‘The Amityville Horror’ by Jay Anson

The Lutz family abandoned this house at 112 Ocean Avenue after twenty-eight days, never to return.

I went online to research this post with a question in mind: Was The Amityville Horror nonfiction or a novel masquerading as nonfiction? The Internet responded to my question with a question. The first source I encountered listed the 1977 book’s title as The Amityville Horror: A True Story. My copy doesn’t have “A True Story” on the cover. Curiouser and curiouser.

As it turns out, The Amityville Horror: A True Story was neither nonfiction nor a novel masquerading as nonfiction. It was a hoax masquerading as nonfiction. According to a snopes.com entry by Benjamin Radford, “The truth behind The Amityville Horror was finally revealed when Butch DeFeo’s lawyer, William Weber, admitted that he, along with the Lutzes, ‘created this horror story over many bottles of wine.'”

“Over and over, both big claims and small details were refuted by eyewitnesses, investigations, and forensic evidence,” Radford wrote in the 2005 article. “Still, the Lutzes stuck to their story, reaping tens of thousands of dollars from the book and film rights.”

It appears from a 2005 interview with George Lutz by Jeff Belanger for Ghostview.com that Lutz was sticking to his story as he spoke of the Amityville tale and its movie versions. He seemed more accepting of the 1979 film than the 2005 remake. (There were several direct-to-video sequels featuring the Amityville name in the 1990s, but they weren’t based on the family’s story, focusing on supposedly cursed items linked with the house.) In the interview, Lutz quotes James Brolin’s character from the first film, but later describes a legal spat that erupted when the Lutzes learned that MGM had begun production on the 2005 film, stating it was “based on a true story,” but had not attempted to contact the family.

George and Kathy Lutz moved their family to San Diego after their experience at 112 Ocean Avenue. The couple divorced in 1980 but remained friends until Kathy died of emphysema in 2004. George died in 2006.

“One fictional movie about Amityville is enough,” Lutz told Belanger. “We don’t need another fictional remake. They’re taking the Amityville name and using that name to amass millions for themselves, with no regard for the effects on the family, no regard for the hard-fought true story to even survive. No care for any of that.”

In what Belanger says is Lutz’s last interview on the subject before his death in 2006, Lutz says that, after being “outed” in the media, the family decided to contact a publisher to tell their story and that’s how they connected with Jay Anson.

According to the author biography in the book, Anson began his career as a newspaper copy boy in 1937, and later worked in advertising and publicity. He is credited with more than 500 documentary scripts for television. After the success of The Amityville Horror: A True Story, Anson wrote a novel, 666.

Anson presented the tale of The Amityville Horror in a sort of chronological, documentary style rather than an elaborately constructed plot. In a novel, for example, there might have been more purpose for Father Mancuso, a Anson’s fictional name for Father Ralph Pecoraro, the priest who blessed the house for the Lutzes. In Anson’s book, Mancuso suffers from various physical afflictions after coming in contact with the house, but seems to be off to the side of the action. Anson wrote in the afterward of the book (p. 308) that the Lutzes were not aware of the priest’s suffering until the final draft of the book was written. As I read the book, I kept thinking the priest might swoop in and dramatically face down the demons and save the day. This might happen in a fictional plot. In The Amityville Horror: A True Story, the priest gets sick a lot and that’s pretty much it. (That’s still more interesting than researcher Rick Moran’s version. According to Radford on snopes.com, Moran, who interviewed Pecoraro, said, “He said he never saw anything in the house.”)

The only resemblance to plotting that occurred to me while reading the book was that it seemed to be dragging. The story chronicles the twenty-eight days the Lutzes stayed in the house, but for me that was about twenty-five days too long. I like to think I’d consider staying with relatives if I experienced some phenomena and saw my dog acted strangely. If something was affecting my kids, I’d be out of there in seconds. Yet the Lutzes continue to stay and dismiss things they’re seeing. One has to allow for the influence of the entities, I suppose, but after a while I began to wonder if the parents weren’t a little bit dim. How many times does a priest have to tell you to get out of a house before you consider getting away for a couple of days? Demonic entities are serious business. This is not Casper the Ghost. On page 177, George sees Kathy levitate, and reacts with “It’s nothing,” instead of, “Wake up and let’s get the hell out of here!” On page 226, Kathy slaps the kids because she “hadn’t equated the green slime with the other mysterious problems.” How often, in a normal, pre-Nickelodeon-era house, does green slime ooze from the wall? On page 272, the family is on the verge of leaving, but then, because they have a happy window repairman, they abandon their plan to leave despite knowing a huge demonic pig has threatened their daughter’s life.

When I read that Anson had a background in advertising and documentaries, it explained a lot. In ad copy and scripts, you can use as many exclamation points as you want. In a novel, not so much. In a work of nonfiction, hardly ever. I’m not sure what the rule is for hoaxes, but it seemed every other paragraph ended with an exclamation point when a period would have had a much more chilling effect. Through a cruel twist of syllabus curation, I read Anson’s book right after Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, which was a little like going from a limo on a paved highway to a jeep on gravel. I tried to give Anson a break in consideration of that, but the prevalence of the exclamation points and people thinking to themselves (who else can you think to?) were distracting. I also felt Anson was overly fond of the past-present verb tense.

I had some other issues in the text. In Chapter 9, George takes communion, but at the time he wasn’t Catholic. On page 142, Kathy “didn’t tell George” about the ceramic lion, but didn’t he have teethmarks on his ankle? It seemed to me that the bartender’s actions on page 112, dropping his glass, were dramatically embellished. My fact-or-fiction radar also beeped on page 191, when “Father Nuncio got up to refill his cup.” No one would have remembered that detail. Maybe this just bothered me as a Florida resident, but I noted “another storm of hurricane strength” on page 280. It’s either a hurricane or it’s not. It’s probably best that I didn’t know the story was an embellished hoax when I read it, or I might have spent the entire time trying to spot errors and inconsistencies.

That said, if you’re not a nitpicky, editing-type person and just want to read a scary story, there’s one here. The Amityville Horror isn’t just a story about haunting but of demonic possession, or at least demons with the intent to possess. There were regular ghosts — the old former owners and the sick little boy. That kind of haunting, to me, isn’t very scary anymore. Pondering the existence of beings radiating from the ultimate power of evil? That’ll keep me up at night.