Review: The Amityville Horror

Jay Anson, The Amityville Horror, Pocket Star Books/Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster Inc., New York NY, 2005.

Octavo; paperback; 317pp., with monochrome maps and illustrations, Moderate wear; covers well rubbed and edgeworn; spine creased; text block edges toned with some spotting. Good.

Try this as an interesting experiment: for one week, note everything that happens to you at home without trying to infer any kind of causality. Wake up feeling off-colour? Note it down. Lost your car-keys only to find them in a place you would never think to look? Put it on the list. Heard an odd noise outside during the night? Noted. Discovered an odd bruise on your shin but can’t remember how you got it? Check. Then, at the end of the week, declare that “demons spent the last seven days trying to possess me”, and re-examine your list. You might start to feel a bit freaked out.

Of course, things happen in everyday life that have no essential connexion to each other – they’re just random pieces of happenstance and nothing can be read between them, apart from the fact that they all happened to you. But viewing them through a specific lens makes them look peculiar. It doesn’t make that peculiarity ‘Truth’; it just implies connexions which are suggestive, but which are not actually there. Despite everything that Jung has to say about synchronicity, sometimes random events are just that – random. What does this have to do with Jay Anson’s book? Let’s begin a slow unpack…

This is a book which is absolutely not true. It’s a mask which hides a whole bunch of baloney. In essence it is a distillation of things – occurrences, objects and happenings - which have been lumped together inside a particular frame. That frame bears the label “Demonic Haunted House”, but this is a lie: many of the things within the frame have been broken in order to fit; other things have been left out entirely. This book is the tip of an iceberg of intention and is designed to fool those who read it. It looks shiny and slick, but we’ve learned since 1977 that things which look polished and enticing are probably trying to sell us something. That’s the case here.

What’s interesting about this book is not so much the contents, the badly-written stuff on the pages between the covers, but all the things that are going on around it. Despite the subject matter, the book lies there trying to look innocent, but it’s covering a multitude of sins exposed by examining how it came to be and what happened afterwards. Essentially, butter wouldn’t melt between its pages.

To recap, in late December of 1975, the Lutz family moved into a house on Long Island in New York that was cheaper than expected but in a district that was above their pay grade. They were told that a series of murders had happened in the house a year earlier – thus accounting for the cheap price-tag - but this didn’t faze them, even when told that the furniture in the house was the property of the slain previous owners. While in the house, the family claimed to have experienced strange and sometimes violent phenomena, personality changes, visitations by invisible entities, odd events and curious noises. They attributed all of this to the proximity of an ancient Native American burial ground, the nearby grave of a Salem witch-hunter, and the restless spirits of those slain on the premises, with a touch of brimstone thrown in for good measure. Twenty-eight days after moving in, the Lutz family abandoned the place and relocated to stay with relatives, claiming that it was impossible to live there any longer.

To our jaded Twenty-first Century palates, this sounds like a trite trope-fest of tedious proportions; however, it’s wise to remember that, before this book was published, very little of this kind of tale had shown up in the popular narrative. William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist had appeared in 1971 to general acclaim (with a sequel appearing in 1983), and the Academy Award^TM winning movie adaptation was released in 1973. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary – a novel which capitalises heavily upon the ‘built-upon-a-Native-American-graveyard’ trope - was released in 1983, while Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” has been with us since 1953. Add to this the fact that horror fiction was going through a boom period, with writers like Guy N. Smith (Night of the Crabs), Graham Masterton (The Manitou) and James Herbert (The Rats) making enormous inroads into the zeitgeist, the world was primed and ready for this horror explosion. And explode, it did.

After the events had transpired, Jay Anson was contracted to write them up in book form. He was given a large quantity of recorded discussions – tapes of conversations that George and Kathy Lutz had made, guided by two lawyers who were advising them. Anson took this material, which he claimed was largely disjointed and non-chronological, and massaged the information into a coherent timeframe. Essentially, he took a bunch of random data as recounted by George and Kathy Lutz concerning their time at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville and focused them through a specific and peculiar lens. He is on record as saying that he contacted as many of the people mentioned in the narrative as he could, but there are notable shortfalls in his due diligence. Errors are present in the text – of sense and of chronology – and changes were made between editions of the book as it gained in popularity. It’s clear that the 1977 first edition was simply a later draft that was corrected at least two times in subsequent editions. That first edition was copywritten to “Jay Anson, George Lutz and Kathy Lutz” – is it cynical of me to think that a corrected later edition, with different copyright benefactors, might have been a slick way to cut the Lutzes out of any royalties owing from the property? Probably.

Anyway, it took only a switch from an “old tan Ford” to a “Chevrolet Vega” as Father Mancuso’s car of choice, to force an edition change, before reverting back to the original model in the following edition. Which, for avid readers, begs the question: what type of car was it?

We can’t, of course, ask “Father Mancuso”. This figure is a fraught element of the story. Apparently, the priest that the Lutz’s contacted to come and bless their house was actually named Father Pecoraro; the publishers insist that the Church intervened with an alias in order the protect the cleric’s identity. In the book, it’s clear that, during the recounted events, the priest and the Lutz family never encountered each other. The crucial scene where Father Mancuso arrives at the house and is told to “Get Out!” by a disembodied voice, occurs without either party actually interacting. Now, I don’t care who you are, if you come over to my house while I’m out in my backyard and blithely let yourself in for a spot of ritual purification, the person telling you to “get out” will be me, pure and simple. This scene has been carefully constructed to obscure the fact that the Lutzes never met a priest at their house while they were in residence, and that no priest ever went to the house during that time. Researchers have been able to verify that Father Pecoraro spoke by telephone to the Lutzes before they moved in; during television appearances after the fact he variously claimed that he had visited the house when it was untenanted, that his visits to the house had been uneventful and also – going full volte-face - that the events in the book were real, with the additional detail that he had been invisibly slapped as well as being verbally abused. Which events were factual then? The decision to rename the character “Father Delaney” in the 1979 movie seems like an attempt to dispense with the whole tortured issue.

Other issues arise: the Prologue of the book claims that the Lutz family were in residence from the 23^rd of December 1975, while the first chapter clearly states that they moved in on the 18^th. Subsequent owners of the property were able to verify that all of the fittings and appointments within the house were original – no doors had been torn off their hinges; no windows had been damaged; no balcony railings had been smashed; and no garage doors had been bent and dislocated. Simple consultation with the weather agencies of the time concluded that there was no snowfall or torrential rain of the levels described over that period. There was no bar named “The Witch’s Brew” (or anything else) in the location indicated in the book. No police officers had answered calls from the Lutzes or made patrols in the area over the period. No neighbours had noticed anything unusual during the Lutz residency. And – most damning – the infamous “Red Room” in the basement of the house was simply a small closet, painted in keeping with the rest of the place, and not concealed in any way.

Claims that the house had been built upon a Native American cemetery, designed to dispose of the mad and the diseased, were disputed by the local Shinnecock population. A burial ground had been designated somewhere in the region but had been abandoned early on after torrential floods had caused the river to break its boundaries and erode the site – that’s all, folks. Nothing to see here. The reference to John Ketcham in chapter 11 is a confusion between several families and individuals of that name who lived in, or moved through, the Amityville area since the first white settlers landed in America – none of them are buried on the Lutz’s old property; certainly, none of the Amityville Ketchams practiced witchcraft in Salem, or attended the Trials there.

A handy template is tacitly offered in the book to slyly inform the reader as to what is taking place. In the Catholic Church, a formula exists to assess levels of demonic interference. First, there has to be an Invitation, or an opening of an individual to the possibility of demonic traffic (in this case we’re told that – somehow - George and Kathy’s fondness for Transcendental Meditation is the key). Then there’s Infestation where the environment surrounding targeted individuals is messed with – knocking, tapping, loud unexplained noises and other poltergeist activity. Following this there’s Obsession, during which the targeted individual starts to harbour dark and dissociative thoughts. Then there’s Vexation, wherein the body of the target is attacked by buffets, cuts and nicks, along with many other distressing ailments which occur and disappear spontaneously. And finally, there’s full-on Possession, during which the body of the target is taken over completely by the outside entity. This system of identification was used in Blatty's book, The Exorcist, and again in the movie of the same name; it was widely discussed after the impact made by those two vehicles and so, of course, it gets jammed in here to ramp up the spookiness.

In the aftermath of their tenancy, the Lutzes engaged a “vampirologist” named Stephen Kaplan to determine the cause of the uproar at the address. The Lutzes were clearly looking for a sympathetic read of the phenomenon, but they had an acrimonious falling-out after Kaplan declared that he was determined to discover and call-out any instance of fraud that he unearthed. It clearly looks as though the Lutzes had something that they’d rather remained hidden. Kaplan and his wife eventually published a book in 1995 that gives a jaundiced reading of the Amityville events.

Subsequently, the Lutzes were given the partisan hearing that they wanted in the form of a visit by Ed and Lorraine Warren. The self-styled “demonologist” and “clairvoyant” – inspiration for all the “Conjuring” and “Insidious” films (and their spin-offs) - roundly declared that the house was bursting with demonic energies and went on to make huge bank on their involvement, all the while boosting the book sales and box-office returns from the movie that launched in 1979. Once the movie hit the silver screen, it was all over bar the shouting. I went to see this film myself when it first came out and it terrified the pants off of me; I can confirm that it was truly a seminal moment for the horror genre. (The 2005 movie, on the other hand, is fine if you’re a big fan of Ryan Reynolds’ abdominal development, but a hot mess, else.)

But is it all real? Well, no – no it’s not. In the follow-up after its release the book prompted many investigations by interested parties, some by television programs and other media outlets, some by amateurs bothered by the inconsistencies between the book editions. There were declarations of shenanigans and some bitter legal fights ensued. It was revealed that the two lawyers who coached the Lutzes on their original taped revelations had met with the couple over a good bottle of red wine and declared that the case was a money-spinner that would reap them great benefits. Researchers working with the Warrens after their moment in the spotlight were told to “make up” material for their reports, the scarier the better, in order to keep popular attention simmering. At the end of the day, George Lutz was forced to amend his stance on the events downgrading the mystery from “absolutely real” to “mostly true”. Which is to say, not at all.

All told, Lutz is on record as saying that he and his family reaped about US$300,000 across several decades, an amount largely eaten into by legal costs and other expenses. The lawyers, the publishers and the film production companies have benefited from the lions’ share of the booty. And certainly, Jay Anson has never had to work another day in his life. Along the way, they created the template for all of the haunted house scenarios to follow in their footsteps.

*****

Fans of the unexplained and the mysterious of course know the story of the Marie Celeste. This ship was discovered adrift at sea in the Nineteenth Century, completely empty of crew and passengers and with signs that, whatever had taken place, it had happened quickly and without warning. Over the years, many writers and researchers have tried to pin down what happened; in essence, they have tried to find a frame that encompasses all of the elements of the mystery, a lens which rationalises all of the myriad details that prompt questions of ‘Why?’. Over the years I’ve read many theories as to what happened to the ship: UFOs; Pirates; Madness Due to Spoiled Grain; Alcoholic Poisoning. None of them seemed to adequately explain each and every recorded detail. The chosen frame didn’t encompass all of the scene. As far as The Amityville Horror is concerned (and, cheekily, Anson named it that in homage to Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”) there is a frame that accounts for all of the goings-on, hidden behind the bland sleekness of this carefully-constructed, sleight-of-hand of a book. If you squint just so through the trashy writing, you can see it too.

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.