You know what’s really scary? Neither do the people behind The Amityville Horror remake.
The story of the Amityville horror has been told and re-told several times over the years. Most famously, there was the book that represents the first telling and the 1979 movie based off of the book. The tale has been pretty soundly refuted as a hoax at this point, but for many years the story of a haunted house that drove a young man to murder his family and then terrorized the next family to occupy it was taken at face value. The murders actually occurred, but the rest of the stuff was fabricated to much financial gain for the “terrorized” family, the Lutz’s. Nevertheless, the Amityville name has been used to entice moviegoers in more than a dozen film projects, including 2005’s remake of the original The Amityville Horror.
First time director, Andrew Douglas, is content to rely on tried and true haunted house imagery and storytelling techniques, rather than bring anything new to the table. The story is a famous one, so he has only so much leeway as far as plot is concerned, but everything from the characters to the imagery to the story beats wither from a lack of creativity. It’s as if he set out to mash up The Shining with Poltergeist while stripping out anything that made those films successful. He tries to get a lot of mileage out of the ghost of the youngest murder victim, who appears frequently throughout the film. Why just her, and none of the other five victims? That’s never explored, nor is her motivation. Ghosts in fiction are typically driven by an all-consuming desire for something, the standard “unfinished business” that informs every action that they take. That is never set up for this little girl, and therefore her actions seem arbitrary and capricious. In most cases, she is clearly doing whatever will help the screenwriter accomplish the scene he wants to create, not fulfilling any internal agenda of her own. She also starts the film following the overused trope of appearing and talking only to the youngest Lutz child. Movies do this because it allows the haunting to start taking place while still allowing for the main (adult) characters to remain in the dark. The child always calmly refers to conversations with the spirit, and the parents are typically like “Oh how cute, little Janie has an imaginary friend!” I can say with certainty that if a pale, rotting little girl with a bullet hole in her head started appearing and talking to my kids, they would promptly freak the fuck out. Chloe Grace Moretz’s character is probably five years old in this movie, and that is plenty old enough that she shouldn’t take for granted that a stranger is in her bedroom, much less one that looks like a zombie.
Unfortunately, nonsensical motivations are not relegated to the youngest Lutz and her dead BFF. The parents of the family are incredibly slow to react to the horrific goings on. Again, the real Lutz’s claimed to have been haunted for a full month before leaving the house, but it never makes sense why they wait that long in the film, particularly when it becomes clear that the children are terrified and in danger. The mother (Melissa George), in particular, sits idly by while the evil house twists the behavior of her husband (a young Ryan Reynolds) to the point that he is openly cruel to his step-children. I understand the concept of people who stay with abusive partners because they have been emotionally manipulated over time, but George was literally just in a healthy relationship with her husband days earlier. The goings on do prompt her to reach out to a local priest for help, but she continues to keep her family in the house even after he bugs out and flees from the house in terror! Was that not clear enough confirmation to grab a hotel room?
If you are going to revisit a well-known story like Amityville, you should aim to bring something new to the proceedings. Outside of some mumbo-jumbo about a sadist pioneer who used to torture Native Americans on the site of the house, the filmmakers add precisely zero to the tale. The result is a stiff, paint-by-numbers horror movie that will have you checking your watch more often than jumping in fright.
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