The curse is real: the dead body found during ‘The Amityville Horror’
It’s an easy gimmick for a horror movie to claim the events depicted on-screen are inspired by true events, even if mileage varies from person to person, depending on how strongly they believe in the supernatural. The Amityville Horror was one of the first to utilise the marketing technique, and not even the remake was safe from spooky goings-on.
In 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr shot and killed half a dozen members of his family at an address in the titular Long Island town, where he was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to six 25-year prison terms. The following year, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the very same house with their children and immediately began experiencing some unnatural and unexplainable events.
They only made it their residence for two months, with things going bump in the night and eerie incidents so often convincing them that their new abode was, in fact, cursed and haunted, with Hollywood smelling the potential to turn a profit. In 1979, The Amityville Horror was released, and the industry’s instincts were proven spot-on after it became the highest-grossing independent film ever made at the time.
It gave rise to a slew of subpar sequels, but because the early 2000s obligated that any horror with inbuilt name recognition was obligated to be remade, Melissa George and Ryan Reynolds stepped in to play Kathy and George Lutz in the 2005 do-over directed by Andrew Douglas. Much like its predecessor, it was a huge hit among cinemagoers, but the paranormal activity refused to die down. Or maybe it was all a big coincidence. Again, it depends entirely on personal opinion.
Although George had frequently met with the person she was playing to try and gain first-hand insight into how to approach the character and what spurred her on to become so convinced her house was haunted, things took a turn for the spine-chilling shortly after cameras started rolling. The actor revealed to Radio Free how “she died the first week of filming,” which was just one of the “weird things that happened on that movie, actually.”
The second was a lot more sinister, with the local authorities stopping by while the crew was filming, leaving The Amityville Horror gang to find themselves in the midst of an unsolved death. “They were on the water there, and they said they found a dead body that had floated to the surface,” George explained. “We were like, ‘Awesome! That’s making everything much more comfortable in this movie!'”
First, the person she was playing passed away at the beginning of production, and then a corpse floated to the top of a local river. Even if George wasn’t a believer in the supernatural, she must have found herself questioning if there really was something to this Amityville curse business after the bodies started piling up in quick succession.
Watch the trailer for The Amityville Horror below.
