The Amityville Horror

No guy who starred in a sitcom called "Two Girls, A Girl and a Pizza Place" has any business starring in a riff on The Shining. I'm just going to come out and say that right up front. It's not that Ryan Reynolds is a horrible actor or anything, though he's yet to prove his chops in anything except lightweight material along the lines of Blade: Trinity (review forthcoming), the miserable romantic comedy Buying the Cow or this 70's remake. It's just that his presence in all wrong for this kind of a part. The stepdad in Amityville undergoes a transformation from kindly authority figure to demented kill-crazy psycho in under 90 minutes - you need an actor capable of real menace. I'd have loved to see a guy like Ed Norton take on this role.

But, for budgetary reasons, that wasn't in the cards. So you get Reynolds, who's fine in the film's opening, dreamy, idyllic suburban opening and pretty much completely dull and unconvincing once the fit hits the shan.



If only that were the Amity remake's only problem. I think the biggest failing of the film overall was the very basic decision of which classic horror film to rip off. The original Amityville Horror, the popular 1970's version, wasn't terrifically good, but it had the good sense to take a formula that works (the formula being the original Exorcist) and simply reapply it to the haunted house genre.

This new movie seems to take its cue more from The Shining. It's also a good film, but it's harder to simply plug that narrative into another movie. And not just because you'd be trying to rejigger an almost perfect film, a film boasting the combined talents of Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson. But because The Shining is such a nuanced, layered piece of art, and removing any one of its interlocking parts (like, say, a house instructing its owner to kill) makes the entire enterprise seem, well, silly. Kubrick was enough of a master stylist to gloss over a possibly humorous plot twist (like the ghost of a man dressed as a rodent hiding in a hotel room) without making it seem humorous. Amity's director, Andrew Douglas, frequently misses the target, hitting camp instead of horror.

What The Exorcist had that the original 70's Amityville captured with minimal success was a lived-in comfort with suburban settings. Exorcist wasn't some horrorshow set in a traditionally frightening setting, like an old castle or an insane asylum or remote woods. It was set in a middle-class all-American home, with some familiar, relatable, recognizable kind of characters. The devil doesn't possess some lustful concubine or hellspawn, but a young, fresh-faced girl. The Shining on the other hand introduces a psychological level to the horror that Exorcist avoids. No demon invades the Nicholson character forcing his hand to grab an axe - the evil comes from within him, from his own mind.

And this new Amityville horror tries to go there, to get us inside George's meltdown, to come to terms with his madness. But it's an empty exercize. The film's not really interested in any kind of psycho-sexual exploration. It just wants cheap scares, "safe" and conventional gory bits and a few whiz-bang effects that will make for a nice trailer.

We're introduced to the haunted house of Amityville via a violent and disturbing opening scene. A man, Ronald Defeo, murders his own family in their beds with a hunting rifle, and we're shown each grisly death in close up. We cut to a year later (the entire film takes place in the mid-70's, in an attempt to maintain some artificial sheen of "authenticity" even though the legend of the real Amityville horror house has since been completely discredited). Widow Kathy Lutz (a bland Melissa George), her three adorable children and her new hubby George (Reynolds) have just moved into a seemingly perfect house with a horrible (yawn) secret.

It seems Defeo wasn't just a lunatic with a grudge - the house "made him" kill his family. The house has powers, you see. It can make people see things that aren't there, it can move objects around on its own, it can turn the lights on and off, it can even talk if you listen very carefully. Although usually it just says the usual haunted house stuff like "get out" and "kill them all."

You'd think a house that has been around since the 1600's would have more things to say than "kill your family." Most old people won't shut the hell up, and they've only been around for 70 or 80 years. This house has been there for centuries, yet it hasn't learned any repartee at all.

So eventually the house starts to win George over, and he starts getting very short with his family, and they get increasingly freaked out by the fact that the walls sometimes bleed. And at around 45 minutes, you start wondering why Kathy doesn't just round up the kids and get the hell out of the house.

As I see it, there's only one thing you need to write a good haunted house movie. You don't need a great backstory about why the house is evil - just make up some shit with Indian burial grounds or mass murders in the conservatory or occult symbols built into the architecture or something and that will do. (In Amityville, it's a particularly bizarre mixture of religious paranoia and guilt over Native American relations which I'll get into later).

And I'm not going to give you the old "you need good characters" crap, cause you don't, really. I mean, Wendy in The Shining isn't a great, nuanced character. She's just eerie and reedy and knows how to scream a lot.

No, what you need for a great haunted house movie is a plausible reason why the people can't just leave the house. And, let's face it, The Shining has the best possible excuse to keep the family trapped inside. The whole reason they're there is that the hotel is inaccessible for the winter months. Brilliant! Kudos to Stephen King for that one...

But Amityville Horror doesn't even try to explain why a woman would force her three children to inhabit a place that's so obviously evil. I mean, from the first day they live there (conveniently labeled as "Day 1" by some extremely unnecessary and inconsistant title cards), weird badness starts going down. Her husband gets violently angry for no good reason, they all start seeing and hearing things, the babysitter freaks the kids out by revealing the house's (double yawn) horrible secret, the dog constantly barks at invisible enemies, the lights keep flickering on and off. I mean, yeah, they've got a mortgage, but it gets fairly inconceivable.

Late in the game, a priest played by veteran character actor Phillip Baker Hall appears (filling in for Rod Steiger from the original), and it takes him four scenes before he recommends to Kathy that she get her family out of the house.

Excuse me? Four scenes? Wouldn't that be the first thing any logical person would say? "Um, hi, Father...I think my house is implanting the deep-seated desire to kill in my new husband. Oh yeah, and the girl murdered in the house has befriended my youngest daughter...What should I do?"

I could go on all day with the gaping plot holes and logical inconsistancies, but who cares? If the movie was scary or entertaining, I wouldn't have even bothered with them at all. But I was kind of bored, because everything in Amityville is so familiar and tired, that I started making mental notes about all the stuff that didn't make logical sense.

And I started thinking about the really subversive ideology behind the movie. No, really.

We've seen this plot enacted hundreds of times, but never quite with this kind of spin. A family man, being influenced by evil spirits, turns against the family he loves and cares about. He starts to view them as a burden, as a "bad family" whose behavior he must "correct," thus perverting the Father's traditional role as disciplinarian and stern teacher.

Obviously, this plays on some deep-seated fears of wives, children, anyone who lives in a family unit with a powerful man at its center. Because young children are so dependant on their fathers, because wives are physically not capable of fighting off their spouses, this notion of a father going mad and overpowering his family into submission has some sort of archetypal significance.

Okay, fair enough. But in Amityville Horror, George's condition seemingly springs from nowhere. Generally, in films of this kind, the man at the center of the puzzle has some sort of problem before he even enters the arena of evil. Take The Shining. Before he goes to the Overlook Hotel, Jack Torrence has hurt his child before. He claims it was an accident, but his alcoholism and frustration over a failed career may have also played into the equation. His wife refuses to talk about it, even when pressed.

So when he gets to the Overlook, there's a sense that the hotel is bringing his evil side out rather than creating it. It plays on his weaknesses (alcohol, pride, rage) and wears down his resistance, until his worst impulses simply get the better of him. This, along with a healthy dose of fatalistic inevitability, makes The Shining feel like a great tragedy as well as a horror film. It's not just the story of a how a man tried to axe his wife and kid, but of a man fighting a losing battle against his own demons.

And now consider Amityville Horror. He has no real gripe here. At the opening of the film, before he's a homeowner, he's the perfect husband and stepfather. Caring, compassionate, funny, warm, open, responsible, stable. He refers to working as a contractor, and implies that there are financial concerns with buying a new home, but he doesn't seem overworked or strapped for cash. And then he moves into this house, and suddenly, without warning, he begins to morph into a kill-crazy maniac.

So, clearly, it's the house that makes him crazy. But consider this conversation from late in the film. Kathy expresses (finally!) a clear desire to leave. But George refuses. He claims that their whole life is tied up in this house, and that they can't run away from their problems.

So the implication is that, for American men (because it's always men that wind up turning evil in these movies), the burden of supporting a wife and family, of running a house, creates not only bitter resentment but homicidal rage. And that the only way to exorcize this rage is to leave the house behind, to get out.

I watched another film this week, 2002's similar haunted house fiasco Darkness, and am struck by how similar it is in theme. Another father is turned psychotic by a new house. The difference is (and here I will reveal the very silly twist in Darkness, so stop reading if you haven't seen the film) that the father in Darkness is "wanted" by the house, has a history with it that cannot be avoided, and so he must sacrifice himself for his family.

So there we get the opposite - that a father must accept his burden and give his life to provide for wife and child.

Either way, these movies don't exactly bode well for the psyche of the American male. Just because the ending of Amityville Horror is immensely silly (and it is) doesn't mean we can easily shrug off the implication made by this popular contemporary film. The idea that suburban family life can make a man insane, and that fleeing can instantly return that sanity, is certainly original for a mainstream American movie.