The Amityville Horror

Flies swarm where they shouldn't, pipes and walls ooze ick, doors fly open, and priests and psychic sensitives cringe and flee in panic. It's definitely a house that audiences will enjoy visiting, especially if unfamiliar with the ending.

Of all the questions raised by The Amityville Horror, the most vexing one revolves around the external range of a haunted house’s supernatural powers. Because while it makes sense for a demonic abode to slam windows shut on small children’s fingers, let loose with swarms of buzzing flies, and turn bearded wood-chopping fathers into homicidal paterfamilias, it’s not quite as clear why such a structure would have the ability to sabotage the brakes of a sedan driving on the highway, or to cause a woman’s briefcase, sitting on her car’s passenger seat, to magically burst into flames. Read full review

Executive produced by B-movie veteran Samuel Z. Arkoff and indifferently directed by TV-trained Stuart Rosenberg, the film's reputation exceeds its achievements, and the true story angle has been vigorously disputed. Read full review

I suspect a lot of people will be scared - and thus satisfied - by The Amityville Horror, a film that stoops to some of the oldest and cheapest tricks of the trade in its dogged pursuit of goose bumps. It's a crude haunted-house movie that depends for much of its tension on the possibility that the events that befell George and Kathleen Lutz might be true (though there is considerable evidence that Jay Anson's best-selling book was more fiction that fact). [13 Aug 1979, p.75]

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there. We watch two hours of people being frightened and dismayed, and we ask ourselves... what for? If it's real, let it have happened to them. Too bad, Lutzes! If it's made up, make it more entertaining. If they can't make up their minds... why should we? Read full review

Films about haunted houses have come a long way since the days when things simply went bump in the night, but The Amityville Horror may make you wish things would get back to basics. Peppered with visual red herrings, fast editing and cheap shocks, this is a product that promises an apocalypse of horror, delivers a few vague samples, but trails to an ending without providing a meaty climax. [28 July 1979]

In happier times, director Stuart Rosenberg confidently helmed Cool Hand Luke. Here, he resorts to one spookhouse cliché after another, and even the original touches are more puzzling than startling. Read full review

So many horror-movie clichés have been assembled under the roof of a single haunted house that the effect is sometimes mind-bogglingly messy. There is apparently very little to which the director, Stuart Rosenberg, will not resort. Scary things do happen in the movie, but they're always telegraphed in advance and make too little sense to have a cumulative effect. Read full review

The Amityville Horror is a feeble excuse for a haunted-house thriller, but given the source, who could ask for more? Read full review

A tedious, lamebrained horror movie, which begins with the promising premise of a haunted house in the suburbs (poltergeists in the barbecue pit?) and quickly degenerates into a display of pretentious camera angles by director Stuart Rosenberg. Read full review