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| By Todd Sokolove |
As you may know, I’m a bit of a fanatic when it comes to the great American haunting known in the cultural zeitgeist as the “Amityville Horror.”
I’ve been a fan of the book since it scared the crap out of me as a kid in the late 70s, and just a few years ago I even had the pleasure of going inside the actual house during a tag sale.
Although a rug from the house’s “sewing room” now adorns my living room, I’ve yet to have anything out of the ordinary happen from it. I do get a kick out of calling it the Amityville Horror Rug.
Daniel Lutz, on the other hand probably wouldn’t step two feet into my living room. As the oldest kid of the first family to move into 112 Ocean Avenue after the brutal murders, he has a lifetime of personal haunts, seemingly paranormal and deeply psychological.
In the new documentary My Amityville Horror, director Eric Walter attempts to exorcise some of Daniel’s demons.
The documentary attempts to do something Daniel Lutz has been unwilling to do for most his life – tell the details of his family’s paranormal experiences during the weeks of their occupancy in the house. What it drives out of Daniel is something even darker. His “family” was not the picture perfect unit portrayed in the 1979 blockbuster movie.
From day one of the move into their new home, this was a family with unusually similar attributes of the murdered Defeos. George Lutz, according to Daniel, was a controlling, commanding, abusive step-father from hell, and possibly literally. Step-dad had a fascination with the occult, and a strong conviction for its power.
The documentary unravels some of these more bizarre tidbits here and there, but the real fun is in the recounting of the events that drove out the Lutz’s from their home only 28 days after moving in. There are plenty of interviews with witnesses from the time of the story, ranging from news investigator Marvin Scott to paranormal researchers Laura DiDio and Lorraine Warren. They expand the usual insight into the hauntings themselves, but the real fun comes from the psychologists hired by the filmmakers to dig deeper.
Daniel is subjected to let his guard down throughout numerous therapy sessions caught on camera and audio recordings. None of them are pretty. Often agitated and quick to defend his story, he’s a prime candidate for advanced level anger management.
Does any of this start to paint a slightly more suspicious element to the most famous haunted house story of our time? The filmmakers seem to want you to think so. By not sticking to just the point of view of the film’s subject, the documentary succeeds in balancing a little “fact or fiction” detective work for the audience to varying success.
Personally, I found some of the first hand accounts, not to mention arguments for their validity, as chilling as anything depicted in the original film and book of the same name. Sure, there there moments of dramatic license, because Daniel is a very intense person to tell the tale. But, one can’t deny the man is, to this day, haunted by something that changed his life forever, and this makes for one hell of an entertaining documentary.
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