The Amityville haunting is a modern folk story based on the true crimes of Ronald DeFeo Jr. On November 13, 1974, DeFeo shot and killed six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, on the south shore of Long Island, New York. He was convicted of second-degree murder in November 1975. In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into the house. After 28 days, the Lutzes left the house, claiming to have been terrorized by paranormal phenomena while living there. These events served as the historical basis for Jay Anson's 1977 novel The Amityville Horror, which was followed by a number of sequels and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1979. Since then, many films have been produced that draw explicitly, to a greater or lesser extent, from these historical and literary sources. As Amityville is a real town and the stories of DeFeo and the Lutzes are historical, there can be no proprietary relationship to the underlying story elements associated with the Amityville haunting. As a result of this, there has been no restriction on the exploitation of the story by film producers, which is the reason that most of these films share no continuity, were produced by different companies, and tell widely varying stories. The Amityville Horror, released in the summer of 1979, was a major box office success, and went on to become one of the most commercially successful independent films of all time. A series of sequels would be released throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s through various distributors; some of the films received theatrical distribution, while others were direct-to-video releases. In 2005, a re-imagining of the first film was released. Beginning in 2011, there was a resurgence of low-budget direct-to-video independent films based on or loosely inspired by the Amityville events. In 2017, The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films distributed the first major theatrical Amityville film since the 2005 re-imagining. , which was filmed in 2014. It was released theatrically in Ukraine on July 27, 2017, and in the United States on October 28, 2017.
Films
Overview
The first film to be inspired by the story of the Amityville haunting, The Amityville Horror chronicles the events of Jay Anson's novel, in which the Lutz family finds their new home in Amityville, New York, to be haunted; the house had been the site of a mass murder by Ronald DeFeo Jr. in 1974. The following film in the series Amityville II: The Possession, is a prequel based on the book Murder in Amityville by Hans Holzer, and documents the purported supernatural events in the home that led DeFeo to murder his family. The third installment, Amityville 3-D is set after the events of the first film, and was released in 3D. In 1989, the fourth installment, Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, was released as a made-for-television film, and documents hauntings stemming from a floor lamp that was in the home at the time of the DeFeo murders. The Amityville Curse, released in 1990, follows a group of teenagers who spend the night in a former rectory in Amityville where a priest committed suicide; this installment was set entirely in a different house. Amityville: It's About Time, released in 1992, focuses on a haunted clock that a family from Los Angeles, California takes into their home from an estate sale in New York. The seventh film in the series, Amityville: A New Generation, also utilizes a haunted object as a main component of its storyline: It follows a man who purchases a mirror possessed by the spirit of his father, who also murdered his family in the Amityville house with a shotgun, not dissimilar to DeFeo. Amityville Dollhouse follows a family haunted by spirits unleashed from a doll house replica of the Amityville home. In 2005, a remake of the 1979 original film was released theatrically. In 2017’s Amityville: The Awakening, which received a limited theatrical release, a family with an ill son moves into the home and find themselves tormented by ghosts who seek to possess the son's body. Further films would follow, each released direct-to-video or with limited theatrical releases: The Amityville Haunting ; The Amityville Asylum ; Amityville Death House ; Amityville Playhouse ; Amityville: Vanishing Point ; The Amityville Legacy, The Amityville Terror ; Amityville: No Escape ; and Amityville Exorcism.
Continuity between films
None of the films are direct sequels to each other, and parts I, II, and IV are the only films based on books from the Amityville book series and establish references with each other. Amityville II is a prequel to the original 1979 film, which tells the story of the DeFeo family's mass murder. Amityville 3-D is a sequel to the first film based on the accounts of Stephen Kaplan who was trying to prove that the Lutz family's story was a hoax. Due to legal disputes with the actual Lutz family the events of the first film could not be directly referenced, including the Lutz family themselves who were never referenced by name. The film, oddly, also refers to the murders that happened in Amityville II as the DeFeo murders despite the family having been renamed Montelli. Of the later films, Amityville: The Awakening is explicitly a different continuity from all previous films, which are portrayed as existing in-universe: the characters watch and discuss the 1979 film The Amityville Horror, and a character brings DVDs of the sequels and remake to the protagonist's house. The Amityville Murders serves as a loose prequel to the 1979 film and a retelling of the original DeFeo murders.
Release
Producers and distributors
The films have at various times been owned by several different production and distribution companies internationally and in the United States. American International Pictures produced and released the original film, before Orion Pictures bought the rights to the film, as well as II and 3-D. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer now owns films one through 3-D, and released them in a box set in 2005. While 4 was a TV film broadcast on NBC, it has been released multiple times by independent distribution companies in recent years. Multicom Entertainment Group owns distribution rights to Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, It's About Time,A New Generation and Dollhouse.
