Adaptation Review: Julie Angelicola

The Amityville Horror (2005)

Director: Andrew Douglas

This film was adapted from two different sources. It is a remake of the 1979 version of The Amityville Horror, which was originally adapted from the novel, The Amityville Horror: A True Story published in 1977. It is one of my favorite books of all time and after seeing both versions of the film I would say the book is worth getting your hands on our of all of them. The 2005 version of the film is very similar to the 1979 version except with obviously better special effects and a few added scenes and characters, such as the babysitter Lisa. Although there are three different sources, I am primarily comparing the book to the 2005 version. The film follows the story of the Lutz family who moves into a dream home that held a brutal 6 person murder of the DeFeo family a year before. The eldest son Ronnie DeFeo killed his parents and 4 siblings in their sleep with a shotgun. The Lutzs are haunted and last only 28 days in the house before moving out.

            They both start off in a similar way, the Lutz family looking at their new dream house and eventually buying it despite the fact they are informed of the gruesome murders that took place in the house only one year prior. George finds an old alarm clock in the basement stuck on the time 3:15 am. We find out later this is the time the family was killed. The clock keeps flipping back to the time throughout the movie which is when a lot of the ‘bad’ things happen to the Lutzs. Things start out normal until the first odd thing to happen is when George, the father starts feeling unusually cold. Throughout the novel and film, George continues to add mass quantities of wood to the stove in the basement trying to heat the house although he is the only one freezing. The most common thread in both is that George slowly goes crazy, being haunted by the angry souls of the murder victims. He sees things, dead people hanging, silhouettes running through the hallways, and reoccurring dreams of the people being shot, sometimes morphing into himself shooting his own family.

            Some other similarities are the fact that the story takes place over the 28 days that the Lutz family survived living in the house. In both the book and film the young daughter Chelsea befriends the deceased little girl Jodi. She sees her ghost and ends up almost dying twice in an attempt to travel with Jodi to see her own dead father. A huge part in the novel is when swarms of flies are crowded around the windows of one upstairs room. This is much more pronounced in the novel versus the film, which only shows it once. In the book, blood seeps and eventually pours down from the walls, out of the faucets, the ceilings, everywhere. It is part nightmare part reality. This happens in the movie but turns into more of George’s visions than actuality.

            In both stories, the wife Kathy seeks help from a reverend at a nearby church. He attempts to do a cleansing of the house but is attacked by the spirits and eventually falls very ill rendering him useless to the family. The phrase, “Katchem em’ & Kill em’ ” appears in both stories but is explored more in the film when Kathy goes to the library and researches the murders as well as her house’s history. She finds out that a man named Katchem brutally murdered over 20 Native Americans and threw them in the lake by the house as well as in the ground under their house’s basement. These killings led to the possessions of Ronnie DeFeo who killed his family in the house the year before. The film is more bloody and shows gruesome psychological scenes where the novel is more psychologically entangling and thrilling, giving details that are more disturbing than gory. Overall the characters have the same names and the basic story is the same because it is based off a true story that has caused controversy since the book first came out.