The Amityville Horror (1979) poster
1979 · haunted-house · possession · classic

The Amityville Horror

Directed by Stuart Rosenberg1h 58m1979
ElsewhereIMDb6.248kRT33%Metacritic28TMDB6.31k
  • heavy
  • intense
Movie DNA

Heavy, steady, measured haunted-house / possession, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

George Lutz, his wife Kathy, and their three children have just moved into a beautiful, and improbably cheap, Victorian mansion nestled in the sleepy coastal town of Amityville, Long Island. However, their dream home is concealing a horrific past and soon each member of the Lutz family is plagued with increasingly strange and violent visions and impulses.

Our read · The Amityville Horror (1979) reads as a heavy, steady, grounded haunted-house · possession · classic entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of The Amityville Horror

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want classic seventies haunted-house dread in suburbia.

ends unsettlingit leaves you shakena slow buildgrips by minute 22attention 4/5earns its length
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upjump scareschild perilanimal harm

Skip it tonightPossession horror with family peril will keep you up tonight.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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