The Amityville Horror
Stuart Rosenberg
(1979)
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.
Cast
Crew
Hook
The horror is patient. It was here before you arrived and it will be here after. The Amityville Horror builds dread through accumulation — each strange detail a thread pulling toward something irreversible.
Identity
The film's commercial success spawned an extensive franchise of sequels, prequels, and remakes, and the Amityville story has remained one of the most frequently revisited cases in American horror culture. Critical reception was largely dismissive, with reviewers finding its execution formulaic despite the inherent strength of its source material, though the Academy Award nomination for Schifrin's score represented a notable exception.
Collector Focus
Based on a disputed but widely believed true story, The Amityville Horror arrived with a cultural framing most haunted house films lack — the house was real, the family real, the events contested but not dismissed. That documentary dimension gives associated materials a weight beyond conventional supernatural horror.
Context
Directed by Stuart Rosenberg and adapted from Jay Anson's bestselling 1977 book by Sandor Stern, the film was produced on a budget of approximately $4.7 million. The film more than proved its commercial viability at the box office, grossing over $86 million. The film's commercial success spawned an extensive franchise of sequels, prequels, and remakes, and the Amityville story has remained one of the most frequently revisited cases in American horror culture.
