmosphere of it keeps me coming back. Plus, any horror film with Tom Atkins is worth a watch because he is always drinking and most of the time ends up sleeping with the girl half his age.
The one I can’t quite understand the high regard for is Prince Of Darkness.
Prince of Darkness is easily Carpenter’s worst film. The praise people heap on it is mystifying. I met Tom Atkins at a convention some years ago. A lot of actors are downright weird, but Atkins seemed like a regular guy. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out he’s one of us.
Tom Atkins is in a lot of John Carpenter’s films. John Carpenter had a core set of actors that he used in several of his films. Donald Pleasance was another one. He was in that film; he was also in the first two Halloween films and in Escape From New York.
Kim, since you mentioned The Shinning and looking for forbidden curse words, I’ll point something out about that movie. During the restroom scene, Mr Grady warns Nicholson’s charcter about his son attempting to contact the black, hotel cook for help. In the original version, he refers to him as a nigger cook. At some point years ago that scene was altered. That line has been edited out and been redubbed. Now in that scene, Mr. Grady refers to him as a no-good cook. The only copies of the movie that have the original lines are old VHS tapes. Political correctness and catering to black sensitivity altered the movie, slightly.
I did not know about that after-production censorship, Bigfoot. Thank you.
Wyatt Stagg, still on youtube, did an excellent video breaking down all the anti-White/anti-Western civilization themes and propaganda in that movie, called The Shining, Stanley Kubrick and the Merchants of Fear.
You’re welcome, I will watch what you suggested. The level of Hollywood’s subversion never ceases to amaze me.
I can’t speak for any recent Bluray releases, but my DVD copy I bought probably twelve years ago has the hard R.
Thanks for the correction. I’m glad that there are still original copies.
My copy says “nigger” too. 🙃
Thanks for the correction. You might want to hang on to it because it might become rare and worth something on an auction block one day. If you watch it on cable, he uses the phrase no-good cook.
Peter Quint: October 24, 2025 My copy says “nigger” too.
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You’re referring to your VHS copy of The Shining, but since the subject of this essay concerns Amityville, your mention of the word “nigger” reminded me of author and featured NV writer John Massaro who lived in Amityville and, aside from the so-called “horror,” as a race-thinker he gives us a glimpse of racial aspects of the town and of Long Island with “When Race War Comes to the Suburbs” at nationalvanguard.org
… Let me give you a demographic sketch of Long Island, that 118 mile-long appendage jutting east from Manhattan that hardly any tourists visit, and for good reason: though there are some lovely, uncrowded beaches on both the north and south shores if you know where to find them, and farms, wineries and scenic towns way out east on the north fork, most of it is just sprawling and soulless – too much asphalt, too many cars, too many strip malls, too many people…
Geographically, the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, which I won’t go into, comprise 20% of the island. That dirty, congested “city feel” dissipates the further east you go but it still exists here and there, depending on the make-up of the population. Racially, Long Island is pretty much a checkerboard. Many towns are solidly “White ethnic” with a sizable component of older stock Whites, though intermarriage has blurred these distinctions. There are quite a few Black towns or enclaves, and no matter where you go on the island, you’re never more than ten miles from one of them. Needless to say, all of them are undesirable areas, though they vary, the better type Blacks preferring to keep their distance from the lower types if they can, and you can easily see the difference on the streets. Lying in the shadow of the world’s most Jewish city outside of Israel, there are, of course, many Jews, but they tend to be clustered in certain towns… One huge change that has taken place in my lifetime is the influx of Central Americans and Asians, mainly Indian and Chinese. In the 1960s, these people had virtually no presence here, aside from the local Chinese restaurant…
From 1988 to 1997, and again from 2003 to 2021, I lived in Amityville – yes, the same town of “The Amityville Horror” fame. Amityville is racially and administratively divided, with Whites a slight majority. North of the elevated railroad tracks it’s nearly all Black plus some Mestizos, and south of the tracks it’s nearly all White. Amityville High School is in the south part of town, but it’s very Black, and for that reason, though they’ll never admit it to a stranger, most White parents send their kids to private high schools…
Being frugal, and not owning a computer, in the latter 18-year period of my residence I would go to the Amityville Public Library to use theirs, until they closed down because of Covid in March 2020, forcing me to buy a desktop to use the internet. The library had twelve computers. On average I’d be there five days a week for an hour or two, and ten computers would be in use, mostly by Blacks. I used the computer at that library thousands of times over the years. I could write a book of amusing stories on the differences between White and Black behavior, just from the things I saw at the library….
Read more at the link, and if interested in the “planneddemic,” John’s 40 years of research into vaccines, many of them no doubt spent at the Amityville Public Library — making him a foremost expert on the subject — will be of interest: “Will Vaccines Be The End Of Us by John Massaro” at cosmotheistchurch.org $20 — interesting blurb:
Vaccines are experimental blends of biological and chemical junk that don’t work and have maimed or killed an uncountable number of people. The big lie that they have “saved millions of lives” has been repeated so often and for so long that most consider it the indisputable truth. Yet any serious investigation will reveal that there are no vaccination success stories, only myths taught in medical universities and served to the public by the fake news establishment, both of which have strong financial ties with the big pharmaceutical firms that manufacture vaccines. Since 1796, when it all started, thoughtful people have emphatically condemned the procedure and exposed its dark underside. And now, with the Covid-19 hoax, the criminals who develop and promote vaccines are trying to force the most dangerous “medicine” ever invented on the entire world. As a result, we may be living on the brink of an unthinkable human tragedy. Massaro delves into taboo topics that many would find offensive, including race, religion, even the Jewish Question and that other big lie: the Holocaust.
“The title of this book asks if vaccines will be the end of us. A corollary question would be, ‘Will Jews be the end of us?’… it’s something that thoughtful men through the ages have pondered. The late William Pierce, founder of the National Alliance, a racial nationalist organization still in operation despite several setbacks, pondered it long and hard.”… Pierce believed that the conflict between Jew and Aryan man was a battle of Nature beyond any moral considerations, such as takes place throughout the plant and animal kingdom, and ultimately one or the other will be ultimately killed off.” -John Massaro, page 244
I’m a The Fog apologist. In fact, it is one of my favorite horror movies of the era.
Is The Fog the best story in the world? No. Is it the scariest horror movie in the world? Far from it. Was Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in any way necessary to the plot? No.
However, The Fog is one of the best looking horror movies I’ve ever seen. The town looks great, the lighthouse looks great, and the fog special effects rolling ominously over the picturesque landscape into a quaint postcard village look cool. It mixes beauty and horror in a way similar to The Shining which is about a nightmare that takes place in an elegant hotel.
I can see why hardcore horror fans are lukewarm on The Fog because there is not enough horror but I think The Fog is a great aesthetic experience. Highly recommended.
It’s a perfect gateway movie for young kids when you want to start showing them scary movies but don’t want to freak them out and end up with a bed partner.
I’ve heard Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, while not a horror film per se, is still terrifying.
I would say more creepy than terrifying, but definitely worth a viewing.
I watched Picnic at Hanging Rock many moons ago. It had promise and spends the duration threatening to become a good movie but ends without ever becoming one.
I can’t explain what is annoying about that movie without giving away too much.
Hmm I may watch it. I’ve formed a mini tradition of watching horror during Halloween season, even though I consider it the lowest of genres.
I agree, however that preternatural things in real life are much more spooky than the supernatural. I had this experience which remains very creepy. When I was young, I had a friend who was from a rich family, well upper middle class. They lived in this really big house for the area. One of the brothers committed suicide later in high school. The cause of death was never in question, but what was eerie about it was the complete unexplainedness of it. He seemed happy and well adjusted, and no identifiable stressors could be found. Well we went to college that fall. Around Christmas break, all of us the group of friends, went out to the pond in the back, which was some distance from the house. We all look back and standing up on the balcony was this gray cloaked, hooded figure standing still, watching us. No one was in the house at all, so we all ran back to find out who it was, but when we got to the house, no one could be found. We never knew who came in or who it was.
When I was a kid, a family up the block had the mother’s brother living upstairs in the attic and he committed suicide by shotgun. I was too young to remember it but he was home alone with the kids and upstairs by himself with his stereo up real loud. The oldest son Mike heard the gun go off but didn’t know what to think of it because of the loud music and went upstairs and found him.
After they moved away and another family came and went, a young Latino family moved in. I would say about 25 years after the suicide I was at a neighbors house when Rueben the father came over and introduced himself to me. I told him I knew both of the previous families that lived there and knew his house inside and out. He got real quiet and asked me in a very serious tone “Tell me something, has anyone ever died in there?” I told him yeah, the brother of the mother of the old family that moved out in the late ‘80’s shot himself. I kind of laughed and said “Why, is it haunted or something?” He told me they are moving soon, his children are not allowed in the attic and his wife won’t step foot up there. I never told him it happened in the attic. I don’t know if I really believe in ghosts or not, but that shit freaked me out.
After they moved away and another family came…
Did this family make any comments about the house that you know of, or did you hear anything through the grapevine? Maybe, the ghost is one of us and doesn’t like “greasers.” 🙃
They were there for at least ten years and I never heard anything from them. They were Latinos as well.
Travis, thank you for sharing the not widely known true crime elements of this familicide.
Check out The Entity for another wacky horror film supposedly based on true events. This one’s about a poltergeist rapist who terrorizes Barbara Hershey and is actually pretty scary.
Another recommendation I would make that isn’t a haunted house story or based on true events but is a fantastic psychological horror film most people haven’t heard of is The Other. Trust me on this one.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BivZrzLB5to&pp=ygUWdGhlIG90aGVyIHRyYWlsZXIgMTk3Mg%3D%3D
I saw the Entity when I was little and it was pretty good
If you are talking about The Other (1972) with John Ritter in it, you are right. I watched it once, and I couldn’t figure it out. There is something there, that has puzzled me since I watched it. It has something to do with one of the twins being born just before midnight, and the other just after midnight on a certain day. Also, nobody saw the twins together except at the end when the woman was staring incredulously at them, which led me to believe that one twin’s death had been faked years before—am I close? 🙃
That’s the one. I won’t spoil the ending but it is one you won’t forget. The whole film is full of twists and surprises but the ending takes a hard, dark turn that will stay with you long after. I absolutely love it and recommend it all the time to friends.
Please “spoil” the ending, I didn’t get it the one time I watched it? Did the evil twin leave the good twin to be burned alive at the end; there is a “zoom-in” shot at the end showing a cut lock? They don’t make the DVD anymore, a used copy is rather pricey on EBay, and Amazon. 🙃
Here’s the full film on YouTube. Close, but you’re WAAAAAY off.😁
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j4TWYmClGEQ&pp=ygUTVGhlIG90aGVyIGZ1bGwgZmlsbQ%3D%3D
Thanks anyway, I am not going to watch the whole movie on my little iPhone. 🙃
I just had an “intuitive leap!” In the last scene, everyone in the house looking out the windows at the smoldering barn are dead. Am I right? 🙃
I guess I figured out what the last scene signifies, you are not saying anything. I still have to figure out what the “cut lock” signifies (somebody got away). I will have to review the entire movie “line for line,” and “scene by scene” to figure out who was alive, and who was dead, but thought they were alive. 🙃
It would take way too long to explain it all and I don’t want to ruin it for anyone else who may be interested in seeing it. It’s probably streaming on something.
Why was The Amityville Horror successful? Let’s not forget the propaganda mill of the National Enquirer, et al. Those newspapers were on the check-out lanes in every grocery store you went to. I remember those days—great article. 🙃
An episode from In Search Of is used in this article. Me and my friends use to watch that show when we were children. There weren’t that many channels back then. It was hosted by Leonard Nimoy, best known as Spock on Star Trek. Some of the episodes would have serious topics and other episodes would have topics that could be debunked like Amityville or the UFO crash at Roswell. As children we took this show seriously because it presented each topic seriously, Leonard Nimoy was serious as a host in each episode, and the show used to have creepy sound effects which gave some episodes a spooky feel.
One thing I have mused over about movies like The Exorcist, et al, is the idea that these are propaganda pieces financed secretly by the Roman Catholic Church through subterranean channels. 🙃
A real priest was in The Exorcist. He appears early in the film. He is the priest who is one of the party guests hosted by the mother. He is also in the final scene. The mother and daughter tell him goodbye at the end of the movie.
Maybe the Vatican wanted some “on the ground” supervision. 🙃
Thanks for the good and detailed review. This review is probably better than the movie. Keep writing. I look forward to reading your next time capsule review.
If you want a general overview* of the Amityville saga including all the claims and counter-claims, I recommend this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g7imRzLO88
There’s apparently a new theory that has emerged in recent years, first promoted by one of the other Lutz kids, is that the paranormal activity real but was actually caused by Greg Lutz’s interest in the occult. This theory would at least explain why no subsequent owners saw any activity.
*It’s a fairly vast subject and there’s an entire Amityville fandom where they debate this stuff endlessly.
“ We can never know what it is like to have watched The Amityville Horror in 1979. Anyone watching it today does so with the knowledge that they are watching a story that is not true. “
I did not see The Amityville Horror in the theater. Friends said it was boring and lame, and I skipped it until a couple of years later on VHS. Still boring and lame. I would cpompare it to a typical Spielberg film (not a compliment).
The best part of “Amityville” was the marketing with the iconic poster of the house with the cat-eye windows.
I saw both Apocalypse Now and Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the theater in 1979. The one I have seen at least a dozen times. The other one I hate to this day.
The 1979 movie, ten years after Star Trek: The Original Series was cancelled, was a big disappointment as I was a big fan of the 1966-69 original series.
I won’t bore you with the details, but generally speaking, the more that Gene Roddenberry was involved with the storyline the worst the Star Trek episode.
The movie sequel, Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan redeemed the franchise a little bit, but the Ricardo Montalban character is probably my least favorite villian of the original series. I also did not care for meeting Kirk’s estranged Gay son.
I like both Horror films and Science Fiction but it has to be extremely well done. At his best Kubrick delivers but I’m not a Stephen King fan.
A Halloween home theater setting is a lot of fun in a darkened house. A showing of The Exorcist with a certain unedited scene involving a crucifix once freaked my jaded date out for days.
This happened also with an early video showing of the first Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, with some plastic forks taped to the fingers of one hand and the arm draped over the couch. Get ready to pick up some spilled popcorn!
I don’t remember any discussions on demonology being triggered by The Exorcist (1973).
In 1975, I had an LDS 9th grade Seminary teacher go on about how if you ever encountered an evil spirit to raise your Right hand to the square and command it to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. However, I have never heard of anything like that mentioned in an actual Sunday School teaching manual.
For a church Halloween party in 1971, I dressed up like Norman Bates’ mother. It was a very convincing costume ─ with a mop head for a wig, an old granny dress, boots, and some throwaway makeup ─ although I had never seen the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie, Psycho. Hardly anyone else had seen it either, which prompted a lot of lame explanations.
🙂
The sequels to The Amityville Horror were even more lame.
From what I’ve read about The Exorcist, it caused at least some controversy when it was released. I’ve read that some people were panicking in the theatre when it came out. I don’t how much of that is real or hype. People probably were frightened watching it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was exaggerated somewhat. None the less, I watched an interview with Ellen Burston who played the mother in the film. She went to see the movie in a theatre several weeks after it came out, a lot of actors do that even after a movie premier. She said that a woman in the audience got so caught up in one of the possession scenes that she became frightened and passed out. She further stated that the movie was stopped, the lights came on and other people in the audience tried to revive this woman, including Ellen Burston. She was one of the first ones to try and help this woman but quickly backed off and decided to let other people attempt to aid her. She said that she did that because she quickly realized that if the woman came to and recognized her as the mother in the film, it could possibly frighten her further.
It was really scary. And William Friedkin ( RiP ) is one of the rare j… Director that I truly like ( can’t stand overrated Kubrick ). I was too young to watch the exorcist back then, but I met one day a woman who saw it r in the seventies , and she told me that she suffered for months of insomnia because of it, to the point of thinking of seeing a psychiatrist. She was not a snowflake, she was a well balanced woman, and a physiotherapist. So, yes, this must have been really scary.
You may know this Hitchcock trivia already, but just in case–
Per both Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust codoh.com & this CFT article below, the horror film master, left Hollywood to work on staged WW2 Holocaust atrocity propaganda:
https://christiansfortruth.com/piles-of-corpses-at-dachau-and-buchenwald-were-dead-german-soldiers-staged-there-for-propaganda-purposes/
I stopped watching horror movies, after I discovered so much true crime, hushed crime, and outright cover-ups going on IRL. (Thank you, to Law & Order’s stories “ripped from the headlines.” Upon investigation, the original crime reports/news was so much more interesting and politically incorrect!)
The Changeling from 1980 with George C. Scott was a very well done ghost movie. Also Carnival of Souls from 1962 , although not very sophisticated, had a dark atmospheric feel and a great organ driven soundtrack.
One decent horror movie that I recommend is the werewolf movie The Howling. Another one is The Brotherhood of Satan from 1971. That movie attempted to take advantage of the satanic panic that was about to set in. While not a great film, for a low budget B film it’s not bad. It has an errie feel to it as well.
Brotherhood of Satan is very good, Bigfoot. Funny thing, I thought of that movie just the other day. It is quite unsettling and the old Satanists replacing themselves with children to continue their coven works as a concept. One horror I do like is “The Antichrist” starring Carla Gravina. Weird creepy Italian movie (early 70’s-of course) with a great soundtrack from Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai.
I’ll check your suggestion out.
Any relation to or have seen Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist with Willem Dafoe?
My choice for the most overlooked horror movie of that era is The Prowler. It is easily the best slasher movie to not become a series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL0mQi2WmcU
I’ll check your suggestion out as well.
Some very disturbingly gory killings in that one. Beautiful Victorian homes, filmed in Cape May, NJ.
Another little known horror is Curtains. Memorable ice skating scene, the killer in a very scary costume, with The Guess Who’s Burton Cummings’ You Saved My Soul playing on a boom box.
Warren Balogh said on last week’s WarStrike that the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers scared the piss out of him. My only recommendation is Spanish found footage horror film Rec. (2007). For a zombie movie, it’s quite good.
Thanks for the recs, pun intended. YouTube has a long version of the origin Halloween. I believe John Carpenter shot extra scenes to fill a 2hr TV time slot (for example a sort of mental asylum tribunal deciding what to do with Michael, and another scene where a teenage Michael is visited in his hospital room). The original (89 minute ?) theatrical release is better. The suspense is killed by the filler scenes.
I saw an okay one the other night, Black Phone from 2021. It has some unnecessary goofiness, but I thought the cinematography at the beginning was rather gripping. It’s a wrenching of the horror genre in that the ghosts are actually protagonists. I guess sixth sense was sort of like that…
you guys didn’t like my anecdote above?
I watched the reboot only because Melissa George was in it. Hotsy totsy. Female viewers got their eye candy with Ryan Reynolds.
Melissa George is a “mud shark!” I just googled her, there is even one picture of her pregnant; she probably shit out a “niglet!” Russel Simmons was the nigger, and an old one at that.
Melissa George has three White children
Did you see the picture of her with Russel Simmons? 🙃
Read the book at 15 and it really scared me because I was under the impression of reading non fiction.
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