Just heard about a new documentary coming out in theaters called “My Amityville Horror.” Check out this article in the New York Times:

Long Island Landmark: Scary Since 1974
‘My Amityville Horror,’ a Haunting Documentary

AMITYVILLE, N.Y. — It’s a splendid day for a stroll past a haunted house: dark, damp, forbidding. A thin mist rises like a mourner’s veil above the gambrel roof, and low-slung clouds bathe the grounds in perpetual gloom.

Thirty-seven years have passed since the last reported haunting in this quiet Long Island village. During the ensuing decades the three-story dwelling has been renumbered, and the distinctive quarter-moon windows — suggesting the malevolent eyes of a jack-o’-lantern — have been changed to discourage rubbernecking.

The house first gained notoriety on Nov. 13, 1974, when Ronald DeFeo Jr., then 23, murdered his parents and his four siblings with a rifle as they slept in their beds there. A little more than a year later the newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz bought the place — named High Hopes — at the knockdown price of $80,000 and moved in, along with her three children by a previous marriage. The family stayed just 28 days.

The Lutzes later claimed that poltergeists had settled into the rooms like uninvited relatives. Their account of having been terrified by High Hopes’ eerie personality disorders — door wrenchings, window slammings, demon infestations — was chronicled in Jay Anson’s 1977 book “The Amityville Horror: A True Story.”

That best seller spawned a cottage industry — make that a Dutch Colonial industry — that has so far yielded dozens of books and documentaries, hundreds of Web pages and a 1979 hit movie that, in turn, inspired no fewer than 12 remakes, prequels and sequels, two of which are scheduled for release in 2014.

This year’s addition to the franchise is “My Amityville Horror,” a documentary that begins a limited run at the IFC Center on Friday before IFC Midnight takes it to select theaters around the country. It opens in Los Angeles next Saturday.

The director, Eric Walter, is a 26-year-old fan of the book who, at 18, started AmityvilleFiles.com, a Web site that bills itself as the largest cyber-based archive of Amityville-related research.

He attributes the house’s enduring appeal as fright fodder to an unholy marriage of mass murders and mythology. Though “My Amityville Horror” is feathered with the testimony of a cuckoo’s nest of psychics, ghost hunters and self-proclaimed experts on the paranormal, Mr. Walter insists that the film is less a showcase for spiritualists than a character study.

The character he purports to be studying is Danny Lutz, the oldest and possibly most tormented of the Lutz children. Head shaved, glacier-blue eyes set in deep alcoves, he prowls in and out of the frame, smiling a faintly sinister smile.

Now 47 and a stonemason in Queens, Mr. Lutz maintains that while living at the house he was spiritually and emotionally abused by phantoms. He tells the camera with rock-solid certainty that he watched his hated stepfather, who has since died, practice telekinesis in the garage.

“That blew me out of the water,” Mr. Walter said with an almost childlike innocence. “I found it extremely hard to swallow.”

Mr. Walter said that his intent for his film is to show the lingering psychological impact of the event on one of its witnesses. “For me that’s the real story, the real Amityville horror, to be living in the shadow of something for the rest of your life,” he said.

Check out: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03…..wanted=all

Check out the trailer:

http://video.search.yahoo.com/…..&tt=b

I’ve always been interested in the Amityville story. I would really like to see this. It looks good.
Certain things in the story have always bugged me. Like with the Defeo murders, how the heck does someone go around with a high powered Marlin rifle, shooting everyone in the house, and NO ONE wakes up?? The neighbors don’t hear anything??
And why in the world would someone buy a house with that type of history? I saw that Danny Lutz was saying his step-dad George Lutz, was involved in the occult. That would explain a lot about the activity, and why it followed them after they fled the house. Plus, that creepy pic they took that night the Warrens did a seance, and there was a creepy kid in the photo (There were NO children there that night, and the child has a strong resemblance to one of the Defeo children) I think many of the events were exaggerated for the movie (what movie or TV show based on real events isn’t?) but I believe SOMETHING was going on in that house.