kingandy | An accurately-named film

Watched The Amityville Horror (2005) last night! Bought it months ago and have thus far failed to make time, as I am not particularly interested in horror movies, except for a sort of vague intellectual interest in the method and technique.

It's a bit of a poor showing, really. I admit to not having seen it for an age, but in my mind the original movie was quite finely crafted and made of suspense and intrigue. Things were seen out of the corner of one's eye, moved around off camera, and generally there was an open question of whether the house was genuinely posessed by evil or just had quite bad plumbing and creepy ambience^[1]. Though a product of its time, and thus somewhat different in pacing from modern offerings, it remains a classic.

The update is not a suspenseful psychological thriller. It is LOOK OUT THE HOUSE WILL KILLE YOU. It is OH MY GOD THERE IS EVIL IN THE BASEMENT IT IS COMING FOR US. It is CRAZY MAN ATTACK FAMILY WITH AXE (which, if nothing else, was in somewhat poor taste considering George Lutz was still alive at the time). In fact at several points it bears more similarities with the Shining than the original Amityville. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing, but still.

I continue to mourn for the descent of the horror genre into SURPRISE GUTS. The movie feels very much as though the production team felt that the primary reason for keeping things off-camera in the original was budgetary and technological constraints, rather than because things are spookier when you can't see them^[2]. Since they had the technology, they saw no reason why things shouldn't JUMP OUT and DISEMBOWEL THEMSELVES and go OOGY BOOGY HA HA and so on^[3].

Then they threw tortured injuns in for good measure (and no apparent reason other than to play on the general American sense of guilt regarding the native peoples and beads and so forth).

All that said, I did have an ulterior motive for watching, and was not disappointed. Oh, my.

[1] I gather later installments diverged from this ambiguity somewhat.
[2] On a related note, I believe it was Hitchcock who defined tension as "when the audience knows something that the characters do not" - that instinctive urge to cry out "Don't go in there!" or "It's behind you!" Given that criteria, there were only one or two moments of actual tension in the movie.
[3] That said, one of the more technically challenging scenes, the daughter skipping around on the very highest part of the roof of the house, did not involve any on-screen supernatural elements whatsoever. This was also one of the more genuinely thrilling moments.