If not for Margot Kidder, a total waste of film In retrospect, the Amityville Horror is not deserving of its notoriety, nor of the influence this film has exerted on the horror film genre. Though this film utterly terrified me as a 10 year old child when I first saw this film, I rented this film recently and was forced to fight off the nods rather than the chills. I could not have suspended my disbelief on wires while watching this film about a man who bought a house he could not afford, had a wife he could not live with, and a family he barely had the patience to tolerate. George Lutz was a man looking to blame someone or something for his own personal problems, and the house proved to be a convenient and timely target.
The plot, as it stands, is that the murder of the DeFeo family (a very real tragedy) sparked a confrontation with the devil, an Indian burial ground, and the ghosts of the recently deceased family and 21 days or so after moving in, depending on which of the different accounts given by the Lutzes, they ran screaming from the house in the middle of the night terrified out of their minds. It is an eerie coincidence that the mortgage payment was due; unfortunately, a marginally self-employed George Lutz was just a few pesos short on making the payment.
For nostalgias sake, I really, really, wanted the Amityville Horror to be better than what it actually was.