The Amityville Horror
Directed by Stuart Rosenberg
- horror
The story
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.
What it’s like
Heavy, overcast Long Island light and a cold grey-blue palette give the house its dread, with the Lutzes' Victorian rendered in wide, steady compositions and slow pushes toward dark doorways and windows. The camera holds on rooms a beat longer than comfortable, and the 1970s film stock carries a faint grain and muted, slightly faded colour that makes the seventies interiors feel lived-in and a little sour. Sound does much of the work: a sparse, mournful organ score swells and drops out, leaving creaks, wind off the water and the buzz of the household's ordinary machines to unsettle the quiet. The mood is autumnal and oppressive, a slow-building unease that tips into scenes of outright physical menace, including a few sharp, shocking set pieces and a late, loud escalation. Violence is occasional but sudden and vivid, with some startling bloody moments and an unsettling sense of a family being pulled apart; there is no sexual content, and the fear comes more from atmosphere and jolts than from gore. Pacing is deliberate, with long stretches of domestic routine interrupted by eerie tremors. Suited to a Halloween-season watch, a late night alone with the lights low, or fans of 1970s haunted-house and possession films who want something atmospheric, creepy and unhurried.
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