After the DVD player on my computer stopped working last night, midway through THE HORROR OF DRACULA, I decided to jump on to Netflix, and watch something.
I realised that MY AMITYVILLE HORROR, a documentary featuring Daniel Lutz, one of the three children at the Amityville hauntings, was now on Netflix and of course, I had to watch it.
I'm always up for a good ghost story, but I've never believed the story of the Amityville Horror. It's always seemed too trumped up - pardon the pun, considering some of the events said to have happened in the home - to be real.
I remember watching a rather ridiculous Amityville movie about a demonic lamp the night before my dog was to be put to sleep when I was a child, so I have a negative association with Amityville through that - and I am very superstitious with movies, to the point that I have never watched Mark of the Devil since I was in my mid 20s and a pet bird of ours passed away the next day.
However, Amityville as such has always struck me as being a ridiculous hoax. I read the book in my late 20s and found it tedious and unbelievable, and aside from the Jodie shot (red glowing eyes freak me out no matter what) I found the movie likewise laughable.
So I was interested in what Daniel Lutz had to say about the Amityville horror case.
It turns out that Daniel, Christopher, and Missy, the three children who lived at the Amityville house at the time of the hauntings, were not the children of George Lutz, the father. He was in fact their stepfather, Kathy Lutz having married a man before George who fathered all three of the children.
After Kathleen divorced the children's biological father, she dated around for a while, until meeting George Lutz, a bearded ex-marine with a temper and money. Kathleen and George dated for a while, then got married. As a condition for the marriage, However, George wanted to legally adopt the children. The biological father agreed, and stepped into the shadows.
It is important to note this, because the conflict between Daniel and George is a running theme throughout this film - and Daniel is, from what is captured on film - a very troubled, tortured man, who was let down by everyone in his childhood.
Daniel and George clashed constantly, especially because according to Daniel, George had no parenting skills. All that George had were Marine skills, and that was what he employed to discipline the children. The situation became worse when Kathleen and the children moved in with George, and the conflicts only intensified after they moved to the infamous Amity House at 112 Ocean Avenue.
A year before the Lutzes moved in, a man in his early 20s named Ronald "Butch" DeFeo murdered his entire family with a rifle. After murdering his family, DeFeo went to a local bar he frequented and alerted the other patrons that someone had gone in and murdered his family. He claimed he had just discovered their bodies, and was terrified.
When he was arrested, his defense was an insanity plea, claiming that he 'heard' his family plotting against him in their thoughts.
That didn't work, and around the time that it looked like DeFeo might actually get the death sentence, the haunting transpired. Interestingly, DeFeo's defense attorney was aware of, and involved with, the purported haunting.
Daniel, like his brother Christopher in other interviews, maintains that something did happen at the home, but that the books and movies blew it out of proportion, turning the haunting into something that it's not.
Nevertheless, his memory appears to be, at times, confused. For example, he references a "Father Ryan" - that's the name of a Catholic priest in the film, but not the name of any priest involved in the actual case. The priest involved was a Fr. Ralph Pecoraro, who stated that he only conversed with those involved in the Amityville situation over the telephone.
This priest supposedly went to bless the home before the Lutzes moved in, which is a strange move for non-practicing Methodists to take (at least, I think they were Methodists - I can't quite recall, but they were definitely American Protestants, not Roman Catholic), though a wise one considering the murders.
To be fair, Fr. Pecoraro has changed his story over the years (he has since passed on), claiming more involvement than he originally stated he had, up to and including the notion that he saw flies in the room the family turned into a sewing room.
However, the Father's original testimony is that he only spoke to the Lutzes over the phone once, due to the murders.
At another point, he claims to have seen a "cartoon pig" with "laser eyes" and "wolf's teeth" - the infamous "Jodie," a supposed demonic pig that was Missy's childhood friend. It appears that "Jodie" was in reality just a neighbour's cat that liked to wander around the neighbourhood and was obese, causing Butch DeFeo to call her a "pig."
Daniel also claims that he would take a newspaper to the sewing room, and spend time killing dozens of flies, drop the newspaper, run to tell his mother, only to return and find the newspaper gone, along with the corpses of the flies.
I should note that Daniel appears very sincere. I do not doubt a word of it - or rather, I do not doubt that he believes it.
Daniel claims that when he first moved in with George Lutz, that he was digging through George's books and found books on witchcraft, demonology, and transcendental meditation. Christopher, Daniel's brother, has claimed that while the events in the book and film are hoaxes, that George Lutz would do transcendental meditation but instead of chanting a mantra of peace or love, he would chant the name of a demonic entity from one of those old demonology books.
Of course, I myself own books on witchcraft, demonology, and TM, and in the film, Daniel doesn't appear to know much about the books except that they were about those subjects - no titles or details are given, except the general sort of information of "witches worshiping the devil" stuff that is in a number of books on the subject.
Daniel also claims that George could move things with his mind, and cites seeing George do just that with a wrench, when Daniel wasn't supposed to see it happen. When he saw it, he ran to his mother, but his mother felt it was just an overactive imagination at work.
It appears that, whatever happened at 112 Ocean View, the real Amityville Horror was the behaviour of the parents. It is evident that George Lutz was not cut out to be a father, and was abusive towards the children, and that the mother did little to protect them - in fact, Daniel said, he felt he had to be there to protect his mother.
In my own experience, I know how traumatic this can be. While my father is supposedly my biological father (I'd prefer it not be the case), my mother was often either not around or trying to be peacemaker, forcing me to also try to protect her from him. While George was physically abusive, my father only was once - and ceased immediately after I pulled a knife on him and told him to go ahead and hit me, I remember all too well what it made me feel like, and like Daniel said, he's still protecting the 10 year old inside.
His original father had abandoned him, his step-father was abusive and vicious (to be fair, Daniel made it clear that he instigated plenty of trouble, but that he hated George and that George was cruel - Christopher detests him as well) and, when the family became famous, Daniel (and presumably his siblings) were dropped off at a Catholic school for a year while the parents went around the world, onto talk-shows - when they returned, Daniel says, his mother wasn't the same woman and once he was 15, she let him simply walk out and walk away from her and the rest of the family.
He traveled around the country, was homeless in the desert, worked odd jobs and got small apartments, and learned how to play the guitar. He now works for himself in upstate New York.
In a story this tragic, you don't NEED demons. The biological father, George, and Kathleen are evil enough without involving the denizens of hell - if you define utter selfishness as evil, which I certainly do.
I feel sad for Daniel, because he has spent his life as "the Amityville Horror guy," and he tried very hard to escape it, but he could not escape it - that's who he is, through no fault of his own. All of the adults in his life failed him completely.
I can't say that I doubt their stories that George Lutz was involved in some less than positive spiritual activities. I don't believe that the place was necessarily haunted, but it wouldn't surprise me if George Lutz was trying to invoke something that he shouldn't have been messing around with and that it caused some chaos for the family.
No-one living at the home after the Lutzes have reported anything of note happening, and everyone involved does seem to think that whatever was going on, George was the center of it.
There is one part of the film that is darkly comical, and that is the visit to Lorraine Warren, who is a purported demonologist and medium. For some reason, she keeps caged roosters in her home, and the place just looks weird and creepy (and that's ME saying it - I want to live in the Addams house, and I think this place is just weird and creepy). She has a cross with a supposed piece of the 'true cross' in it, and an image of Padre Pio with some of Padre Pio's hair taped to it - the latter of which she credits with keeping her from being destroyed at the haunted house, and claims that an apparition of Padre Pio appeared to her.
I'm a fan of Pio myself, and I borrowed one of his images or holy cards or whatever it was from Mark McDonough when I was going through the terrible spot in my life after I was put in the hospital, lost my flat, etc. and it comforted me - but I find her story of the Padre appearing to her, etc. questionable at best. She seems rather... loopy.
And her home does look very very creepy, and not in a fun or good way.
I genuinely enjoyed the movie as a character study of a man who had a very traumatic and miserable childhood that has led to a lot of pain in his adult life. As an illustration of how badly parents can ruin their children by being selfish and pathetic, you couldn't do better. As far as proving or disproving anything about the haunting - not so much. Again, I believe that Daniel is telling the truth as he believes it.
I just don't necessarily think that anything paranormal happened there.
