The Amityville Horror by Daniel Cubias

The Amityville Horror (1979) was a box-office smash that terrified audiences with its supposedly true depiction of a real-life haunting in Amityville, New York. In the decades since its release, the film has gone on to be one of the most profitable independent films of all time, casting a shadow over the haunted house subgenre and spawning an unwieldy franchise of official and unofficial sequels.  But in spite of the film’s success, it was lambasted by critics, and the “true story” that inspired it was already being debunked as exaggeration or even outright fiction before the film was even released.  So what made audiences’ belief in its implausible origin story so stubborn? And why does The Amityville Horror continue to wield such an outsized influence on contemporary haunted house stories?  In this lively analysis of the movie that traumatized him as a child, Daniel Cubias draws on wide-ranging research into the film’s themes, factual basis, and legacy to explain what continues to dr