“We now appreciate good things more,”

October 31, 2017 10:44 PM

The True Twisted Story of the Amityville Horror
posted by the man of twists and turns (29 comments total)

Huh. Stops just short of Danny Lutz, who will convince you of something with his documentary though maybe not quite what he thinks he's convincing you of - maybe something a bit realer and darker.

Also does mention the Warrens. Boy would I like to see a The Conjuring type film but where they are treated like the utter frauds they are.
posted by Artw at 10:56 PM on October 31, 2017 [6 favorites]

I read the book shortly after it was released and under the influence of the considerable hype re it being a true story. Further, I was just 23 (i.e., not yet operating with a fully-formed adult brain) and as mentioned in the article, things were different back then. "American culture was awash in superstition. ...the onslaught of upsetting news had led everyone to question conventional facts and truth. It was unclear whether the stable laws of the universe still held". So, I was primed to be terrified.

I was alone in the house my then-husband and I had recently purchased when I started reading early in the day, stretched out on the sofa in front of an open window. Over the course of the day/passing of the chapters, I closed the windows and curtains and moved to increasingly less exposed spots, finally settling on the floor, back to the wall, in a corner of the living room, scared witless.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door to the attic slowly open. The thing is, that door was always locked. Before we bought the house, we noticed during viewings that the previous owners kept the door locked, so we continued the practice, joking that they must have had "reasons". I was so terrified I literally couldn't move or make a sound. I hadn't been that paralyzed by fear when we walked into our apartment mid-burglary and had been tied up at gun point. I just stared at the back of the door awaiting my fate.

After a prolonged pause, my cat, Wally, hopped down the final step and did that exaggerated slow stretch cats do when they wake up. If I didn't know better, I could swear he had a smirk on his little face and that he was deliberately fucking with me.

That couldn't happen to me now, of course. I'm an atheist with no expectations re an afterlife/reason to believe in ghosts, dismiss out of hand everything associated with "the paranormal" as bullshit, and assume that there is an actual explanation for the "unexplainable". An unfortunate consequence of this mindset is that I can no longer experience the thrill of a good horror story—or the rush of relief that follows when the horror of the unknown turns out to be a grey cat.
posted by she's not there at 12:58 AM on November 1, 2017 [28 favorites]

I'm sitting here alone, in the dark, wondering how did your cat open a door that is always locked?!
posted by straight at 1:08 AM on November 1, 2017 [29 favorites]

Although my ex never copped to it, I assume he neglected to lock the door after moving boxes upstairs. But I'm not ruling out the possibility that Wally was, in fact, the instigator of a deliberate prank.
posted by she's not there at 1:20 AM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

I'm sitting here alone, in the dark, wondering how did your cat open a door that is always locked?!

Personally, I'm convinced that cats are in league with the occult. My cat has scared the shit out of me many a time by staring fixedly at an empty corner. Clearly he sees something that's invisible to me.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 1:24 AM on November 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

Kliban figured out the mystery re what cats see in corners years ago. Perhaps this will ease your mind.
posted by she's not there at 1:35 AM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

I was 12 when I read The Amityville Horror (the Wikipedia page is interesting additional reading). I liked ghost stories at the time and the "true story" part was really the hook that set the book apart from a marketing point of view.

I guess it was an early example of a "True Story" in the Cohen Brothers/'Fargo' sense - but the linked story is a little coy on some details: did the Lutz family - together with Jay Anson - deliberately buy the DeFeo property so that they could fabricate a story about being spooked out of there?

Quite a lot of what Anson describes in a book are really just examples of the kind of spooky sounding events and observations that we occasionally witness in any house: unexplained noises, dog reluctant to go into a room and so on. And most of us live somewhere where there is absolutely no grounds to believe there was previous bad stuff happening. Normally we tell ourselves - and especially our children - that there is nothing to worry about. But what was the impact of concocting all this material into a book, actually fleeing the house, calling a press conference and publishing a book - on the 3 children - who were aged 5,7 and 9 years old at the time? I think actually, the horror element lies in that question.
posted by rongorongo at 2:49 AM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

I have no belief in the supernatural either, but I still intermittently get scared of ghosts in the dark. I just embrace it as a fun joke my brain has decided to play on itself and try to roll with the sensations.
posted by Scattercat at 2:56 AM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

When the story took place, I lived about 12 miles away, and was 9 years old.
My parents were very dismissive of the whole thing, convinced it was a scam from the start. "They dreamed it up with their lawyer over a bottle of wine" was my mother's take.
I don't remember my fellow kids being that into it.

Two decades later, though, I did PhD work on Gothic literature.
posted by doctornemo at 4:21 AM on November 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

The entire article could have been two sentences:
"The Lutz family was seeking to milk the un-evidenced claims for everything they could.
The Warrens have been well-known to be blatant con artists for decades, and their involvement almost singlehandedly refutes the supernatural claims."
posted by mystyk at 4:57 AM on November 1, 2017 [7 favorites]

I, too, read it shortly after its release (mid-1980s) after finding it in the non-fiction section of my junior high library in my early teens; I hadn't read much horror at all, other than probably "Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark", and Amityville's obviously true story -- it says it is right on the cover, and it was in nonfiction! -- really creeped me out, like, the pig in the window with red eyes gave me nightmares. As the article hints at, as far as a scary story goes it's pretty tame (people saw weird things and got scared!), but the supposedly factual nature of the haunting is what really made it creepy for me.
posted by AzraelBrown at 4:59 AM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

A uniquely American horror story.
posted by tommasz at 6:33 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

"I read the book shortly after it was released and under the influence of the considerable hype re it being a true story. Further, I was just 23 (i.e., not yet operating with a fully-formed adult brain) and as mentioned in the article, things were different back then. "American culture was awash in superstition. ...the onslaught of upsetting news had led everyone to question conventional facts and truth. It was unclear whether the stable laws of the universe still held". So, I was primed to be terrified."

Change the year to 1999, change "American culture was awash in superstition" to "we didn't use the Internet the same way then as now". Leave the age the exact same and you have me and the Blair Witch Project. I eventually got confirmation that it wasn't real shortly before I saw it in the theater but that didn't do much to diminish the experience.

Many people appreciate the feeling of being scared, and there's always gonna be someone to capitalize on that in a new and intriguing way. Fortunately there will always be 23-year-olds around as well.
posted by komara at 6:43 AM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

I would not read the book back in the day because I knew it would scare the crap out of teenaged me. Now, I know what I'm taking to the beach next summer!
posted by JanetLand at 7:01 AM on November 1, 2017

Also does mention the Warrens. Boy would I like to see a The Conjuring type film but where they are treated like the utter frauds they are.

Those two films, especially The Conjuring 2, would be vastly more entertaining if they didn't try to convince me that Demons and Ghost are real.
posted by Beholder at 7:31 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

That couldn't happen to me now, of course.

Oh for sure man.
posted by stinkfoot at 7:33 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Gah. Should be "doesn't mention the Warrens".
posted by Artw at 7:37 AM on November 1, 2017

Also, for those curious, you can enter the street address into Google Maps and see what the house currently looks like.
posted by Beholder at 7:38 AM on November 1, 2017

The horseshit book about the Warrens, The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren by Gerald Brittle, also happens to be one of the books that most badly frightened me when I was in my teens.

Had all these folks just been honest brokers, telling horror stories, they would have been fine, because they knew how to tell a scary story and there is money in that, instead of frauds, which is what they all are.
posted by maxsparber at 7:40 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Kliban figured out the mystery re what cats see in corners years ago. Perhaps this will ease your mind.
posted by she's not there at 1:35 AM on November 1 [+] [!]

Eponysterical.
posted by chavenet at 7:51 AM on November 1, 2017

I grew up surrounded by this story. Played on the same CYO hoops team as Marc DeFeo the year he was murdered by his big brother, and later my parents lived across the canal from the Amityville Horror house for 20 years. I didn't know anyone who believed the silly stories about the house, because we knew immediate neighbors who said it was all BS and because, honestly, the actual mass murder that preceded the haunting hoax was horrific enough on its own.
posted by Lyme Drop at 8:13 AM on November 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

“I’m interested in unexplained... phenomena,” said a father who’d brought his 12-year-old son. “I was here the other night with my other son, and we watched the electric meter for a while—and I swear it slowed down... of course, it could have been the refrigerator.”

This reminds me of the time I was on a historic house tour as a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, with a bunch of the same, and a door swung from slightly ajar to halfway open. There was gasping and squealing, but not from me. I was deeply disappointed, either about the fact that the other kids could believe that was a ghost, or the idea that it was a ghost and that was all it could do in the afterlife.

The late '70s-early '80s were a good time for books and movies about young people who bought their beautiful American dream and found out it was a nightmare. I saw Poltergeist at way too young an age -- I blame HBO -- and the skeletons boiling out of the ground haunted me for the rest of my childhood because I thought one of them was wearing a shirt that belonged to my dad. (Turns out the skeletons were real, too, so that can go ahead and keep haunting me.) But when I thought of that, I made myself think of the end of the movie, where Craig T. Nelson is holding the little girl. He believes her -- the parents believe her -- and they leave the house and never come back. The idea that grownups would take horrors seriously was comforting to me.

Of course, that was at the beginning of the '80s, and I was growing up in a part of the country where adults took demonic activity very seriously indeed. I would come to regret that fact.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:15 AM on November 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

My mother spent my entire childhood reassuring librarians that Yes, That Child Can Check Out Any Book She Chooses. Mom's only rule was that I show her what I had checked out. She would sometimes ask why I'd chosen a particular book but she pretty much just let me read anything and everything. In the mid-70's, I went through a UFO stage, a Titanic/Hindenberg/Disasters phase, a witches phase and Mom would sigh and tell the librarians, "yes, let her check out anything she brings to the counter." And then ask me what I had found interesting in the various books.

One day I brought home the Amityville Horror and for the first time ever my Mom asked if I really thought it was worth my time to read a book. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time (I was 7 when the book came out) and the book scared me to death (and moved me into a true crime phase). When it was extremely overdue at the library and Mom found it wrapped in a towel and shoved behind a giant credenza, she had a long talk with me about buying more house than you can afford, the pressures of second marriages and what other things motivate people to perpetuate fraud for fame and money.

Still prefer a good ghost or witch story to one about demonic possession. Demonic possession just seems so sadly connected to misunderstood emotional and mental disorders.
posted by crush at 8:25 AM on November 1, 2017 [16 favorites]

"American culture was awash in superstition. ...the onslaught of upsetting news had led everyone to question conventional facts and truth. It was unclear whether the stable laws of the universe still held"

Are there any good analyses of what happened to (specifically American) culture in the 70's that led to so much crazy stuff? To vastly oversimplify:

Disruption in the 50's: "I'm going to write poetry and listen to bebop"
Disruption in the 90's: "I'm going to make a website"
Disruption now: "I'm going to get funding to build an expensive machine that makes juice and connects to the Internet for some reason"
Disruption in the 70's: "I'm going to start a cult, have sex with everyone who joins, then persuade them all to kill themselves"

Was it just the drugs? Or a backlash to what had come before? Or something else?
posted by kersplunk at 1:09 PM on November 1, 2017

When I was a kid, this movie scared the crap out of me. It hasn't really held up.

My favorite part is where they actually get away in the end, but the postscript is something like, "The Lutz family left 112 Ocean Avenue for good. They never came back for their belongings."

And I guess that's supposed to sound scary? It's like, OH NO! NOT THEIR BELONGINGS! Like the worst thing that could happen to a family is they have to buy new couches.

Also, this is sort of a classic case where a haunted house really should be the least scary movie villain ever. I mean, all they had to do was leave. It's not like the house was gonna follow them. Although I suppose you could see it as a metaphor for human greed. Wasn't the whole reason they stayed because the house was such a good deal?
posted by panama joe at 1:32 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

There's a bit in King's Danse Macabre where he argues that it's about the horrors of having a mortgage and the costs of home upkeep.
posted by Artw at 1:42 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's like, OH NO! NOT THEIR BELONGINGS!

That rug really tied the room together.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:26 PM on November 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I don’t think it’s the loss of the belongings so much as the implication they were too scared to come back for them, even in the light of day. Kind of reinforces the realism too—suggests that the spooky stuff was totally reproducible, with a convenient added excuse for not actually doing so.
posted by No-sword at 5:46 AM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

The question of why the Lutz's didn't leave the house is a sort of famous joke — Eddie Murphy mocked it pretty extensively in one of his comedy acts — but it's the question that every haunted house writer must address, and Jay Anson used a classical, almost Gothic solution:

For the first part of the novel, the events are not overtly supernatural, just odd, and the meaning of many of them (such as the fact that the family has started sleeping on their stomachs, the position of the murder victims) doesn't become clear until later. For much of the first novel, it's flies, cold spots, weird dreams, any of which can individually be explained away, and are.

The overtly supernatural stuff doesn't start happening until Christmas, all of it spooky, but nothing violent. They attempt to have the house exorcised, but there are hints that George is actually somewhat influenced by the killer, DeFeo, who he resembles.

Things go bananas in early January, and they move out shortly afterwards, having spent less than a month in the house.

I literally spent nine months in an apartment where there were heroin deals taking place in the hallway, so they actually seem to have made a decision to leave relatively quickly once things became overtly threatening.
posted by maxsparber at 6:05 AM on November 2, 2017 [4 favorites]