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Transcript

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR — America’s most haunted home · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode includes Hellmouths, slime, rising mortgage rates, adult language, and also spoilers.
• 0:06
  But it doesn't include me, your regular host Rico Gagliano.
• 0:10
  For the next few episodes leading up to Halloween, I'm handing over my hosting reins to a horror expert par excellence you're in good, creepy hands with her.
• 0:19
  Enjoy.
• 0:23
  What if I asked you what the most prolific horror franchise is?
• 0:29
  The one with the most movies attached to it?
• 0:31
  You might guess Halloween, which keeps reviving Michael Myers.
• 0:35
  Maybe Saw which has been putting out roughly a film a year since 2004.
• 0:40
  Or Dracula, the one that's been getting remade consistently since 1931.
• 0:46
  Good calls, all of them.
• 0:47
  But actually, it's a haunted house flick from the late 70s, which has 60 films and counting.
• 0:57
  I don't think most people actually know how many titles there are.
• 1:01
  Every single time I talk to folks about this, their immediate reaction is one of disbelief and like, "Oh, why are you putting yourself through this?" That's Joe Lipsett, horror critic and co-host of the podcast Horror Queers, and the only person in the world who's taken it upon himself to watch and review every single film in The Amityville Horror canon.
• 1:25
  There's something a little bit masochistic about it, but it also feels like the Mount Everest of horror franchises, right?
• 1:33
  This is a hill I could quite literally die on.
• 1:36
  I've been working on this project for nearly two years, bi-weekly columns, for the most part, and I'm still more than ten films away.
• 1:44
  And every time I check, there's a new one in production.
• 1:48
  Because there's so many of them, the franchise has somewhat diluted the value of the original 1979 film that terrified America, blending true crime with the supernatural, and that transformed a nice three-storey Dutch colonial house in a nice neighbourhood, in a nice town in Long Island, into the most notorious haunted house in America.
• 2:13
  It's the kind of house they don't build anymore.A relic of a time when the world wasn't in such a hurry.When there was still time for a little charm and elegance. Whether I want to admit it or not, given its relative lack of prestige compared to other 1970s horror classics,The Amityville Horror has influence on the haunted house genre has been enormous.
• 2:39
  As Jenn Adams, film critic at Bloody Disgusting, puts it, it's the grandfather of the genre.
• 2:45
  There are so many things introduced in this film that will continue to filter through modern horror and modern pop culture.
• 2:53
  The Amityville Horror set the template for The Conjuring,Insidious, and in a way, even Get Out.
• 3:00
  In The Amityville Horror the ghost told them to get out of the house. That's Eddie Murphy in his 1983 stand-up special Delirious.
• 3:07
  Why people stayed in there, now that's a hint and a half for your ass.A ghost say "Get the fuck out." I would just tip the fuck out the door. Most of all, The Amityville Horror was the start of a true modern folk story that in a way, contains in itself the promise and the lies of the American Dream itself.
• 3:42
  Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 3:44
  MUBI is the streaming service that champions great cinema, and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 3:52
  I'm Anna Bogutskaya and I'll be your host for this season.
• 3:56
  I'm a film critic, host of The Final Girls podcast and the author of the new book
• 4:01
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A Deep Dive Into Why We Love Watching Horror Films.
• 4:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Which I've made a career out of doing.
• 4:08
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And it's also why the good folks at MUBI asked me to guest host this season.
• 4:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We're calling it 'Haunted Homes' and for the next five episodes leading up to Halloween, I'm diving into the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made.
• 4:27
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Your regular host, Rico Gagliano, will be back with a new season in November.
• 4:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But for now, let's take a look at how one family's bad real estate investment created a horror phenomenon that melded true crime and fiction, and will apparently continue spawning movies forever.
• 4:47
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In fact, two days after we first recorded this episode...
• 4:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>a new one was announced.
• 4:58
  <i: Feeding the Monster>One thing that will for sure ruin the resale value of a home is a multiple murder.
• 5:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Next is the master bedroom. The story of The Amityville Horror begins with a true crime case, the DeFeo murders.
• 5:23
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I won't go into too many grisly details because this isn't a true crime podcast after all.
• 5:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Ronnie DeFeo, who was the oldest child, kills his parents and his four siblings, his two younger brothers and two younger sisters.
• 5:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In just kind of a murderous rage, he goes through and he shoots them all in their beds, and he was pretty quickly apprehended.
• 5:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Shortly after this.
• 5:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We're talking less than a year.
• 5:47
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Lutz family, that's dad, George, mom, Kathy and her three children buy this property for $80,000.
• 5:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There's nothing like it on the market.
• 5:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Not at this price. By the way, today it's worth $1.9 million.
• 6:03
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Which is just another way the story becomes more horrific after years.
• 6:08
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Lutzes moving to this dream home, which they can just about afford, and they even take the furniture that was left behind.
• 6:15
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So their children are sleeping in the beds that the DeFeo children had died in.
• 6:21
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There really wasn't a whole lot of difference between the home that this family was murdered in and the home that the Lutzes moved into, but they buy it for a song.
• 6:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's so cheap. It's like, and it's a really nice house.
• 6:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's got a pool, it's three storeys, it's on the waterfront.
• 6:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's got a boathouse.
• 6:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Within 28 days, they flee the house.
• 6:42
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Leaving all of their belongings behind.
• 6:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Find the well.It's the passage to hell!Cover it! That is just the start of their story.
• 7:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In 1977, journalist Jay Anson publishes a book about their experience called The Amityville Horror, and it becomes a sensation.
• 7:15
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Lutzes go on international tours like they are world famous.
• 7:20
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They're using their real names and they have changed the names of the children in the film.
• 7:25
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They've changed the first names, but they are still using the last names.
• 7:29
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Within two years the book is a movie starring James Brolin as George, and Margot Kidder as Kathy.
• 7:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It was a fairly recent true crime story that captured the imagination of a lot of people.
• 7:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That's Phil Nobile Jr. Editor-in-Chief of Fangoria magazine.
• 7:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>As far as the popular culture consciousness was concerned, what happened in that movie is what happened.
• 7:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Amityville Horror opens on the image of a house that if you're in the right frame of mind, looks like it's leering at you.
• 8:00
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's got these cat like windows and it's all illuminated in red.
• 8:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's giving evil.
• 8:07
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We know this, but in the film it's the embodiment of the American Dream.
• 8:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Lutzes are lifelong renters.
• 8:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They have never owned a house.
• 8:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I love it, but honey...
• 8:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>$80,000?It might as well be $800,000. At this point in time, and the economy,$80,000 for a three storey family home is too good a bargain to pass up.
• 8:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Murders and all.
• 8:35
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This is their big chance at owning a piece of the home ownership dream.
• 8:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Phil Nobile Jr says modern audiences can relate.
• 8:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I definitely can.
• 8:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There are Millennials and Zoomers who are becoming aware that they're not going to be able to afford to buy a house, and one of the ways that manifested in the horror crowd was,"Well, now I understand the Lutzes, now I understand...""I get why they didn't leave that house." You know, it became relatable because of our current housing crisis.
• 9:03
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Listen, as a Millennial in another housing crisis in London, I would take a ghost if it meant that I could have that house.
• 9:10
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Yeah, like what kinda ghost are we talking-- Like, you know, I think we sort of would have, like, we would bargain with ourselves about what our ghost threshold might be as it relates to the asking price of the house.
• 9:22
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This family has lucked into this opportunity to get what they've always wanted and what they've been told they're supposed to want.
• 9:32
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You know, I live in Nashville.
• 9:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I have grown up with this idea of like when you are an adult, you get married, you buy a house, you have 2.5 children.
• 9:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That is the American dream.
• 9:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That is how we define success.
• 9:43
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And so I think it introduces that element into the haunted house story.
• 9:48
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This is not an ancestral castle that you can flee.
• 9:51
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This is something they have put all of their money into.
• 9:56
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And they know from the start what had transpired in the house.
• 10:00
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It introduces this really interesting idea of what do you do?
• 10:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Where are you going to go if you flee?
• 10:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You know, it takes the downfall of one family for another family to rise.
• 10:11
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And what happens when maybe a lower class family tries to move into a neighbourhood that they don't quite belong in, but also just the relatability of taking on more than you can really afford.
• 10:27
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But when you're going through an economic recession, a deal is a deal, right?
• 10:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A guy kills his whole family.
• 10:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Doesn't that bother you?Sure, but...
• 10:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Houses don't have memories. Except, they do.
• 10:43
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Very soon, weird stuff starts happening.
• 10:49
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Lutz's youngest daughter starts talking to an invisible girl called Jody.
• 10:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Why didn't you unlock the door?
• 10:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You heard Jackie knocking. Jody wouldn't let me.
• 10:59
  <i: Feeding the Monster>George the dad starts getting way into his axe.
• 11:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Don't ever do that.Not to a man with an ax in his hand. There's green slime coming down the walls.
• 11:15
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A priest comes to bless the house and gets surrounded by flies and advised in the film's most iconic scene to scram by demonic voice.
• 11:26
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Get out! And although it was not on the floor plan, there was a hole in the basement full of black bog water that is the entrance to literal hell, which tries to drag George Lutz into it.
• 11:42
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It always kind of cracks me up too,'cause there's absolutely no reason for this pit of, I guess, goo or blood to exist.
• 11:49
  <i: Feeding the Monster>- Demon goo.
• 11:49
  <i: Feeding the Monster>- Demon goo! Exactly. It doesn't connect to anything.
• 11:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's just like, well, there's a red room that clearly means Satan and that means red goo.
• 11:57
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There's an explanation for all of it.We're not in the habit of blaming Satan for every phenomenon. It's that addition of demonic elements that places The Amityville Horror at the centre of the 1970s horror Satan-ssance.
• 12:14
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The 70s landscape of horror was a shifting one.
• 12:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It was one that was trying to sort of figure out its place in pop culture, because the 60s did a lot to kind of put the nail in the coffin, so to speak, on this sort of haunted, spooky gothic.
• 12:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Universal Monsters and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.
• 12:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>What happened from there is that the movies tended to get a lot more realistic.
• 12:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So you had Night of the Living Dead, and you had some more grisly kind of films happening in the 70s as a result of this new threshold that I think the public had for for violence and for terror and mayhem, from reality.
• 12:50
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And in that new landscape of mayhem, there was also a return to the supernatural.
• 12:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Horror was not just replicating the horrors of what had been seen daily on the news.
• 13:01
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A new big bad was also coming to the forefront.
• 13:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Satan himself.
• 13:10
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Although we associate the Satanic panic with the 80s, it was the 1970s horror films that started planting the seeds.
• 13:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Satanism was kind of something people were curious about and curious to explore in a way that probably cinema hadn't seen before that.
• 13:29
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Released in 1979,The Amityville Horror comes on the heels of the holy trinity of horror...
• 13:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Rosemary's Baby, and The Exorcist, and The Omen, which is this idea of the devil is taking over.
• 13:43
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The devil is going to come into our lives in our most intimate places.
• 13:47
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We're talking about like in The Exorcist, it's a mother and child in their home.
• 13:51
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In The Omen, it is a child that you've adopted.
• 13:54
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And then in Rosemary's Baby, it's literally inside your own body.
• 13:58
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Amityville became a classic by association.
• 14:01
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's been swept up in the glory of films like The Exorcist or The Shining.
• 14:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's like, well, if you can't watch those or you've watched those too many times, maybe give The Amityville Horror a try.
• 14:11
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The supernatural and the Satanic became a new, reliable source of on-screen evil, and one that could be vanquished, but only by the Catholic Church.
• 14:24
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There's a whole subplot in the film about a priest, Father Delaney, played by a wonderfully over-the-top Rod Steiger, who tries to convince his higher ups that they are the only ones who can save the Lutzes from the demon goo.
• 14:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I am not some pink cheeked seminarian who doesn't know the differencebetween the supernatural and a bad clam.I am a trained psychotherapist.I went into that house and what I saw there was real.What I felt there was real and what I heard there was real!Now, gentlemen, I have a family in my parish that's at great risk,and they are facing real danger. The role these priests are playing is what really ties it to 70s horror.
• 15:07
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And maybe one of the reasons it doesn't hold up so well now, because we're not so concerned with that.
• 15:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Also, we're not looking at priests like heroic figures the way we were in the 70s.
• 15:17
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Here the priests are the authority, the establishment, our protectors, but they're also vulnerable.
• 15:27
  <i: Feeding the Monster>If even they are susceptible to this evil.
• 15:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>If it can get Father Delaney even when he's not in the house anymore, then this is a really powerful being, and it can get me anywhere.
• 15:39
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In a way, The Amityville Horror really puts its authority figures through the wringer.
• 15:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Father Delaney's persecuted by the forces of the house, but the most affected member of the family is George Lutz, the patriarch.
• 15:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Oh, no.Oh, no!I'm coming apart!Oh, mother of God, I'm coming apart! Neither of them win.
• 16:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The house wins at the end.
• 16:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The house is bad and that's it.
• 16:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And that's all we need to know.
• 16:10
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And it doesn't matter what we do.
• 16:10
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This house is going to continue to be bad.
• 16:14
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And so allowing them to escape the house, but not really exact any change, allows this house to continue being evil, no matter who moves into it.
• 16:25
  <i: Feeding the Monster>While he's trying very hard to keep it together and protect the family, George starts losing it and he becomes the threat.
• 16:35
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I can't really relate to a house besieged with flies or a, you know, blood running down the walls, but a dad who's sort of losing it, and a parent who is supposed to be your safe space, becoming an unknowable threat that you can't connect with.
• 16:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The idea that you're protector becomes your predator is certainly the purest horror there is.
• 16:59
  <i: Feeding the Monster>At the end of the film, George has failed.
• 17:02
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He has to be pulled out of the demon bog, and it's Kathy who drives everyone away to safety.
• 17:14
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The film was a runaway success.
• 17:17
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It grossed over $86 million on a budget of only $4.6 million.
• 17:22
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Huge numbers for an independent horror film.
• 17:25
  <i: Feeding the Monster>If you look at the time span between the actual murders happening in that house to the book being written to the movie coming out, it feels like a much longer period of time than you'd think.
• 17:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But it's only a few years.
• 17:35
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So when you went to seeThe Amityville Horror in 1979, it was a fairly recent true crime story, and I think that captured the imagination of a lot of people.
• 17:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It meant that people could come out of the cinema and buy the book.
• 17:50
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They could hear from the actual paranormal investigators who worked on the case.
• 17:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They could see the Lutzes on talk shows.
• 17:57
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They could watch James Brolin and Margot Kidder give interviews too.
• 18:01
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There was a way to kind of gorge yourself on that story that you couldn't with other horror movies.
• 18:08
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Amityville Horror became larger than just one horror movie.
• 18:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It became modern folklore.
• 18:15
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I had a gang of older brothers who would go see these movies and then scare me with the stories of these movies, like Halloween was a bedtime story before it was a movie to me.
• 18:25
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And, Amityville Horror was definitely one of those.
• 18:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>People wanted to believe it was true.
• 18:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>After all, there was a book and a movie and real people involved.
• 18:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It was a shame then that it was all a scam.
• 18:42
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There were no demon voices.
• 18:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There was no satanic goo.
• 18:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>What allegedly happened was this: the Lutzes did buy the house where the DeFeo murders had happened.
• 18:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They did leave 28 days later after some creepy but totally Satan free experiences.
• 18:59
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But then they got contacted by the DeFeo murderer's defence attorney.
• 19:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He had an idea the Lutzes should write a book saying that they'd experienced a violent haunting in the house.
• 19:11
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Then he'd used that to defend his client.
• 19:16
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The Lutzes saw dollar signs and sold the rights to their amped-up story to journalist Jay Hanson for about a hundred grand.
• 19:23
  <i: Feeding the Monster>When his book and then the movie and then its first few sequels started earning gazillions, George Lutz felt short changed.
• 19:32
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Soon everyone involved was suing each other.
• 19:35
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Lutz actually took Dino De Laurentiis, the producer of the original movie, all the way to court.
• 19:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He argued, you can't keep making these movies based on our experience, and that what ends up happening is he loses because the judge says, well, people don't associate Amityville with the Lutzes.
• 19:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They associate it with the real life murders of the DeFeos as well as the supernatural properties.
• 19:59
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The case got thrown out, and that opened the floodgates for basically anyone to make Amityville movies.
• 20:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You can make one too listeners, as long as the films don't reference the Lutz family or their alleged real life experiences, you can use the image of the house and even the town's name.
• 20:17
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So if you go into the Lutz territory, you're going to get sued.
• 20:20
  <i: Feeding the Monster>If you just say Amityville and the house or anything supernatural, or the DeFeo murders, then you are clean and gold, and all of a sudden now we've got the supernatural vibrator movie.
• 20:32
  <i: Feeding the Monster>More on what that means and how we got from two family tragedies to the Amityville Karen after the break.
• 20:45
  <i: Feeding the Monster>MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 20:54
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We stream movies, we produce them.
• 20:56
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We release them in theatres. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs and brilliant first timers.
• 21:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We've always got something new for you to discover, and regular MUBI Podcast host Rico Gagliano is here to recommend some of those brilliant gems that populate the MUBI-verse.
• 21:16
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Yes, it's always nice to pop into the middle of your episodes.
• 21:19
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Thanks for having me.
• 21:21
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's like I'm letting you come into your own show, isn't it?
• 21:24
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You know, I mean, it's like if I was renting you an Airbnb, I wouldn't just presume I could pop in willy nilly.
• 21:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But let me tell you.
• 21:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So the thing that I want to point you to this week is a group of films that we are calling 'Featured on the MUBI Podcast'.
• 21:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You can find this at MUBI.com and it's pretty self-explanatory.
• 21:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's movies that we've featured previously on the MUBI Podcast, so Perfect Days I did an interview with Wim Wenders, the director of that amazing film.
• 21:48
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Priscilla, did a great interview with Sofia Coppola about that amazing film.
• 21:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I just realised that we have like, some of the best movies of the last year are on MUBI.com, and I'm pretty proud of it.
• 21:58
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Do you know what? Actually the film that I absolutely was obsessed with when it came out and saw in its original screening at the Cannes Film Festival, was Aftersun, the debut feature by Charlotte Wells.
• 22:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I will always cherish the memory of a whole roster, about 200 film critics in France.
• 22:19
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Coming out of the screening, everyone weeping and calling their father almost at the same time.
• 22:24
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Oh, Aftersun melted the hearts of the most hardened critics.
• 22:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That movie, too, is part of the collection'Featured on the MUBI Podcast' in many countries.
• 22:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>To find out which titles are playing where you live, you can check the show notes of this episode.
• 22:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Speaking of which, let's get back to the basement hellmouth.
• 22:42
  <i: Feeding the Monster>What are the main ingredients of an Amityville Horror movie?
• 22:47
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Let's make this into a list.
• 22:49
  One: a haunted house.
• 22:51
  One: Maybe the original one in Long Island.
• 22:51
  One: Or just any house.
• 22:55
  Two: a cursed object of some kind.
• 22:58
  Three: the word Amityville somewhere in the title.
• 23:01
  Three: And four...
• 23:03
  Three: I found all of the best Amityville films have this element.
• 23:06
  Three: Which, Anna, you're going to love this.
• 23:08
  Three: - Hmm?
• 23:08
  Three: - Incest.
• 23:12
  Three: The films that have incest in them are often the weirdest, wackiest, most gonzo enterprises.
• 23:19
  Three: Wait, how has it taken us almost 40 minutes to get to incest?
• 23:26
  Three: That debuts in the sequel, so Amityville 2: The Possession, which, of course is a sequel, but it's actually depicting the original murders of the DeFeo family, and it's very much brother and sister are getting down.
• 23:41
  Three: The original Amityville film was one of the most successful independent films ever made.
• 23:47
  Three: But no one could have predicted that its profitability would actually transform it into one of the most amorphous, sometimes pervy and often derided horror "franchises".
• 23:59
  Three: Horror fans don't even like calling it a "franchise".
• 24:02
  Three: People really want to disavow any of these independent, sort of straight to streaming, VOD releases.
• 24:09
  Three: So when you hear me call it a "franchise" assume that I'm doing quotation marks every time I say it.
• 24:19
  Three: There is the canon, which lasts until about the 90s, and a remake from 2005 starring Ryan Reynolds as George Lutz.
• 24:28
  Three: Well, houses don't kill people. This remake has become known in the horror community as a story about Ryan Reynolds abs.
• 24:38
  Three: And I'm not really kidding.
• 24:40
  Three: Like, that is what this movie is known for.
• 24:43
  Three: Oh my goodness.
• 24:44
  Three: It's like a 12 pack and he's just constantly walking around in the rain shirtles, ooooh.
• 24:49
  Three: The Amityville films sort of fizzled out after this.
• 24:53
  Three: But despite Amityville essentially becoming haunted house public domain IP after George Lutz lost his case against the producers of the original film, the floodgates didn't open until the late 2010s.
• 25:06
  Three: The vast majority of these Amityville films come after a particular point, when Frank Khalfoun'sAmityville: The Awakening gets announced in 2011, and ultimately it wasn't shot until 2014.
• 25:19
  Three: It wasn't released until 2017, but this was the title that sort of reactivated the franchise because we get all of the knockoffs where it's like,"Amityville is popular again, we should make a direct to video knockoff that we can use to profit" like the couple of years preceding the pandemic is when all of a sudden, we just get this influx of what appear to be about 5 to $10,000 movies that are just like Amityville: Whatever.
• 25:47
  Three: There's a lot of them.
• 25:49
  Three: Too many for one episode, but it is a fun Wikipedia deep dive.
• 25:54
  Some favourites: favourites in quotation marks, of course.
• 25:58
  Some favourites: There's the Amityville Vibrator from 2020...
• 26:01
  Some favourites: A softcore porn like there's full frontal nudity, there's simulated sex acts.
• 26:07
  Some favourites: It's quite raunchy, but it also has a kind of meta awareness where it is actually poking fun at previous Amityville films in a very knowing way.
• 26:19
  There's also <i: Amityville>KarenGod! Good help is so hard to find.I might have to just fire you right now. Which is riffing on, you know, the whole idea of a Karen who lives in the suburbs.
• 26:32
  There's also <i: Amityville>And Amityville Ghost Toilet where someone dies strangled by a possessed roll of toilet paper.
• 26:39
  There's also <i: Amityville>In lieu of a clip let's just take a moment here to digest that image.
• 26:45
  There's also <i: Amityville>There's Amityville in Space andAmityville Werewolf, Amityville VampireAmityville Cult, you get the point.
• 26:53
  There's also <i: Amityville>We're not on Long Island anymore.
• 26:53
  There's also <i: Amityville>We're not even on planet Earth.
• 26:58
  There's also <i: Amityville>And most of these films get somewhere between a half star and 1.5 stars out of five for me.
• 27:04
  There's also <i: Amityville>So they are unabashedly, often not good movies.
• 27:09
  There's also <i: Amityville>The increasing ridiculousness of these films has become a running joke in the horror film community.
• 27:14
  There's also <i: Amityville>My magazine, Fangoria, does an annual awards show called The Chainsaw Awards, and in 2023, we installed a new category called 'Best Amityville'.
• 27:22
  There's also <i: Amityville>Because there were 40 something Amityville movies to choose from just that year alone.
• 27:27
  There's also <i: Amityville>The contenders were wide and varied.
• 27:29
  There's also <i: Amityville>Anybody with a dollar and a dream can make an Amityville movie.
• 27:32
  There's also <i: Amityville>We now introduce a brand new Chainsaw Award in a category that has hadundeniable impact on the genre, inspired by a franchiseas old as Fangoria itself.A rallying cry against corporatism and a firm statementon the iron fist of IP driven media.The groundbreaking first ever nominees of the prestigious Chainsaw Awardfor Best Amityville are...Amityville Christmas Vacation, won, by the way.
• 27:57
  There's also <i: Amityville>In 2024 if you see a movie with Amityville in the title, you know you're in the hands of some kind of huckster who is trying to get over.
• 28:05
  There's also <i: Amityville>And I don't say that as a negative.
• 28:06
  There's also <i: Amityville>Horror, historically, is rife with hucksters who are looking for a gimmick to get their movie out and get asses in seats, right?
• 28:13
  There's also <i: Amityville>In the 1930s, there was producer Carl Laemmle, who'd keep nurses on standby in movie theatres when he screened Dracula and Frankenstein in case people passed out from fear.
• 28:24
  There's also <i: Amityville>And in the 1950s, gimmick king William Castle installed buzzers in some seats of showings of The Tingler to incentivise people screaming in fright.
• 28:33
  There's also <i: Amityville>As Joe Lipsett says, in a way, the Amityville franchise exists in this weird IP vacuum where anything is possible.
• 28:42
  There's also <i: Amityville>I wanted to see what people do with a kind of intellectual property free for all.
• 28:49
  There's also <i: Amityville>Like you can make an Amityville film.
• 28:49
  There's also <i: Amityville>What will you choose to do with it?
• 28:53
  There's also <i: Amityville>And in some ways, when we introduce something like a vampire into the mix or when we take the franchise into space, there's something kind of fun about that, because everybody gets to put their own unique take on it.
• 29:06
  There's also <i: Amityville>Every time I see an Amityville movie, I think that the spirit of the horror huckster is alive.
• 29:10
  There's also <i: Amityville>Making the Amityville films in their own way, a triumph for independent film.
• 29:18
  There's also <i: Amityville>But even though the Amityville ghosts were a sham, there were real people involved.
• 29:24
  There's also <i: Amityville>And while some of them benefited hugely, like the author of the book and the movie producers and the real estate market, others didn't.
• 29:32
  There's also <i: Amityville>George Lutz, in particular, was so concerned with continuing to profit off of this and continuing to take ownership of this story.
• 29:41
  There's also <i: Amityville>But the rest of the Lutz family, particularly the children, not so much.
• 29:46
  There's also <i: Amityville>I think the people who did not benefit from this are the children.
• 29:50
  There's also <i: Amityville>And, you know, Christopher Lutz has talked extensively like he changed his name back to his mother's name because he did not want to be associated with this anymore.
• 29:58
  There's also <i: Amityville>And another party that definitely didn't love to be associated with a haunted house was the town of Amityville itself.
• 30:06
  There's also <i: Amityville>The success of the movie brought murder tourists to their town, attracted by both the grisly real life DeFeo murders and the film.
• 30:14
  There's also <i: Amityville>It's not something that they, understandably, wanted in their city brochure.
• 30:22
  There's also <i: Amityville>But now, over 60 movies in, it's impossible to disassociate the little Long Island town and this cat eyed house from the ghosts and the bleeding walls.
• 30:34
  There's also <i: Amityville>Now and forevermore.
• 30:34
  There's also <i: Amityville>Amityville means horror.
• 30:38
  There's also <i: Amityville>It set a template for horror, and now we are continuing to evaluate that.
• 30:45
  There's also <i: Amityville>The Amityville horror capitalised on a real tragedy and did what Hollywood does best.
• 30:52
  There's also <i: Amityville>It made a story out of it.
• 30:54
  There's also <i: Amityville>The housing market may be as bad now as it was in the 70s, but at least we don't have to deal with Satan goo.
• 31:01
  There's also <i: Amityville>Okay, let's go home. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week.
• 31:17
  There's also <i: Amityville>Follow us to hear more stories about houses and how they haunt us at the movies.
• 31:22
  There's also <i: Amityville>Next week we explore House, the cult Japanese psychedelic horror.
• 31:28
  There's also <i: Amityville>I remember the reaction, especially from the kids.
• 31:32
  There's also <i: Amityville>Oh, finally.
• 31:32
  There's also <i: Amityville>This is a movie for us.
• 31:37
  There's also <i: Amityville>Follow us so you don't fall into the digital basement hellmouth.
• 31:41
  There's also <i: Amityville>Until then, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me, Anna Bogutskaya.
• 31:46
  There's also <i: Amityville>Ciara McEniff is our producer.
• 31:46
  There's also <i: Amityville>Christian Coons is our editor.
• 31:51
  There's also <i: Amityville>Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick.
• 31:55
  There's also <i: Amityville>If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, even if it's from the basement satanic bog.
• 32:02
  There's also <i: Amityville>And if you've got questions, comments, or just want to tell me about what's lurking in your basement, I would love to hear it.
• 32:09
  There's also <i: Amityville>Seriously.
• 32:09
  There's also <i: Amityville>Email us at podcast@mubi.com This show is executive produced by Rico Gagliano, John Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca.
• 32:20
  There's also <i: Amityville>And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned on this very podcast subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening.
• 32:32
  There's also <i: Amityville>Stay out of the basement.