The real story-behind-the-story of The Amityville Horror (and the genuine horror of the house) was the well-documented mass murder that occurred at 112 Ocean Avenue on November 13, 1974. At roughly 3 o'clock that morning, 23-year-old Ronald Joseph ("Butch") DeFeo, Jr. shot and killed his parents and four younger siblings as they slept. He originally told police that he suspected a gangland hit against his car dealer father, but his story unraveled the following day and he confessed to the crime. He was tried in 1975 and convicted of six counts of second-degree murder. His defense lawyer, William Weber, attempted to present a plea of insanity, saying that DeFeo heard voices in his head which told him to kill his family.

To continue the timeline, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the Amityville house in December, 1975, with their three children. They left the house after 28 days. After recording several hours of audio tapes relating their experiences in the house, author Jay Anson took the material and wrote the book The Amityville Horror - A True Story, which was published in September of 1977. Two producers, Ronald Saland and Elliot Geisinger, who worked for CBS television, first optioned the hit book. The property then came to the attention of Sam Arkoff, a cigar-chewing producer and co-founder (with James Nicholson) of the famed low-budget studio American International Pictures, or AIP.

As Arkoff wrote in his 1992 autobiography, Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants, "as important as The Amityville Horror was in the history of AIP, we might not have ever made the picture were it not for a bookstore owner in the San Fernando Valley. In 1977, I was browsing through his shelves, selecting some books to take on an upcoming vacation. 'Here's one, Sam, that you've got to read. Everyone says it would make a terrific movie.' Of course, I had heard that line hundreds of times before over the past forty years." Arkoff bought the book, but did not take it on his trip. His daughter read it though, and also told him it would make a good film. Arkoff agreed after reading it in one sitting.

Arkoff investigated the rights and found that while no movie studio had bought the book, the CBS Network had the rights and planned to shoot a TV movie with a budget of $800,000. Arkoff called the CBS vice president to negotiate for the rights; he ended up with the sale while CBS retained the first two TV network airings of the finished film.

Casting the two leading characters, George and Kathy Lutz, became a top priority during the preproduction period. James Brolin's agent contacted his client about the picture, and Brolin dismissed the project as a "cheap little horror deal." The agent sent Brolin the book to read, however. "One night... I started about 7 o'clock, and it was 2 in the morning I was still reading, going 'whoa! Really?' and I'm right at this particular part, I can't remember what it was, where I'm pretty tense. Where my pants, which I had hung up on the door, fall onto the floor. Well, I practically hit the ceiling with my head, I was up so fast. At that point I realized how scared I was, and I thought there's something to this - this is a real grabber."

Actress Margot Kidder also discussed her role with her agent, and later admitted that, since her stock was high following the enormous worldwide success of Superman: the Movie (1978), in which she played reporter Lois Lane, "we could get my first big salary." Following a philosophy of "do one for money and one for the heart," she felt the time was ripe for cashing in. "As I got into it (making the movie)," Kidder continued, "I just thought it was fun."

The Amityville Horror was budgeted for $4.6 million, and was allowed a short seven-week shooting schedule. As Arkoff explained, the film came in slightly over budget, "...at $4.7 million at a time when the average picture at the majors cost $13 million to $15 million. Ironically, the New York Daily News eventually reported that we had spent $25 million on the picture; the newspaper's film critic just couldn't believe that we had made it for relatively small change. Even in those latter years of AIP, however, excessive spending was never part of our standard operating procedure. Good habits are hard to break."

Cryptically, Arkoff wrote that "...there were nonstop headaches during the shooting of the picture. Some of the people behind the cameras - from producers [Ronald] Saland and [Elliot] Geisinger... to the Lutzes themselves - created a hornet's nest of problems, frequently getting in the way and contributing very little to the project itself. (I often thought that if I could conjure up the demons of Amityville, I'd turn them loose at the homes of those individuals who had tormented us throughout the making of the picture!)"

Another conflict on the set concerned the differing acting styles of the two leads. Kidder later said that she and Brolin were "from different worlds." She said "I was very full of myself and thought I was from the hip, young Hollywood, and Jim Brolin, to me, was from the old, stodgy Hollywood." Brolin agreed, saying "Yeah, there were tribulations." Kidder continued, "there's kind of two approaches you can take to acting. ...one is to have [everything] really seriously planned out and execute everything ahead of time in a scene, so you figure out ahead of time what your character is thinking, what your character is doing, you know every prop intimately so you know what your character is going to do at what spot in the line. Then there's another way of acting that says be in the moment, take the accidents, play with them as you're doing the scene and let's see what happens. And that's more the way I like to work. ...There's no right or wrong way here, but it can be very annoying to actors ...who really, really can't cope with accidents and have to know exactly what's going to happen." Brolin seemed to feel that this clash of styles added to the tension of their scenes, and that director Rosenberg also took advantage of the situation, saying "if [the director] loves the fact that you're a pear, and you're an orange, and you're an apple... [then] let's see how you interrelate, because you're from completely different gene pools; to me, that's what makes movies great."

Sam Arkoff was near the end of his producing days, and the success of The Amityville Horror came along with a business move that meant the end of American International Pictures as well. As Arkoff later wrote, "ironically, we released The Amityville Horror at about the same time I had merged AIP with Filmways, a move designed to channel more capital into the company to finance bigger-budget movies. Admittedly, hindsight is always twenty-twenty. But the success of The Amityville Horror could have almost single-handedly achieved the same goal, without all the difficulties and the heartache that the merger eventually brought with it."

SOURCES:
Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants by Sam Arkoff with Richard Trubo.

For God's Sake, Get Out!, (2005). 21min. documentary on the making of The Amityville Horror.

by John M. Miller