The Amityville Horror Movie - 2005 Interviews

On November 13, 1973, police received a frantic phone call that led them to a nightmarish crime scene at the DeFeo residence in Amityville, Long Island - an entire family had been murdered in their beds while they slept. In the days that followed, Ronald DeFeo eventually confessed to methodically killing his parents and four siblings with a rifle, saying "voices" in the house drove him to the massacre. One year later, George and Kathy Lutz (played by Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George) and their children moved into the house thinking it would be their dream home. But soon the voices began again. Sleepless nights. Numbing cold. Visions of a murdered little girl. Then George began to do what the voices told him... 28 days after moving in, the Lutzes abandoned the residence - lucky to escape with their lives. 30 years after the shocking real-life events that inspired one of the most popular horror stories of all time, revisit the house that started it all: The Amityville Horror.

That’s what the press release for the 2005 remake says. Only time will tell what audiences say, but most agree that in terms of a horror movie, The Amityville Horror is up for an update. As director Andrew Douglas pointed out, “The Shining came out within the same year as The Amityville Horror — that movie still resonates, but Amityville doesn’t. Today’s audiences want constant thrills.” As a director who’s only done television commercials before this, Douglas feels that he was hired because he’s able to create a certain “look” and get a point across in a very short time.

Brad Fuller, one of the producers, said, “[He got the job] very similarly to the way Marcus Nispel got the job on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We had a great exchange with Marcus on Chainsaw. We were looking for a director on Amityville, and Andrew’s reels were amazing.”

While the new movie does not stay true to the book and takes little from its cinematic predecessor, it has kernels of what the fans have enjoyed over the years: An innocent family moves into a haunted house and 28 days later, they flee in terror after a series of disturbing events.

Jodie the Demonic Pig is, sadly, no more. Now she is a little girl, ala Samara from The Ring. When I asked the producers about this at the film’s world premiere, they both laughed and said there were many, many meetings about Jodie the Demonic Pig. They admitted that people do miss it. “But there was no way we could make a pig scary!”

The real George Lutz, who is still very much alive, has made it no secret that he’s not pleased about this new portrayal of him. At the press junket, producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form were grilled on the subject of the people who lived the story.

Q: Have you contacted the Lutzes to try to get them involved?

Fuller: Very early on MGM said they were going to take care of the Lutzes and for us to just do our thing. If we went too far, they would let us know.

Form: There was also a competing project that Dimension was controlling, which George Lutz was involved in, and we were trying to keep the projects separate. So there was the one that he was involved in which was 25 years later, and there was our project, with the 28 days, which MGM controlled the rights to and the Jay Anson book. So it was a little tough in the beginning.

Q: Did you try the DeFeo family?

Fuller: We reached out to Ronald DeFeo.

Form: We wanted to go see him. We wrote him a letter in jail but he never responded. We only know the research that [screenwriter] Scott Kosar was able to come up with. I mean, there’ s a book out there, The Night the DeFeos Died, that was written all about them. It’s so hard to tell the truth about it; if you go on the Internet there are so many crazy stories and theories.

Q: What is your personal opinion? There have been a lot of reports that the Lutzes were hired by the DeFeo’s attorney to solidify Ronald’s insanity plea.

Fuller: My personal opinion? I think that the Lutzes bought that house, moved in, and I think something happened in those 28 days because I don’t believe that they were that smart, to come up with the whole book thing. Knowing that they were gonna get the book deal, and sell ten million copies, and get out of your house within 28 days and make it all work.

Q: So why do you think nothing has happened in that house since?

Form: Well, that is subject to debate. Some people say that some things have happened. It’s hard for us to find that out, because no one is calling us and telling us what happens in the house.

Fuller: I do know that Missy Lutz came out recently saying that she did have an imaginary friend named Jodie, and George says the same thing. We know that Jodie character did exist when the Lutzes lived there.

Ryan Reynolds says he has no opinion on the matter of the haunting. “I just wanted to tell the story as best I could according to the script. It’s not a biography of George Lutz so I never met George. I never got into what he's like as a man and a person. I know that something awful happened in that house. We know that six murders happened in that house. We know a family moved in there a year later and lasted twenty-eight days; we know that. My job was just to bring that character to life in the script.” But he did admit to me that it gave him some pause: “Yeah, it is a little unnerving knowing that you’re playing someone who has a very famous name and who’s going to be dealing maybe with the repercussions of a movie like this. You obviously don’t want to let anyone down, but at the same time you have to portray him as maybe not the most approachably warm person.”

I’ll say! He’s sort of a taciturn character to begin with, and goes downhill from there. I had to ask, “What is it with you and dogs? You had a run-in with one in Van Wilder; you shot one (albeit a vampiric one) in Blade: Trinity, and now there’s this incident with the family pooch in The Amityville Horror. Is PeTA after you yet?”

Reynolds laughed and said, “That is the best question, ever! PeTA should be after me. But no, I love animals. I love all kinds of animals, and I have two dogs. I guess I’m lucky my dogs don’t know the kinds of movies I’m making, or they’d run when they see me!”

Costar Melissa George didn’t know enough to be afraid of Reynolds, either. I was surprised when she told me, “I didn’t even know it was a remake, actually, when I got the role. I was like, ‘Amityville Horror is a remake? That’s interesting.’ I just thought it was a good story, a good script, and a great role to play as an actress. I did a lot of research by reading the book. Not watching the original films so much, but more so seeing the new evidence that has come up with the coroner’s reports and stuff.”

George told me she “really went for it” in the emotional scenes, and also said during a press conference that she “liked this character, because I like to play a strong woman. This was a difficult role because I felt like I was the audience seeing the movie, witnessing what my character was going through. I felt like I was responsible for what the audience was going to feel when they watch our movie. Like, how does Kathy Lutz behave? That's kind of what we're going to feel as well.”

Emotion. Yeah, fine. Ho-hum. But where are the scares? Believe me, there are a lot of them. As Reynolds told Horror.com, “Audiences what to jump out of their frigging skins! That’s the name of the game in a movie like this. We didn’t want to go for creepy — we wanted to go for terrifying and I think that that’s something we were able to achieve. The story itself is just a terrifying story, so being able to tell it nowadays with this kind of lighting, this kind of camera work, and special effects, is a treat.”

Come April 15, be on the lookout for clocks that stop at 3:15 a.m., possessed people with axes to grind — literally and figuratively, and a ghostly little girl named Jodie who likes to show off her bullet wounds. Hold onto your popcorn!

Article by Staci Layne Wilson