When George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) and his wife, Kathy (Melissa George), find a beautiful new house in the small town of Amityville, N.Y., they think the place is too good to be true. After they move in with their kids, they find out the cheap price tag is thanks to the house's sordid history: The former tenant murdered his family after supposedly being possessed by the devil. Believing the home is haunted, the couple find a priest (Philip Baker Hall) to help them rid the place of evil spirits.

Chiller about a family who is terrorized by supernatural forces when they move into a new house in New York State which was the scene of a recent mass killing and the home of an 18th-century satanist. When swarms of flies appear from nowhere and the pipes and walls begin to ooze slime and blood, they call on a local priest to exorcise the evil spirits.

Ouch!

 

 Overexaggerated!!

Horror or Hoax?

Did a priest really bless the house when the Lutz family was moving in?

On December 18, 1975, the day that the real Lutz family was moving into their new Ocean Avenue home in Amityville, a Catholic priest allegedly came by to bless the house, supposedly at the request of Kathy Lutz. On October 4, 1979, a little more than two months after the release of the movie, the investigative television program In Search of featured an episode that included an interview with who they claim is the real Amityville priest. He wanted to remain anonymous, so his face was kept hidden. Watch the Amityville Priest Interview

"I was blessing the sewing room," says the priest. "It was cold. It was really cold in there. I'm like, 'Well, gee, this is peculiar,' because it was a lovely day out, and it was winter, yes, but it didn't account for that kind of coldness. I was also sprinkling holy water, and I heard a rather deep voice behind me saying, 'Get out!' It seemed so directed toward me that I was really quite startled. I felt a slap at one point on the face. I felt somebody slap me, and there was nobody there."

Did a swarm of flies appear in the home?

Yes. During an interview with Inside Edition in 2005, Chris explained that, "There was definitely a lot of flies but nothing again like Hollywood is portraying it." His brother Daniel also mentioned issues with flies in his documentary My Amityville Horror, although he claims there were many more.

Did flies really swarm the priest who blessed the home?

No. "They [the filmmakers] could have just as easily had done the flies the way they really happened," says George Lutz, who laughed at the movie's portrayal of flies attacking the priest (Rod Steiger). -The Real Amityville Horror

Did the priest really get static on the phone when he tried to call and warn the Lutzes?

Yes, at least according to the TV program In Search of and their 1979 interview with who they state is the real Amityville priest. Noise interference prevented any phone communication and he could never get through to warn the family.

Were there cold spots in the real Amityville Horror house?

Yes, at least according to most of the people involved in the story. This includes son Daniel Lutz and Father Ralph Pecoraro, the priest who allegedly blessed the home. The strange coldness is why the movie depicts George Lutz constantly chopping wood and burning the home's fireplace.

Did the toilets overflow with a black sludge?

No. At least not according to what George Lutz said during the 1979 Good Morning America interview. He states that it was the porcelain toilet bowls themselves that turned black, not the water.

Did Missy have an imaginary friend named Jodie?

Our exploration into The Amityville Horror true story revealed that according to George Lutz, Missy did have an imaginary/paranormal friend named Jodie (spelled "Jody" in the film). The entity would present itself to his daughter in different forms, including as an angel and as a large pig. In the movie, George (James Brolin) sees Jodie in pig form in an upstairs window. Earlier, his wife Kathy (Margot Kidder) sees Jodie's glowing red eyes through a window in the darkness. A drawing that the real Missy Lutz allegedly did of Jodie is featured in Jay Anson's novel. The creature in the drawing looks more like a cat than a pig. However, the book describes it as a drawing of a pig walking through the snow.

Left: Missy Lutz's drawing of Jodie running through the snow. Right: George (James Brolin) sees Jodie the pig in an upstairs window in the 1979 movie.

 

Did Daniel get his hand smashed in a window?

Yes, according to Daniel Lutz, he did get his hand smashed by the window. In real life, Daniel says that the window smashed his hand "skin on skin", emphasizing the initial severity of his injury. In his documentary My Amityville Horror, he holds his hand up in front of the camera to demonstrate that his little finger is still bent from the injury. Moments later, he contradicts himself somewhat by saying that his hand had magically healed just minutes after the injury. In the movie, the parents take their son to the hospital and are eerily amazed that there are no broken bones in his hand.

Was there really a secret red room in the basement?

Yes, but the red room was exaggerated in the movie and book. In reality, the red room wasn't all that secret. It was part of a storage space under the basement stairs. Patty Commarato, a former friend of the murdered DeFeo daughter Allison, revisits the real Amityville red room (pictured below) during a 1980 episode of That's Incredible (See Video of the Red Room). She says that the DeFeos used to store toys in the small red space.

A former friend of Allison DeFeo sits in the real Amityville house's red room (left). Right: Actor James Brolin sees a familiar face in the movie's secret Amityville basement room.

For the Amityville movie scene pictured above on the right, the filmmakers recruited the real-life brother of actor James Brolin to portray the face/entity that Brolin's character sees in the secret basement room. They needed someone who looked like Brolin and when given a beard and mustache, his brother easily fit the part.

Did the window in the Amityville house really break?

No. Not only was there never any physical evidence of a window breaking, in a 2011 interview, son Christopher Lutz confirmed that no Amityville house windows broke. -Spooky Southcoast
During a 1980 Amityville episode of the TV show That's Incredible, Barbara Cromarty, who purchased the home with her husband Jim after the Lutzes moved out, allowed the cameras inside the home to demonstrate that the upstairs eye window had never shattered like in the movie, noting that the window frame still showed the old paint and putty from when the house was built in 1927.
In a 2011 interview with 30 Odd Minutes, Christopher Lutz clarified that even though one of the Amityville home's infamous eye windows never shattered, this element of the movie was in fact inspired by the windows having opened on their own. "That was my bedroom...Those two windows are one bedroom and that used to be Ronald DeFeo's bedroom, and when we moved in the house my brother and I shared that room. That window opened many times, but rather than display it like it happened, they showed it absolutely shattering. It didn't shatter the glass. The window opened. The thing swung open."

Did the front door really get ripped off?

No. In The Amityville Horror movie, demonic forces cause the wooden front door to explode outward. "It did not get ripped off," said son Christopher Lutz during a 2011 interview (Spooky Southcoast). It should be noted that mother Kathy Lutz had previously stated that the door did blow outward, leaving police and repairmen dumbfounded. However, no physical evidence has ever surfaced to validate Kathy's claim.

Did blood drip down the walls?

No. In the 2005 documentary The Real Amityville Horror, the real George Lutz said that blood never dripped down the walls.

Did George Lutz really fall through the basement stairs into a hole filled with black sludge?

No. During the 2005 Christopher Lutz Inside Edition interview, he says that the exciting scene at the end of the film when James Brolin's character falls through the basement stairs into the sludge-filled hole never happened in real life.

Did anything paranormal happen on The Amityville Horror set?

No, at least not according to the movie's two main stars. "I watched with great amusement as the studio's publicity machine went into action concocting these terrible things that were happening on our set, which weren't really," says Margot Kidder, who portrays Kathy Lutz in The Amityville Horror movie.
Actor James Brolin recalls with amusement, "We're being asked, 'Is there weird stuff goin' on?' and we're goin', we're lookin' for stuff now, you know, cause we'd like to tell 'em, 'Awe, yeah, you wouldn't believe what happened yesterday.'"

 

 -http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/amityvillehorror1979.php

The Lutz family:

      George Lutz                                 Kathy Lutz                        Daniel Lutz                  Christopher Lutz                             Missy Lutz

When George and Kathy Lutz moved into the three-story colonial in Amityville on New York's Long Island in December 1975, they were thrilled. 

The sprawling house at 112 Ocean Ave. had cost them just $80,000, and they loved it. "It was a dream come true," George Lutz remembers. 

True, the house had been the scene of a horrible multiple murder a little over a year before, when 23-year-old Ronnie DeFeo went from room to room methodically shooting his parents and his four brothers and sisters in their beds. But the Lutzes sat down with their three young children and agreed the family could handle it. 

Just in case though, the day they moved in they had a priest, Father Ray Pecoraro, bless the house. According to Lutz, the priest said he felt an unseen hand slap him in the sewing room and heard a voice say "Get out." Then, Lutz says, Pecoraro became ill with flu-like symptoms and his hands began to bleed. 

The family moved in anyway, but within days they began to notice strange phenomena.

"There were ... odors in the house that came and went," Lutz says. "There were sounds. The front door would slam shut in the middle of the night.... I couldn't get warm in the house for many days." 

Lutz says the family kept the fireplace burning day and night in a futile attempt to stay warm, and found strange gelatinous drops on the carpet when they woke up in the morning. At times, he claims, his wife was physically transformed into an old woman, with the face, hair and wrinkles of a 90-year-old. 

Lutz claims that he mysteriously woke at 3:15 a.m. almost every day — around the same time the DeFeo murders were believed to have happened. One night, he says, he heard his children's beds "slamming up and down on the floor" above him but he was unable to do anything because he was immobilized in bed by an unseen force. Later that night, he woke to see his wife levitating and moving across the bed, he says. 

The next morning, just 28 days after they moved in, the Lutz family fled the house, leaving their clothes in the closets and food in the refrigerator. If the family had not left, Lutz says, he believes something horrible would have happened. "I try not to think about it," he says. 

-http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132035&page=1

Amityville Murders Documentary
^^Click on me to watch!!^^

Published on Sep 5, 2014

The real Amityville Horror is the strange story of the brutal DeFeo murders that took place 13 months earlier.
This A&E documentary explores the true story behind the Amityville Horror: the bizarre circumstance

Did Robert Jr. have help?

The parents were attacked while they lay in bed. Mr. DeFeo, however, was able to struggle to his feet to attempt a counterattack on his assassins. A second bullet struck him dead before he was able to reach his target. Louise DeFeo lay in bed, moaning for help, as she slowly bled to death. A second bullet would silence the woman for good.

Although the original plan called for the younger children to be taken to the grandparents' house in Brooklyn, Dawn, according to Butch, killed them to eliminate the children as witnesses and potential threats. Butch claimed he was not in the house at the time of the children's murders, but giving pursuit to one his friends, who had fled the scene, in order to lure him back to assist with the cleanup. Even while feigning insanity at trial, Butch DeFeo never admitted shooting the children.

One can only imagine the horror on Marc's and John's faces when their big sister entered their room with a rifle. Dawn callously ordered the boys face down. A clue that the DeFeos were awake at the time of the murders rested in the final position of Marc DeFeo's body. Because Marc had suffered a debilitating injury from football, he was forced to sleep on his back. Yet, he was shot face down in bed. The prosecutor confirmed this fact at the DeFeo trial.

The next room Dawn entered was Allison's. Standing at the doorway, Dawn raised the rifle, taking aim as Allison slightly raised her head before looking into the muzzle flash. Death was instantaneous, as the bullet impacted Allison's left cheek and exited her right ear. Allison's wounds were meant to disfigure the beautiful girl.

Butch, upon his return and enraged at the senseless murder, confronted Dawn DeFeo in her third-floor bedroom. After briefly wrestling for the gun, Butch got the upper hand and slammed Dawn against the bed knocking her out. As she lie unconscious on her bed, Butch placed the back of the rifle to Dawn's head and fired. 

http://www.amityvillemurders.com/murders.html 

The Murders:

The bodies of Ronald and Louise DeFeo as they were discovered on the night of November 13, 1974

The body of Louise DeFeo neatly tucked under the covers.

The uncovered body of John Matthew DeFeo,9 as it was discovered by John Altieri on the evening of November 13, 1974. In the bed on the opposite side of the room lay his 11-year old brother, Marc. Both boys had been shot at extremely close range with a .35 Marlin rifle. 

Standing at the threshold between the second floor hallway and Allison DeFeo's bedroom, this is precisely what Officers Greguski and Tyndall discovered. Thirteen-year-old Allison DeFeo was clearly beyond help. The blood from her massive head wound had run down the mattress and boxsprings to the carpeting below.

 

The body of Dawn Theresa DeFeo, 18.  

Meet Allison, John, and Mark DeFeo:

 

Allison DeFeo was a quiet girl. Every time that Ronald DeFeo Jr. raised his voice in the house, she closed her bedroom door to block the discussions that Ron Sr. and Ron Jr. had. She spent her summer in the pool with his friends. She was aged 13 at his assassination.

John DeFeo was seven years old when he died. It has been described as a nice little boy by the friends of Allison. The day before the murders, John DeFeo and his friend were sitting on the steps of his basement and secretly watched Ronald Sr. and Jr. Ronald argue. Ronald Jr. was left with a bloody lip

There is not much information about Mark DeFeo, except that the day of his murder, Mr. DeFeo was supposed to take Mark to the doctor for an injury in football. During the football season, Mark DeFeo had a serious injury and has required the temporary use of crutches and a wheelchair. He died at the age of 12. There was a theory that claimed he was awake when he was murdered because he was found on  his stomach, but due to his football injury he was only able to sleep on his back. 
 

-http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/f237/real-amityville-horror-crime-scene-pictures-29401/