Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

But Americans have always been aware that their homes can be menaced by unseen forces. Perhaps those forces are the ghosts of people murdered there a hundred years before, or maybe it’s toxic waste from a leaky landfill. Maybe demons are stealing your life force, or maybe it’s radiation. Your kids might be sick because your house is built over a cemetery, or the radon in the basement. Large-scale environmental disasters like Love Canal, the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, and a series of high-profile asbestos lawsuits made clear that invisible evil was hiding in your home. In fact, if the cause was Satan, you were lucky. At least the Lord of Darkness wasn’t a carcinogen.

Despite Jackson’s iconic The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s go-for-broke Hell House, Anne Rivers Siddons’s beautifully disturbing The House Next Door, and even Marasco’s pioneering Burnt Offerings, the unfortunate fact remains that America’s most iconic haunted house is the title property from The Amityville Horror. Crass, commercial minded, grandiose, ridiculous, this carnival barker’s idea of a haunted house is a shame-train of stupid.

Socialite Patricia Montandon hired a tarot reader for a party but forgot to get him a drink. Furious, he cursed her San Francisco apartment. The Intruders is her all-true account of the party snub…from hell. Credit 82

“George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue on December 18. Twenty-eight days later, they fled in terror.” So begins one of the most promiscuous horror franchises of all time, one that spawned at least six novels (all marketed as nonfiction), as well as books by pretty much everyone who ever crossed the property line.

Amityville’s cottage-industry success stems from the fact that George Lutz stuck to his guns all his life, dishing out movie-ready claptrap from one side of his mouth while claiming it was all true from the other. Reportedly never happy with his share of the proceeds from the original best-selling book and movie, Lutz realized that he could still market his name. And so he did, desperately hoping to pad his bank account with sequel after sequel. After sequel.

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Many people found the original story of demonic possession, goo flowing down walls, and mysterious voices shouting at priests hard to swallow. Those events pale in comparison to the sequels, with their devil pigs riding on the wings of 747s, attacks by fire bats, and evil forces compelling people to rent cars they don’t even want. The Amityville Horror II (1982) was plenty ridiculous, with archangels working as lifeguards to rescue drowning Lutz children, but in the third installment the story went from a simple meal of possessed homes to an all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit. Amityville: The Final Chapter (1985) follows the Lutzes as they ditch their kids and fly around the world on a studio-paid publicity tour, giving interviews to promote the movie. Keeping the franchise going, the Entity (the source of all evil from the first book) goes mobile, following the family everywhere. Fortunately, George Lutz is manly enough to punch and kick it into submission. “I knew this martial arts training would come in handy someday,” he muses. The Final Chapter climaxes in a battle in which George puts the Abomination in a chokehold while his wife and kids form a human chain and channel love power into him. When the Entity finally taps out, the entire family, including Harry the Dog, kick and stomp its corpse into dust.

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It’s an inspirational story. “One day,” author Ken Eulo said in an interview, “I read The Amityville Horror and I thought to myself, oh Christ, I could do this in my sleep.” And so he wrote The Brownstone (1980), which spawned two sequels. He wasn’t the only one. Even poor deceased Jay Anson, a jobbing writer brought on board to write the original Amityville book, wasn’t allowed to rest in peace. His 666 (1981), effectively a smudged photocopy of The Amityville Horror, was published under his name a year after he died.

Sadly, the true story of 112 Ocean Avenue turns out to be worse than what’s in the books. The crime that cursed the Amityville House wasn’t the real-life murders of the DeFeo family. Nor was it that the land was supposedly home to John Ketcham, a warlock who escaped the Salem witch trials. Nor was it a violation of fabricated Shinnecock Indian Nation burial grounds. A 2013 documentary (My Amityville Horror) about Daniel Lutz, who was ten years old when his family moved in, puts a name to the Entity that haunted this house: George Lutz.