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Franchise / Amityville

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The actual house back in The '70s.

"Houses don't have memories..."
— George Lutz, in the 1979 film

"There are no bad houses..."
— George Lutz, in the 2005 film

The Amityville franchise is a series of films and books that are about a certain Haunted House (and later other objects associated with it) that resides in 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville. It began with the 1977 novel The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson that was made into a film in 1979.

Official Films

Unofficial Films

  • The Amityville Haunting (2011)
  • The Amityville Asylum (2013)
  • Amityville Death House (2015)
  • Amityville: The Final Chapter (2015; also known as Sickle)
  • Amityville Playhouse (2015; also known as The Amityville Theater)
  • Amityville: Vanishing Point (2016)
  • The Amityville Legacy (2016; later re-titled Amityville Toybox)
  • The Amityville Terror (2016)
  • Amityville: No Escape (2016)
  • Amityville Exorcism (2017)
  • Amityville: Evil Never Dies (2017; later re-titled Amityville Clownhouse; sequel to The Amityville Legacy)
  • Amityville Prison (2017; also known as Against the Night)
  • Amityville: Mt. Misery Road (2018)
  • The Dawn (2019)
  • Amityville Island (2020; sequel to Amityville Exorcism)
  • Amityville Vibrator (2020)
  • Witches of Amityville Academy (2020; also known as Amityville Witches)
  • The Amityville Harvest (2020)
  • Amityville Poltergeist (2021)
  • Amityville Vampire (2021)
  • Amityville Cult (2021)
  • Amityville Scarecrow (2021)
  • The Amityville Moon (2021; sequel to The Amityville Harvest)
  • Amityville Cop (2021)
  • Amityville in the Hood (2021; sequel to Amityville: Evil Never Dies)
  • Amityville Uprising (2022; sequel to The Amityville Moon)
  • Amityville Karen (2022)
  • Amityville in Space (2022; sequel to Amityville Island)
  • Amityville Hex (2022)
  • Amityville Christmas Vacation (2022)
  • Amityville Thanksgiving (2022)
  • Amityville Scarecrow 2 (2022; sequel to Amityville Scarecrow)
  • Ghosts of Amityville (2022)
  • Amityville Ride-Share (2023)
  • Amityville Emanuelle (2023)
  • Amityville Death Toilet (2023)
  • Amityville Frankenstein (2023)
  • The Last Amityville Movie (2023)
  • Amityville Ripper (2023)
  • Amityville Bigfoot (2024)

Literature

  • The Amityville Horror (1977)
  • The Amityville Curse (1981)
  • The Amityville Horror Part II (1982)
  • Amityville: The Final Chapter (1985)
  • Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1988)
  • Amityville: The Horror Returns (1989)
  • Amityville: The Nightmare Continues (1991)

Franchise-Wide Tropes:

  • Arc Number: 3:15, which is the approximate time that Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed all of the other DeFeos.
  • Artifact of Doom: Objects taken from the house are infected with its evil, resulting in a lot of cases of Attack of the Killer Whatever.
    • The lamp from The Evil Escapes had a preference for attacking people with other pieces of technology, like appliances and power tools.
    • The clock from It's About Time could manipulate time, freezing it, fast-forwarding or rewinding it, sending people forward or backward in it, aging people up or down, etc.
    • The mirror from A New Generation preyed on the fears and insecurities of the people who looked into it, and could control people via their reflections.
    • Whatever happened inside of the dollhouse from Dollhouse also affected the real world; its fireplace flaring up made a real fireplace engulf a girl in flames, a mouse crawling into it made a giant mouse manifest in the real house, etc.
    • The toy monkey from Legacy and Evil Never Dies could cast illusions and alter people's perception of reality.
    • The lumber from Exorcism is the most generic of the lot, in that it displayed no special powers beyond merely driving people to kill other people.
    • The clown in the clown painting from Evil Never Dies could exit the portrait at will in order to personally attack and kill people.
  • Artistic License – Geography: Nearly every depiction of the house makes it look isolated, when in reality its neighbors on either side are located only a few feet away.
  • And I Must Scream: The potential fate of anyone who dies in or around the house, being Barred from the Afterlife and turned into a puppet of the Evil.
  • Bad People Abuse Animals: If a film contains a pet, its chances of making it out of things unscathed are slim (the original film was a notable outlier in this regard, though).
  • Based on a Great Big Lie:...maybe. But the DeFeo murders really did happen, and some of the spookier circumstances surrounding them (like the neighbors not hearing any of the gunshots) are true.
  • Big Bad: The Evil, though it sometimes gets sidelined or outright replaced by other villains, like:
    • Frank and/or the Thin Boy in Curse.
    • Reverend Jeremiah Ketcham in The Remake.
    • Doctor Elliot Mixter in Asylum.
    • Abigail Wilmont in Death House.
    • Delilah McCallister in Terror.
  • Big Fancy House: 112 Ocean Avenue, provided you are able to look past the whole "repository of evil" thing.
  • Bloody Horror: This series may have popularized the whole "blood spewing from the walls, faucets, and other random things" trope that is now so prevalent in stories involving Haunted Houses.
  • Brother–Sister Incest:
    • The possessed Sonny Montelli has sex with his sister Patricia in The Possession.
    • The corrupted Lisa Sterling tries to seduce her brother Rusty in It's About Time.
    • The possessed Shea Jacobson has sex with her brother Todd in Terror.
    • Ronald DeFeo Jr., while having sex with a date in his car, has a vision of the girl turning into his sister Dawn in Murders.
  • Bugs Herald Evil: Flies are the Evil's favorite pet, but it has also deployed spiders, maggots, wasps, and bees.
  • Catapult Nightmare: These occur about Once per Episode.
  • Censored Child Death: The original film is, to date, the only one in which the deaths of children are directly shown, during the prologue where Ronald DeFeo Jr. shoots all of the other DeFeos. In every other case, a child's death is either cut away from, or we only see the aftermath (in the form of a body or a ghost).
  • The Corrupter: The Evil, when not outright possessing people, enjoys poisoning their minds and making them Axe-Crazy. Successful and attempted victims of the corruption include Ronald DeFeo Jr. and George Lutz, Jessica Evans in The Evil Escapes, Jacob and Lisa Sterling in It's About Time, Franklin I. Bronner and Keyes Terry in A New Generation, Jimmy Martin in Dollhouse, Melanie Benson in Haunting, Mark Janson in Legacy, and Senator Ty Pangborn and Ben in Evil Never Dies.
  • Creepy Basement: Its layout is far from consistent, but it always feels dingy and unpleasant, thanks in part to containing a Hell Gate.
  • Creepy Child: The films are rife with them, usually little girls, though male ones do pop up in Haunting and Terror.
  • Creepy Doll: The frequency with which these appear in the films actually gets lampshaded in the audio commentary for Terror. While they are usually just inanimate set dressing, actively malevolent ones are featured in Dollhouse, Exorcism, and Island.
  • Dead Person Impersonation: The Evil has a habit of taking on the form of people's dead relatives, usually fathers and husbands, like Frank Evans in The Evil Escapes, Franklin I. Bronner in A New Generation, Jimmy's father in Dollhouse, and Mr. Janson in Legacy.
  • Devil, but No God: The original film contains a priest whose holiness is utterly defeated by the house's evil, which sets a theme for the rest of the franchise: the Amityville house is so evil that no force of goodness can defeat it. We see a lot of demonic evil, but very little Heavenly goodness, with about the only instance of the latter being Sonny Montelli (who had just undergone an exorcism) being levitated back to his feet by an angelic light at the end of The Possession. The Awakening even has a character outright state that God's apparent apathy or nonexistence is what prompted them to seek out the Evil.
  • Downer Ending: The only film to have an unambiguously happy ending is It's About Time.
  • The Dragon: Anyone corrupted by the Evil, technically, but more straightforward examples are Mayor Elliot Saunders from Playhouse and Delilah McCallister from Terror, both of whom ran cults that sacrificed people to the Evil to keep it from terrorizing the rest of Amityville. Interestingly, the two were the exact opposite of each other, with Saunders being wracked with guilt (to the point of being Driven to Suicide) over what he was doing while Delilah was completely fine with it, at one point sneering, "As long as tenants pay, I don't care who they are."
  • Dysfunctional Family: Almost all of the families that appear in the films do not come off as particularly stable, even before they start being victimized by the Evil, with standout examples being the DeFeos, the Montellis from The Possession, the Bensons from Haunting, and the Jansons from Legacy.
  • Evil-Detecting Dog: All manner of creatures (dogs, cats, birds, etc.) become anxious (if not outright hostile) in the presence of the house, or anything related to it.
  • Evil Phone: Amityville's telephones are prone to spewing only static, garbled nonsense, or voices from beyond, when they are not melting or bursting into flames.
  • Eye Motifs: The house's upper windows look like eyes, and if a film takes place in a different house, then chances are it will have eye-like upper windows as well.
  • Flies Equals Evil: They often act as harbingers of doom, though they somehow manage to directly kill a man in 3-D. They are replaced by wasps in Dollhouse, and by bees in Death House.
  • For the Evulz: The Evil's raison d'être, as it so succinctly reveals in The Possession (one of the few films to give it any semblance of character):
    Father Frank Adamsky: You want to destroy this boy's life?
    The Evil: I do what I want.
  • Found Footage Films: Haunting, No Escape, and Prison.
  • Generic Doomsday Villain: The Evil is more of a force than an actual character, with its personality (in the few films that even bother to give it one) being no deeper than "I am evil and do it all For the Evulz."
  • Geographic Flexibility: The layout of the house, as well as the land that it is situated upon, is far from consistent, with the worst offenders in this regard probably being Haunting and No Escape.
  • Glowing Eyes of Doom: The eye-like upper windows of the house are often portrayed this way, with a lot of promotional material depicting it as an Evil Overlooker.
  • Greater-Scope Villain:
    • John Ketcham, the alleged witch who desecrated Shinnecock land by building a house on it, in the 1979 film.
    • The unnamed woman who replaces the aforementioned John Ketcham in the land's backstory in The Possession.
    • Gilles de Rais (the original owner of the clock) in It's About Time.
    • The Dark Master that the Satchem cult worships in Asylum.
    • The unnamed warlock who resurrected Abigail Wilmont in Death House.
  • Haunted Headquarters: The house is dirt cheap, and so attracts a lot of naïve and/or desperate people who rarely last long in it, to the point that a "For Sale" sign is an almost permanent fixture of the house's front yard.
  • Haunted House: One of the most (in)famous examples in modern American history, though a few of the pseudo-sequels relocate things to other structures, like a theatre and a Bedlam House. Curse, Vanishing Point, and Terror are all set in different haunted houses that just so happen to also be in Amityville.
  • Haunted Technology: Lights, telephones, radios, televisions, appliances, vehicles, Walkmen, etc.
  • Hell Gate: The infamous Red Room (and its substitutions, like the crawlspace in The Possession and the abandoned well in 3-D) that is located in the Creepy Basement of 112 Ocean Avenue.
  • Holy Burns Evil: Sometimes. Other times, the Evil is able to No-Sell or Fight Off the Kryptonite.
  • Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday:
  • I Am Legion: The Evil refers to itself in the plural in The Possession and Exorcism, and it was portrayed as being an apparent hive mind that was made up of six individual demons in Playhouse.
  • Indian Burial Ground: The novel is widely believed to have been the modern Trope Codifier. Depending on what, or which film/book you believe, the house was built on land that was used as a burial ground by Natives. Or land where Natives exiled their invalids. Or land where a bunch of Natives were massacred. Or land where Natives sacrificed people to a God of Evil. Or land where Natives sacrificed people to abate demons. All anyone can really agree upon is that it was land where a bunch of Natives died.
  • In Name Only: All of the unofficial films pay at least some lip service to the Amityville mythos, with the exception of The Final Chapter and Prison, both of which were original stories (titled Sickle and Against the Night, respectively) that were rebranded as Amityville installments for their home video releases.
  • Intercontinuity Crossover: With The Otherworld in the 2012 novel Amityville Horrible.
  • The Mockbuster: Amityville is the name of a town, so no one owns the rights to the word, which means that anyone can slap together a horror film (which may or may not involve Amityville) and call it "The Amityville _____."
  • Monster Mash: The series has featured demons, ghosts, witches and warlocks, zombies, vampires, aliens, werewolves, revenants, mad scientists, giant animals, a Scary Scarecrow...
  • Movie-Theater Episode: Playhouse, though it is an abandoned one, and the emphasis is more on it being a stage theatre than a film one.
  • Negative Continuity: Due to legal issuesnote , none of the films are technically allowed to be "real" sequels to the 1979 film. The filmmakers seem to have run with this and decided to not let any of the sequels have anything to do with each other, either.
    • The Amityville Horror: The land was used as a dumping ground for invalids by the Shinnecock. It was desecrated when a house was built on it by John Ketchum, an alleged witch who was run out of Salem.
    • The Possession: While billed as a prequel, the film comes off as more of a Stealth Sequel due to the anachronistic technology, the familicide and its aftermath being completely different from what was shown and mentioned in the 1979 film, and a bulletin board in the police station giving the date as 1982 instead of 1974. The murdered family is named Montelli instead of DeFeo, though this admittedly does not contradict anything in the first film, which never actually used the name DeFeo. The land is changed from a dumping ground to a more standard Indian Burial Ground, the Red Room is replaced by a crawlspace, and John Ketchum is replaced by an unnamed woman with an identical backstory (an alleged witch who desecrated the land by building a house on it after being run out of Salem).
    • 3-D: The murdered family is named DeFeo, and not Montelli. The land is still an Indian burial ground, but the Red Room has been replaced again, this time by an abandoned well. The film ends with the house destroying itself.
    • The Evil Escapes: The house is still standing, and is cleansed when an exorcism that is performed on it forces the Evil to take refuge in a lamp, which is then shipped off to California. The lamp is destroyed when it is thrown off of a cliff, but the Evil survives by possessing the pet cat, Pepper.
    • Curse: The film takes place in Amityville and makes an oblique reference to the DeFeo murders, but is set in a different haunted house that has no connection to 112 Ocean Avenue.
    • It's About Time: The house was demolished, and the source of its evil is changed from a Satanist-desecrated Indian burial ground to a clock that was owned by Gilles de Rais. The clock is destroyed, and is there no indication that the Evil survived its host's destruction like it did in The Evil Escapes.
    • A New Generation: The house is in upstate New York instead of Long Island, and was the site of a hitherto unmentioned familicide that was committed by Franklin I. Bronner in 1966. The house's status during the events of the film is not mentioned, but the Evil has taken up residence in a mirror, which Bronner gives to his estranged son, Keyes. Keyes destroys the mirror, and like in It's About Time, there is no indication that the Evil survived this like in The Evil Escapes.
    • Dollhouse: The dollhouse looks like 112 Ocean Avenue. That is it, there is otherwise no reference to Amityville, the Lutzes, the DeFeos, etc. The Martin family's new home is stated to have been built on top of the foundation of another house that burnt down, but the film is set in California, so there is no possible way that the old house was 112 Ocean Avenue.
    • Haunting: The house is in a middle-class neighborhood that is nowhere near a body of water, the Lutzes are said to have lasted two years in it instead of just twenty-eight days, and one of the entities that is haunting it is Ronald DeFeo Jr.'s youngest brother, John Matthew. The main ghost is credited as being DeFeo himself on IMDB, but nowhere in the film itself (which does not have credits) is this made apparent.
    • Asylum: The house was demolished and replaced by the High Hopes Psychiatric Hospital, which is haunted by the ghost of Allison DeFeo. The Satchem were a Native American tribe who immigrated to Amityville after being run out of Salem. They believed that they would be granted immortality if they made regular sacrifices of six people to a deity called the Dark Master, and were wiped out by a witch hunter named John Underhill at the site of what would later become 112 Ocean Avenue.
    • Death House: A white witch named Abigail Wilmont moved to Amityville after being run out of Salem, and was lynched after being falsely accused of killing a child in the 1600s, with it being vaguely implied that her death may have jinxed or cursed Amityville. Raymond Florence's house has the iconic eye-shaped upper windows of the Amityville house, despite clearly not being 112 Ocean Avenue.
    • The Final Chapter: An entirely unrelated film, the original title of which is Sickle.
    • Playhouse: While passing through Amityville, the Shinnecock unearthed a cave that turned out to be a Hell Gate. They managed to seal the cave back up, but it was at some point disinterred again, and ever since the town of Amityville has made yearly sacrifices of six people (including, it is implied, the DeFeos) to the Evil.
    • Vanishing Point: The film is set in Amityville, but its plot revolves (loosely) around a haunted boarding house and the mysterious death of one of its residents, Margaret East.
    • Legacy and Evil Never Dies: The house was at some point destroyed, but the Evil (which is indicated to be Beelzebub, and a personal agent of Satan) lives on in the form of a clown painting and a Cymbal-Banging Monkey. Evil Never Dies makes reference to the events of The Evil Escapes, It's About Time, A New Generation, Dollhouse, and Playhouse.
    • Terror: The Oberests were a family of occultists who lived in Amityville, and they sacrificed people in an attempt to attain eternal life, though all they apparently succeeded in doing was opening a Hell Gate, which made Jimmy Oberest kill all of the other Oberests besides his baby sister, Delilah. Delilah now owns the house (which is clearly not 112 Ocean Avenue) where everything went down, and has the town's citizens help her "feed" people to it to abate the Evil, with it being mentioned that this has been going on since the 1970s.
    • No Escape: The house is dilapidated and full of abandoned junk, and has been moved from the lake-adjacent suburbs to the edge of an Enchanted Forest. Half of the film is set in 1997, while the other half is set in 2016, and it has a Gainax Ending in which a dead 2016 character somehow goes back in time and kills a character in 1997.
    • Exorcism: The house was cleansed when it was at some point exorcised by Father Jonas. Unfortunately, the Evil (which includes the Legion) lives on in the form of wood that a contractor took from the house prior to the exorcism and added to other properties, unwittingly creating a bunch of other Haunted Houses.
    • The Awakening: The DeFeo murders and the Lutz haunting happened, but everything else is fiction, something that is made overt by a scene where a character shows off various Amityville films (including the original, The Possession, and The Remake). The house has lain dormant since 1975, but it "wakes up" when the Walker family moves into it in 2015, Joan Walker having purposely sought out the Evil in the belief that she could harness its power to restore her braindead son, James. The Evil is revealed to be trapped within the confines of the property by a magic circle, and it is driven out of a possessed James (and possibly destroyed) when he is dragged past the boundary by his sister, Belle.
    • Prison: An entirely unrelated film, the original title of which is Against the Night.
    • The Last Amityville Movie - Set in Los Angeles, the main character is mailed the door knob from the original house, and discovers all of the events in previous Amityville movies were sparked by the contents of the original house sold at auction.
  • New House, New Problems: As noted in the description. Interestingly, the next owners after the Lutzes reported absolutely no such problems with the house, nor have any subsequent owners.note  The only "supernatural" issues reported have been curiosity seekers taking pictures, knocking on the door, sitting out front waiting for something spooky to happen, or otherwise bothering the house's owners and their neighbors. Indeed, one of the recent owners repainted the house's exterior, removed the famous quarter-moon windows and changed the address (from 112 to 108 Ocean Avenue) to discourage tourists.
  • New Powers as the Plot Demands: The Evil's abilities are limited only to the imaginations of the writers.
    When producer and co-screenwriter Christopher DeFaria read the short story collection Amityville: The Evil Escapes by John G. Jones in preparation for writing the script [of Amityville: It's About Time], he became confused by what he felt were inconsistencies in the nature and abilities of the demonic entities between stories. He called Jones to ask for clarification. Jones simply told him, "Yep, Chris, that's the way evil is - it's just unpredictable!"
  • No Name Given: The Evil, except in Evil Never Dies, where it is explicitly stated to be Beelzebub (hence all of the flies).
  • Ominous Obsidian Ooze: Black sludge appears throughout the films, starting with the original, where it overflows from the toilets and fills up a pit in the Red Room. A man is drowned in it in The Evil Escapes, and it manifests as an outright Blob Monster in It's About Time.
  • Parental Incest:
    • Clair Martin begins having erotic fantasies about her stepson Todd in Dollhouse.
    • Mark Janson has an erotic fantasy about one of his daughters in Legacy.
    • Belle Walker has a sexually explicit vision of her mother and brother together in The Awakening.
  • Pater Familicide: The Evil seems to take perverse joy out of making people kill their own families, having used its corrupting influence to orchestrate the massacres of the DeFeos, the Montellis, the Bronners, the Jansons, the Jacobsons, the Humes, the Pangborns, and the Walkers.
  • Police Are Useless: The Possession and A New Generation are the only films in which they are even remotely helpful, and even then it is just individual officers, and not the police as a whole.
  • Premiseville
  • Prequel: Murders and The Dawn. The Possession was billed as this, but it comes off as more of a Stealth Sequel.
  • Prison Episode: Prison (though it is set in an abandoned one that the protagonists are exploring, rather than an active one that they have been sent to) and a good chunk of Island.
  • Salem Is Witch Country: All manner of witches and occultists are said to have immigrated from Salem to Amityville.
  • Sapient House: The house itself is sometimes treated as a living thing, most prominently in 3-D, where there are innumerable scenes that are shot in a way that suggests that the house is "watching" everything that occurs in and around it.
  • Shotguns Are Just Better: Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his family with a rifle, but most recreations of the massacre replace the weapon with a shotgun; shotguns are also used in the DeFeo-inspired mass shootings that occur in films like A New Generation, Asylum, Legacy, and The Awakening.
  • Stopped Numbering Sequels: The films stopped being numbered after 3-D, though a few home video releases do list The Evil Escapes as Amityville 4.
  • Supernatural-Proof Father: If a film's focus is on a family, then chances are the father will be the least likely to acknowledge that something supernatural is going on, even if they are the one most affected by it, like George Lutz.
  • Town with a Dark Secret: The citizens of Amityville "feed" people to the Evil to keep it contained in both Playhouse and Terror.
  • Undead Child: Jodie DeFeo in the remake, John Matthew DeFeo in Haunting, and Allison DeFeo in Asylum.
  • Unperson: The Lutzes. Besides the original and the remake, the only films to directly reference them are Haunting and Murders. All of the others do their best to only pay them lip service, if that, with the most egregious instance of this probably being The Awakening, where they are only mentioned once (and not even by name) even though the film features scenes taken from the original that contain George and Kathy.
  • Vampire Episode: Harvest (which has a vampire who dates back to at least the Civil War) and Vampire (which has Lilith).
  • Very Loosely Based on a True Story: DeFeo's lawyer claimed it was a hoax, and few if any outside sources corroborate the Lutzes' version of events. Certainly a lot of the backstory attributed to the house (namely, that it was an Indian Burial Ground and claims of deaths among previous owners) is either exaggerated or without any apparent basis in fact. In any case, the films and books are very different from what the Lutz family claimed happened as well, and Jay Anson admitted that he embellished elements of their story for his book.
  • Villain of Another Story: Ronald DeFeo Jr., despite being an integral part of the franchise's backstory, is this in every film besides Murders.
  • Weirdness Magnet: Amityville is plagued by all manner of supernatural phenomena, only some of which involves 112 Ocean Avenue.

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