Despite Jackson’s iconic The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s go-for-broke Hell House, Anne Rivers Siddons’s beautifully disturbing The House Next Door, and even Marasco’s pioneering Burnt Offerings, the unfortunate fact remains that America’s most iconic haunted house is the title property from The Amityville Horror. Crass, commercial minded, grandiose, ridiculous, this carnival barker’s idea of a haunted house is a shame-train of stupid.
Socialite Patricia Montandon hired a tarot reader for a party but forgot to get him a drink. Furious, he cursed her San Francisco apartment. The Intruders is her all-true account of the party snub…from hell. Credit 82
“George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue on December 18. Twenty-eight days later, they fled in terror.” So begins one of the most promiscuous horror franchises of all time, one that spawned at least six novels (all marketed as nonfiction), as well as books by pretty much everyone who ever crossed the property line.
Amityville’s cottage-industry success stems from the fact that George Lutz stuck to his guns all his life, dishing out movie-ready claptrap from one side of his mouth while claiming it was all true from the other. Reportedly never happy with his share of the proceeds from the original best-selling book and movie, Lutz realized that he could still market his name. And so he did, desperately hoping to pad his bank account with sequel after sequel. After sequel.
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Many people found the original story of demonic possession, goo flowing down walls, and mysterious voices shouting at priests hard to swallow. Those events pale in comparison to the sequels, with their devil pigs riding on the wings of 747s, attacks by fire bats, and evil forces compelling people to rent cars they don’t even want. The Amityville Horror II (1982) was plenty ridiculous, with archangels working as lifeguards to rescue drowning Lutz children, but in the third installment the story went from a simple meal of possessed homes to an all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit. Amityville: The Final Chapter (1985) follows the Lutzes as they ditch their kids and fly around the world on a studio-paid publicity tour, giving interviews to promote the movie. Keeping the franchise going, the Entity (the source of all evil from the first book) goes mobile, following the family everywhere. Fortunately, George Lutz is manly enough to punch and kick it into submission. “I knew this martial arts training would come in handy someday,” he muses. The Final Chapter climaxes in a battle in which George puts the Abomination in a chokehold while his wife and kids form a human chain and channel love power into him. When the Entity finally taps out, the entire family, including Harry the Dog, kick and stomp its corpse into dust.
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It’s an inspirational story. “One day,” author Ken Eulo said in an interview, “I read The Amityville Horror and I thought to myself, oh Christ, I could do this in my sleep.” And so he wrote The Brownstone (1980), which spawned two sequels. He wasn’t the only one. Even poor deceased Jay Anson, a jobbing writer brought on board to write the original Amityville book, wasn’t allowed to rest in peace. His 666 (1981), effectively a smudged photocopy of The Amityville Horror, was published under his name a year after he died.
Sadly, the true story of 112 Ocean Avenue turns out to be worse than what’s in the books. The crime that cursed the Amityville House wasn’t the real-life murders of the DeFeo family. Nor was it that the land was supposedly home to John Ketcham, a warlock who escaped the Salem witch trials. Nor was it a violation of fabricated Shinnecock Indian Nation burial grounds. A 2013 documentary (My Amityville Horror) about Daniel Lutz, who was ten years old when his family moved in, puts a name to the Entity that haunted this house: George Lutz.
George was Kathy Connors’s second husband, and he made it clear he would not invest his time and money in children who didn’t belong to him. George demanded that Kathy’s first husband surrender all parental rights; from then on, he insisted that Daniel and his two siblings call him either “sir” or “Mr. Lutz.” As Daniel said in the documentary, “He’s the biggest asshole you ever could meet.”
Don’t sign the lease! Witch House was a 1945 occult detective novel spruced up for a seller’s market with a new cover by fantasy illustrator Michael Herring. T. M. Wright’s The Woman Next Door was an early standalone novel for the author that deliberately mixed hauntings, ghosts, and child abuse. Walls of Fear was a 1990 haunted house anthology, with a nightmarish cover by rock ’n’ roll artist Jim Warren, edited by Kathryn Cramer, who also edited the 1987 haunted house anthology The Architecture of Fear. Credit 85
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Throughout the books, George and Kathy Lutz claim that the Entity changed their personalities and made them violently aggressive toward their children. But Daniel says that happened plenty of times before they moved in and plenty of times after they moved out. In fact, what happened after they fled was worse. While George and Kathy went on their year-long, round-the-world publicity tour for the movie, Daniel was ditched at a Catholic boarding school, where he claims the priests beat him and tried to exorcize his demons. He was eleven. By his account, those 28 days at 112 Ocean Avenue left him with physical and mental damage from which it took years to recover.
Maybe George, Kathy, and their lawyer concocted the haunting story over a bottle of wine, as the lawyer later claimed, but their children didn’t. If every haunted house is built on the site of a terrible crime, the crime that The Amityville Horror rests on may be child abuse.
Small Town Trauma
You are a Vietnam veteran. You are 6 foot 4, 230 pounds of solid muscle. You can kill a man with your bare hands; you prefer not to. You are driving back to the small town where you grew up, somewhere in the South. Once there, you notice something strange: everyone in town is a sex pervert and a satanist. You reunite with your high school sweetheart. She is a zombie; it takes you a while to figure that out. You are attacked by a dark force. You sing hymns to keep it at bay. You kill a lot of satanists. You kill monsters. You kill some teenagers.
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You are in a William W. Johnstone novel.
Johnstone wrote two hundred books, most of them Westerns and men’s adventure stories. But with his five-part Devil series (1980–92) written for Zebra Books (The Devil’s Kiss, The Devil’s Heart, The Devil’s Touch, The Devil’s Cat, The Devil’s Laughter), Johnstone became a horror novelist. And every one of his horror novels is insane. Characters act in ways that barely resemble human behavior. The carnage flies thick and cartoony, with popped-out eyeballs flying across a room, people’s heads flattening when hit, cats gamboling in loops of human intestines. Johnstone loads his shotgun with tropes—incest monsters, zombie girlfriends, ghost werewolves, killer dolls—and blasts them at the reader again and again until nothing makes sense anymore.