"The Amityville Horror"...What the Hell...?

Jay Anson's "The Amityville Horror" was one of the scariest books I have ever read. Maybe it was the fact that I was only fourteen years old at the time, or maybe it was the fact that it was all purportedly true. I imagine it was really a combination of the two.

Whatever the reason, there were images from that book that will forever be seared into my brain; the red glowing eyes peering into the upstairs window, the rocking chair moving back and forth of its own accord, the hooded figure at the top of the stairs at the book's climax. These scenes were so affective and so frightening I vividly remember needing the lights on when I went to sleep for a LONG time.

Suffice it to say, that after watching the remake of the the 1979 film (ITSELF an adaptation of the book!), I won't have any problems with sleeping. That came DURING the film.

I have ranted here before about the wisdom (or lack of it) of remaking films that were fine to begin with. While the 1979 James Brolin/Margot Kidder "Amityville" was hardly a classic, it was a very workable and occasionally scary film version of the Anson book. I liked both lead actors, and the various recreations of the book's frightening moments were quite well done, with an air of doom and evil and a determination to be faithful to the story as outlined by Anson.

That said, I suppose that a remake wasn't totally out of the question. I was hoping that perhaps this version might mine some heretofore unexplored thematic area of the book; more attention on the Lutz' marriage before they bought the house, perhaps, or a more thorough investigation of the origin's of the house's supposed evil.

Sadly, this version seemed content to delve more deeply into the gore that never seemed to pop up in the book, and was determined to alter key events and characters that really needed no such altering. George Lutz went almost immediately berserk the minute he entered the house in this version, far from the gradual disintegration he displayed in the book and previous film. Brolin really brought out some sympathy for this poor working class guy who was overwhelmed with a brand new family and a huge house with a terrible past that seemed bent on driving him nuts. The 2005 Lutz started pushing kids around and scowling horribly from the get go, after about five minutes of nicey nice time with the family. Kathy Lutz was played younger (though no more sexy, in my opinion) here and ended up being just a victim of the house, bounding from one intense moment from another, overloud music in tow.

I guess the most egregious error this film made for me was the totally arbitrary and puzzling alterations of the story. Besides the warped transformation of George, the whole morphing of the evil spirit/imaginary friend "Jodie" into the ghost of one of the children murdered in the house was ill considered and disappointing. Without wanting to post spoilers, I'll just say I also hated the way the dog Harry was treated here. When you already have a story that is so eerie and compelling on its face (whether or not one chooses to believe that story is really beside the point), why on Earth is it necessary or wise to alter it? It just seems like time after time when there was a choice between following the established story or "Hollywooding" it up, the filmmakers chose the latter course to the film's utter detriment. Likewise the rushed and muddled "explanation" of the house's presence; by the time they got around to this, there had been so much deviation from the story it wouldn't have mattered whether they got this element "right" or not.

Horror films work best when several different elements are operating. One, you have to feel for your characters, just as in any type of drama. If you don't care about the characters, what difference does it make if they are scared, or go psycho, or are murdered? Two, you have to present a malevolent presence that's truly scary on a very real, personal level; you have to "feel" the presence and understand it's evil. Here, what are we supposed to be scared of? Surely not "Jodie", who is just the ghost of a murdered girl. Not the "figure at the top of the stairs" that was so frightening in the book's climax, because it isn't even included here! I guess we could fear George, but his personality change is so quick and jarring it comes across as more annoying than scary. And...that's about it actually. Very little of the poltergeist activity from the book is included, nor are most of the odd incidents that plagued the family They concentrated so heavily on George they seem to have forgotten the myriad of grotesqueries and inexplicable occurrences the family endured. Third, the horror has to be, as much as possible, rooted in the real world. This film is, ostensibly, but once the Lutzes get to Amityville it seems as if they enter their own little private bubble with virtually no contact from the outside world. George never seems to work, Kathy doesn't seem to have friends or family, the kids never go to school. Their whole existence is reacting to crazy stuff, again, most of it George. And again, it isn't as if there wasn't a whole slew of great scenes already written for them in the book. They just chose, foolishly, to ignore them.

The old cliche is always that "the book was better". It's not always the case, of course, but the one saving grace of this unnecessary remake is that it has made me appreciate the Anson story more. I plan on re-reading it, and savoring its eerie tale of a family I could relate to and a house I would want no part of.