Flicks: My Amityville Horror (2013)

Horror-doc about the infamous house in Amityville featuring a man who lived there during the incidents.

IFC/Sundance Now and director Eric Walter's My Amityville Horror (2013), while not making a large splash when it was originally announced in late December of 2012, crawled back out of it's grave on March 15th 2013 to arrive in selected theaters and Video-On-Demand (VOD) simultaneously.

This documentary, according to film producers Andrea Adams and John Blythe, is about the the actual Amityville house in Long Island, New York where poltergeists allegedly attacked the Lutz family in 1975. The documentary features Daniel Lutz who was 10 at the time of the infamous haunting.

Prior to Daniel and his family moving into the home, on November 13th 1974, the house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York became a place that locals feared when 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo murdered his entire family under very mysterious circumstances.

In September 1977, it became a place the entire world feared when Jay Anson’s book “The Amityville Horror” was published (later adapted into the popular series of films), bringing the house international notoriety and instant entry into the occult history books. Not so much because of the DeFeo murders, but because it told the tale of what happened to the next family who lived there, one year after the massacre. The Lutz family.


The actual house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York where the events allegedly occurred.

My Amityville Horror's producer John Blythe goes on to say: "This house haunting inspired the best-selling novel and the entire film franchise. Seeing that this was an untold story about an already world renowned case, sparked my interest. I offered for Eric (Walter) to join my company in order to raise enough financing to get the project off the ground."

References:
IMDb, My Amityville Horror (2012)
Facebook, Official Group
IMDb, Eric Walter

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Slash-Mess Day Ten: Grave Encounters (2011)

Do you wanna see something really scary? Really? Press play. Once.

Horror movies posing as documentaries are nothing new in Hollywood. For the past two decades film makers have been eager to capitalize on utilizing this genre within a genre as horror masquerading as "found footage" (see REC, Quarantine, Blair Witch Project)^[0]. This is an accessible method of creating a sense of credibility then immediately bypassing the audience's ever-present skepticism.

This Vicious Brothers movie (funded by Tribeca Film) features Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson) and the crew of "Grave Encounters", a Ghost Hunters type of reality television show, who plan to shoot an episode inside the spooky ol' abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital.

"American horror films have become increasingly safe and predictable.... the genre isn't taken seriously anymore. Our intention was to take things back to a time when horror films didn't play by the rules."

- The Vicious Brothers.

Collingwood is reputedly a place where unexplained phenomena has been reported for years since it's closing. In the name of Must-See-TV the crew locks themselves inside the building for a night to begin a paranormal investigation by capturing everything on camera.

The production crew quickly realizes that the building is more than just haunted - it's alive - and it has no intention of ever letting them leave.

In 2012, a significantly worse film written by The Vicious Brother was released as a sequel this time directed by John Poliquin as his feature length directorial debut. Poliquin's version focused on a younger crowd but used many of the same spooky special effects and style that made the first movie so entertaining.

Creatively entitled Grave Encounters 2 (2012), the sequel followed a group of spoiled teenagers, who had seen the original film, and were inspired to visit Collingwood to investigate for themselves. Yet the malicious force from the first film was all but gone very much like Blair Witch, Texas Chainssaw Massacre and Friday The 13th and their sequels - progressively watered down versions of what was once a scary and original idea.

Notes:[0] = Film makers do this in order to get around traditional conventions that horror movies (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street) get deeply mired in. As an unintended consequence of obeying genre dogma - so do horror movie audiences.

References:
IMDB, Grave Encounters (2011)
Vicious Brothers, Hard Line
Horror Movie Blog, Grave Robbers Inc.

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