Overview The first film to be inspired by the story of the Amityville haunting,
The Amityville Horror (1979) chronicles the events of Jay Anson's novel, in which the Lutz family finds their new home in Amityville, New York, to be haunted; the house had been the site of a mass murder by
Ronald DeFeo Jr. in 1974. The following film,
Amityville II: The Possession, is a
prequel based on the book
Murder in Amityville by
Hans Holzer, and depicts the purported supernatural events in the home that led DeFeo to murder his family. The third installment,
Amityville 3-D, is set after the events of the first film, and was released in
3D. ''Amityville: It's About Time
, released in 1992, focuses on a haunted clock that a family from Los Angeles, California takes into their home from an estate sale in New York. The seventh film in the series, Amityville: A New Generation
, also utilizes a haunted object as a plot device. This time, a man purchases a mirror possessed by the spirit of his father, who, like DeFeo, also murdered his family in the Amityville house with a shotgun. Amityville Dollhouse'' (1996) follows a family haunted by spirits unleashed from a
doll house replica of the Amityville home. In 2005, a remake of the 1979 original film was released theatrically. In 2017’s
Amityville: The Awakening, which received a limited theatrical release, a family with an ill son moves into the home and find themselves tormented by ghosts who seek to possess the son's body. Further films would follow, each released direct-to-video or with limited theatrical releases:
The Amityville Haunting (2011; a
found footage film that presents supposed home movies that corroborate the family's haunting);
The Amityville Asylum (2013, set in a haunted Amityville psychiatric hospital);
Amityville Death House (2015, featured yet another explanation for the hauntings);
Amityville Playhouse (2016, focuses on a haunted theater in Amityville);
Amityville: Vanishing Point (2016, focused on a haunted boarding house in Amityville);
The Amityville Legacy (2016, features a haunted toy monkey from the original house),
The Amityville Terror (2016, a family moves to Amityville and are tormented both by an evil spirit and the townsfolk who want to keep them trapped there);
Amityville: No Escape (2016, college students encounter evil in the forest around Amityville); and
Amityville Exorcism (2017, evil spirits possess the daughter of a family that moves to Amityville).
Continuity between films Only the first two films released share some continuity, although they also contain contradictions.
Amityville II is a prequel to the original 1979 movie, and tells the story of the
murder of the DeFeo family (renamed the Montelli family in the film).
Amityville 3-D is not a sequel as stated in the movie poster to the first 2 movies, and is based on the accounts of paranormal investigator
Stephen Kaplan (renamed John Baxter for the film), who was trying to prove that the Lutz family's story was a hoax. Due to legal disputes with the actual Lutz family, the events of the first movie could not be directly referenced, nor could the Lutz family themselves be referenced by name. Of the later films,
Amityville: The Awakening (2017) is explicitly a different continuity from all of the previous movies, which are depicted as
films within the film; the characters watch and discuss the 1979 movie, and one of them brings DVDs of the sequels and remake to the protagonist's house.
The Amityville Curse (2023) is loosely based on the 1981 book of the same name, but is not a remake of its 1990 adaptation.
Release Producers and distributors The films have at various times been owned by several different production and distribution companies internationally and in the United States.
American International Pictures produced and released the original film, before
Orion Pictures bought the rights to the film, as well as
II and
3-D.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) now owns films one through
3-D, and released them in a DVD box set in 2005. While
4 was a TV film broadcast on
NBC, it has been released multiple times by independent distribution companies in recent years (one of which was Vidmark, who also released
Curse (1990); Vidmark is now owned by
Lionsgate). Multicom Entertainment Group owns distribution rights to
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, ''It's About Time
, A New Generation
and Dollhouse''.
Box office Critical reception ==Documentary==