Andrew Douglas’s remake of The Amityville Horror takes a more accurate measure of the diminishing cultural authority of the Catholic church in America than any news analysis piece that followed the death of Pope John Paul II. In the original version, released in 1979, Father Delaney (Rod Steiger) piously struggles to save a family from the haunted house on Long Island it has just moved into; in the new version the priest’s role is greatly reduced, and the one who does appear—Father Callaway, played by Philip Baker Hall—is cowardly and ineffectual. And no wonder: Callaway represents an organization that is now, as the movie’s audience knows, mired in scandal and questioning its identity.
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It’s now axiomatic that 70s vigilante films like Dirty Harry (1971), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976) sublimated America’s psychic wounds from the Vietnam war. The subtext of 70s horror films, however, was a national anxiety about what we now call “family values.” And Catholicism was a perfect placeholder for that anxiety, because it was then facing its own choice between adhering to tradition and keeping pace with a rapidly secularizing society. In horror films like Carrie (1976), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976), the threat doesn’t come from supernatural demons so much as the fallout of the 60s: feminism, the sexual revolution, rising divorce rates, and other perceived dangers to the American family.
The original version of The Amityville Horror offered a franker look at the disintegration of conservative family values. George (James Brolin) and Kathy Lutz (Margot Kidder), recently married, purchase a Victorian manse that they can afford only because no one else wants it: a young man murdered members of his immediate family there. Kathy, who has three children from a previous marriage, is a faithful Catholic, while George is a nominal one—he’s converted only to marry her. Early on, he dismissively asks where he should hang a gaudy silver cross, and as if to punish him for his weak faith, he’s possessed by the evil that lurks in the house and eventually creates a passage to hell in the basement. Kathy, as the heroine, is a wife first and a mother second: she’s concerned with maintaining her second marriage—even if George winds up attacking the children with an ax during the climax.
Directed by Andrew Douglas
Written by Scott Kosar
With Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Philip Baker Hall, Jesse James, Jimmy Bennett, and Chloe Grace Moretz
