The Amityville Horror film series is a series of American horror films that currently consists of 18 films. The films center on events in a haunted house in Amityville, New York, as depicted in Jay Anson's 1977 book of the same name. The first film, released in the summer of 1979, was a major box office success, and went on to become one of the most commercially-successful independent films of all time. A series of sequels would be released throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s through various distributors; some of the films received theatrical distribution, while others were direct-to-video releases. In 2005, a re-imagining of the first film was released.
Starting in 2011, there was a resurgence of low-budget direct-to-video independent films based on the Amityville events.
In 2017, The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films distributed the first major theatrical Amityville film since the 2005 re-imagining, Amityville: The Awakening, which was filmed in 2014. It was released theatrically in Ukraine on July 27, 2017, and in the United States on October 28, 2017.
Video The Amityville Horror (film series)
Films
Overview
The first film in the series, The Amityville Horror (1979) chronicles the events of Jay Anson's novel, in which the Lutz family finds their new home in Amityville, New York, to be haunted; the house had been the site of a mass murder by Ronald DeFeo Jr. in 1974. The following film in the series Amityville II: The Possession, is a prequel based on the book Murder in Amityville by Hans Holzer, and documents the purported supernatural events in the home that led DeFeo to murder his family. The third installment, Amityville 3-D is set after the events of the first film, and was released in 3D.
In 1989, the fourth installment, Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, was released as a made-for-television film, and documents hauntings stemming from a floor lamp that was in the home at the time of the DeFeo murders. The Amityville Curse, released in 1990, follows a group of teenagers who spend the night in a former rectory in Amityville where a priest committed suicide; this installment was set entirely in a different house. Amityville: It's About Time, released in 1992, focuses on a haunted clock that a family from Los Angeles, California takes into their home from an estate sale in New York. The fifth film in the series, Amityville: A New Generation, also utilizes a haunted object as a main component of its storyline: It follows a man who purchases a mirror possessed by the spirit of his father, who also murdered his family in the Amityville house with a shotgun, not dissimilar to DeFeo. Amityville Dollhouse (1996) follows a family haunted by spirits unleashed from a doll house replica of the Amityville home.
In 2005, a remake of the 1979 original film was released theatrically. Six years later, in 2011, The Amityville Haunting was released direct-to-video, an ancillary found footage film that presents supposed home movies that corroborate the family's haunting.
Further films would follow, each released direct-to-video or with limited theatrical releases: The Amityville Asylum (2013; set in Amityville at a psychiatric hospital haunted by ghosts); Amityville Death House (2015; featured yet another explanation for the hauntings); Amityville Playhouse (2016; focuses on a haunted theater in Amityville); Amityville: Vanishing Point (2016; focused on a haunted boarding house in Amityville); The Amityville Legacy (2016; features a haunted toy monkey from the original house), The Amityville Terror (2016; a family moves to Amityville and are tormented both by an evil spirit and the townsfolk who want to keep them trapped there); Amityville: No Escape (2016; college students encounter evil in the forest around Amityville); Amityville Exorcism (2017; evil spirits possess the daughter of a family that moves to Amityville); Amityville: The Awakening (2017; a family moves into the home with an ill son only to find themselves tormented by ghosts who seek to possess the son's body); and The Amityville Murders (2017; a retelling of the original DeFeo murders).
Continuity between films
None of the films are direct sequels to each other, and parts I, II, and IV are the only films based on books from the Amityville book series and establish references with each other. Amityville II is a prequel to the original 1979 film, which tells the story of the DeFeo family's mass murder (though they are named the Montelli family in the film). Amityville 3-D is a sequel to the first film based on the accounts of Stephen Kaplan (renamed John Baxter for the film) who was trying to prove that the Lutz family's story was a hoax. Due to legal disputes with the actual Lutz family the events of the first film could not be directly referenced including the Lutz family themselves who were never referenced by name. The film, oddly, also refers to the murders that happened in Amityville II as the DeFeo murders despite the family having been renamed Montelli.
Of the later films, Amityville: The Awakening (2017) is explicitly a different continuity from all previous films, which are portrayed as existing in-universe: the characters watch and discuss the 1979 film The Amityville Horror, and a character brings DVDs of the sequels and remake to the protagonist's house.
Maps The Amityville Horror (film series)
Release
Producers and distributors
The films have at various times been owned by several different production and distribution companies internationally and in the United States. American International Pictures produced and released the original film, before Orion Pictures bought the rights to the film, as well as II and 3-D. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) now owns films one through 3-D, and released them in a box set in 2005. While 4 was a TV film broadcast on NBC, it has been released multiple times by independent distribution companies in recent years (one of which was Vidmark, who also released Curse; Vidmark is now owned by Lionsgate). It's About Time, A New Generation and Dollhouse have all been released by Republic Pictures.
Box office
Critical reception
See also
- The Amityville Horror (franchise)
Notes
References
Works cited
- Arkoff, Samuel Z.; Turbo, Richard (1992). Flying Through Hollywood By the Seat of My Pants. Birch Lane Press. ISBN 978-1-559-72107-3.
- Smith, Gary A. (2009). The American International Pictures Video Guide. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-786-43309-4.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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