In 1974 in the Long Island town of Amityville a sensational mass murder occured one night where Ronald DeFeo killed his family - parents, brothers and sisters - with a shotgun. Even at the time the case was controversial since while DeFeo was the only man convicted of the crime, there were questions left unanswered, such as why nobody heard the gunshots, how he managed to slaughter all those people as they slept without alerting the others in the house, and whether there was actually someone else involved. But that controversy was nothing compared to what happened the next year, something which haunts Daniel Lutz to this day...
The Amityville Horror was a cause celebre of the seventies, apparent proof of a supernatural occurence which gradually descended into a welter of scepticism and contradictory accounts, leaving the impartial observer unable to work out what to believe, and resting on how far you were prepared to accept the concepts of ghosts and demons in the real world. Jay Anson's bestselling book on the case was one for the believer camp, spooking millions of readers across the globe, so naturally there was a movie version which bolstered the claims of Daniel's stepfather George Lutz and his wife, Daniel's mother, that this house they moved into shortly after the killings was haunted.
The movie was one of the biggest hits of the seventies, and the case stlll echoes down into popular fiction to this day: if you're making a haunted house flick, it's this Amityville tale that will be influencing you, consciously or otherwise. So what you had was a scary story to which most would observe, well, maybe, maybe not, and think little of it past a movie to enjoy (there were sequels and a remake of the first one) and the occasional article to cast your eyes over. But Amityville obsessive Eric Walter's film of his extensive interview with Daniel brought up something that you might not have considered: to have been at the heart of such an intense media blitz and then for it all to go away for the public while it still defined your life, that wasn't too good.
Daniel is a nervy presence throughout, testy and brittle and confrontational. He is certainly convinced something strange happened to him in the DeFeo house when his family moved in during 1975 even if you are not, and grows understandably defensive if anyone meeting him confronts him that perhaps he might not be mentally stable and actually he's remembering the events of the possibly fictionalised book and film rather than what happened in real life. His obvious psychological unease does his side of the story no favours, and many dismissed the film as giving the oxygen of publicity to a man who would be best to move on from his childhood experiences, whatever they were, and not subject us to his ramblings.
Walter coaxed out Daniel's account, so the bases were touched here with the bit about the flies, the window slamming on his hands (he has a crooked pinkie to prove that), seeing the pig apparition, having his bed jump around while he was still in it (yeah, like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist), getting thrown up the stairs, and so on, all of which you would be familiar with if you'd read the book or even seen parts of the original movie. He relates this as fact, but his demeanour suggests the one person who needs to accept this the most is Daniel himself, though an interesting relationship becomes clear when he talks about George, the stepfather it turns out he truly detested. His parents' divorce really hit the young boy hard, and he takes every opportunity to berate his replacement father.
But do you swallow the line about George being so into the occult, something he had kept secret so as not to harm his credibility, that he could move objects with his mind and possibly summon up the dark forces which had encouraged DeFeo to commit those murders the previous year? Between guitar sessions Walter had Daniel talk to various experts as well, including a psychologist (the man seems a seasoned patient at therapy sessions), a reporter who investigated the case back in the seventies who acts in the same manner as the shrink, and even the paranormal investigator who investigated with her late husband at the time. This last leads the film up a blind alley as she produced a piece of the True Cross, a false relic scam she has apparently fallen for but which galvanises Daniel, yet another aspect which will have the sceptics' ears twitching. Ultimately, My Amityville Horror is not going to change many minds, and Daniel was right to refuse a lie detector test as those things just don't work, but then, how can we verify this whole, sorry affair? Music by Herman Witkam.
