The Amityville franchise has clocked up an astonishing 18 installments to date. Inspired by the critical and financial success of 1979’s The Amityville Horror (still one of the most commercially successful indie films of all-time), various production companies have been churning out sequels, remakes and re-imaginings for the last couple of decades now.
The most recent is Amityville: The Awakening, shot in 2014 and released straight-to-video last week – our review here. Next up though we’ve got The Amityville Murders: A Haunting on Long Island, and courtesy of Bloody Disgusting, we now have a sneak peek of what’s coming.
The genesis of the series was the experiences of the Lutz family, who moved into a haunted house and experienced all manner of ghostly happenings. The previous occupiers of the house were the DeFeos, who met a grisly end at the hand of patriarch Ronald DeFeo Jr. One misty night, he loaded a hunting rifle and methodically executed his sleeping family, claiming that mysterious voices were compelling him to kill. This film tells that grisly story.
Judging from the stills here, it looks like a pretty standard horror thriller, with the whole ‘Dad goes crazy and turns into a killer’ thing coming with more than a whiff of The Shining. The past pedigree of the Amityville series suggests that this upcoming installment isn’t going to trouble the Academy (it probably won’t even trouble theatres), but director Daniel Farrands does have some excellent horror credentials to his name.
He’s made a series of documentaries about various horror franchises and will presumably be hoping to impress in his debut. At the very least, he’s assembled a decent cast in Paul Ben-Victor, Lainie Kazan, Chelsea Ricketts, John Robinson and Diane Franklin, who starred in the second Amityville film.
Let’s just hope that awful poster for The Amityville Murders: A Haunting on Long Island is only a work in progress, eh?
