My Amityville Horror
First came the real-life mass murder, then the “true tale of a haunting” book (still one of America’s most infamous hoaxes), then a hit movie—which in turn spawned a series of tenuously related sequels that are still being made four decades later. The story even got a shout-out in the blockbuster Conjuring franchise. Adding yet another facet to the Amityville story: the tale of Daniel Lutz, who was just a kid when his family (the subject of that 1977 best-seller by Jay Anson) moved into the house where Ronald DeFeo, Jr. killed his parents and four siblings in 1974. Famously, they only lived there a few weeks… but the effect of being at the center of the Amityville story haunted Lutz, psychologically speaking, his entire life, as this genuinely disturbing documentary reveals. (AMC+, rentable on Amazon)
