All those pious pundits who regularly
lament the decline of faith should examine the history of the horror flick over
the last few decades. Ever since the glory days of The Exorcist and The Omen,
which inspired numerous sequels, remakes, and imitations, religion constitutes
an important element in the form, suggesting the continuing attractions of
faith to the producers and consumers of popular culture.
In a time when a significant body of
believers happily anticipates the end of the world, moreover, supernatural
menaces, usually in some way connected to satanic possession, assume an
increasing relevance in the cinema of terror and dread.
That cultural and temporal context
may explain the appearance of a new remake of the 1979 horror hit, The Amityville Horror, which initially
spawned three remakes, one of them even 3-D. The new version, following in the
footsteps of the remarkably slavish recent copies of Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre (the producers of the latter film, not surprisingly, also made
this picture), sticks closely to the original, adding only a remarkably silly
back story to explain the curse that troubles the inhabitants of that famous
Dutch Colonial with the peculiar windows on the north shore of Long Island.
The picture begins with a montage in
black and white, using newspaper stories and television footage of the actual
incident that first made the house infamous, a young man named Ronald DeFeo’s
inexplicable murder of his entire family. It then recounts the now familiar
story of George and Kathleen Lutz, played this time around by Ryan Reynolds and
Melissa George, who move with their three children into the enormous old house,
which, because of its history, they acquire for an impossibly low price.
Since the present audience benefits
from a previous education in the dangers of Long Island real estate, the rest
of the action proceeds in a most familiar fashion, with a series of ominous
incidents and a gradual accumulation of shocks and frights.
Kathleen’s three children think they
see some unsettling apparitions and the youngest, Chelsea (Chloรซ Grace Moretz),
acquires a new playmate, Jodie, the ghost of one of the murdered DeFeo
children. A babysitter who tells the children the house’s history suffers a
horrible fright and a subsequent breakdown at the hands of the sinister Jodie,
who apparently wants the whole family to join her in death.
Most important, the house begins to
work its influence on George, isolating him from the family, transforming him
from a good-natured, lighthearted joker into a sadistic bully, ultimately
inciting him to attack his wife and stepchildren.
Like the original, the new version
employs a couple of decidedly non-supernatural subtexts to establish its
atmosphere of ordinary reality. If the horror derives from some unearthly
cause, for example, it also grows out of the perfectly understandable problems
of a deteriorating family environment, with a young stepfather attempting to
ingratiate himself with three troubled children who naturally mourn for their
dead father. The tensions and hostilities of that difficult situation in a
sense account for George’s inability to cope with the conduct of the children
and his ultimate transformation into a monster as frightening as the malevolent
presence in the house.
As the original book records, and the
original film shows, the Lutzes actually called in the obligatory Roman
Catholic priest (Rod Steiger) to attempt an exorcism, a ceremony that became
extraordinarily popular in the 1970s after the success of The Exorcist, a movie that apparently inspired the Protestant
Lutzes.
This time around, Philip Baker Hall
plays the priest, but he flees in fear almost immediately, hardly inspiring
faith of any sort — if bell, book, and candle can’t do the job, the Lutzes
must surely be doomed. (His pallid and despairing performance makes one yearn
for Max von Sydow and Jason Miller, who worked with far more conviction in The Exorcist).
The final confrontation with the
haunting house — in a sense the house itself actually influences its
inhabitants as much as any supernatural presences — depends upon a
considerable load of nonsense from the past, with some obvious theft from
another, entirely different horror film, Poltergeist.
The filmmakers use the added material to explain both the visitations that
trouble the Lutzes and the slaughter of the DeFeos, although by then any
rational interpretation seems quite unnecessary — the horror really needs no
logic beyond the sort of problems that trouble numerous families.
Although religion quite properly
offers a solution to evil, oddly it finally fails to withstand the forces that
attack the family, a conclusion that suggests little comfort in these unhappy
times.
The Amityville Horror (R), starring
Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jesse James, Jimmy Bennett. Chloรซ Grace Moretz,
Rachel Nichols, Philip Baker Hall; screenplay by Scott Kosar, based upon a
screenplay by Sandor Stern, based upon the book by Jay Anson; directed by
Andrew Douglas. Cinemark Tinseltown,
Loews Webster, Pittsford Plaza Cinema, Regal Culver Ridge, Regal Eastview,
Regal Greece Ridge, Regal Henrietta
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2005.
