Jay
Anson, The Amityville Horror, Pocket Star Books/Pocket Books/Simon &
Schuster Inc., New York NY, 2005.
Octavo;
paperback; 317pp., with monochrome maps and illustrations, Moderate wear;
covers well rubbed and edgeworn; spine creased; text block edges toned with
some spotting. Good.
Try
this as an interesting experiment: for one week, note everything that happens
to you at home without trying to infer any kind of causality. Wake up feeling
off-colour? Note it down. Lost your car-keys only to find them in a place you
would never think to look? Put it on the list. Heard an odd noise outside
during the night? Noted. Discovered an odd bruise on your shin but can’t
remember how you got it? Check. Then, at the end of the week, declare that “demons
spent the last seven days trying to possess me”, and re-examine your list. You
might start to feel a bit freaked out.
Of
course, things happen in everyday life that have no essential connexion to each
other – they’re just random pieces of happenstance and nothing can be read
between them, apart from the fact that they all happened to you. But viewing
them through a specific lens makes them look peculiar. It doesn’t make that
peculiarity ‘Truth’; it just implies connexions which are suggestive, but which
are not actually there. Despite everything that Jung has to say about
synchronicity, sometimes random events are just that – random. What does this
have to do with Jay Anson’s book? Let’s begin a slow unpack…
This
is a book which is absolutely not true. It’s a mask which hides a whole bunch
of baloney. In essence it is a distillation of things – occurrences, objects and
happenings - which have been lumped together inside a particular frame. That
frame bears the label “Demonic Haunted House”, but this is a lie: many of the
things within the frame have been broken in order to fit; other things have
been left out entirely. This book is the tip of an iceberg of intention and is
designed to fool those who read it. It looks shiny and slick, but we’ve learned
since 1977 that things which look polished and enticing are probably trying to
sell us something. That’s the case here.
What’s
interesting about this book is not so much the contents, the badly-written stuff on the pages
between the covers, but all the things that are going on around it. Despite the
subject matter, the book lies there trying to look innocent, but it’s covering
a multitude of sins exposed by examining how it came to be and what happened
afterwards. Essentially, butter wouldn’t melt between its pages.
To
recap, in late December of 1975, the Lutz family moved into a house on Long
Island in New York that was cheaper than expected but in a district that was
above their pay grade. They were told that a series of murders had happened in
the house a year earlier – thus accounting for the cheap price-tag - but this
didn’t faze them, even when told that the furniture in the house was the
property of the slain previous owners. While in the house, the family claimed
to have experienced strange and sometimes violent phenomena, personality changes,
visitations by invisible entities, odd events and curious noises. They
attributed all of this to the proximity of an ancient Native American burial
ground, the nearby grave of a Salem witch-hunter, and the restless spirits of
those slain on the premises, with a touch of brimstone thrown in for good
measure. Twenty-eight days after moving in, the Lutz family abandoned the place
and relocated to stay with relatives, claiming that it was impossible to live
there any longer.
To
our jaded Twenty-first Century palates, this sounds like a trite trope-fest of
tedious proportions; however, it’s wise to remember that, before this book was
published, very little of this kind of tale had shown up in the popular narrative.
William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist had appeared in 1971 to
general acclaim (with a sequel appearing in 1983), and the Academy AwardTM
winning movie adaptation was released in 1973. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary
– a novel which capitalises heavily upon the ‘built-upon-a-Native-American-graveyard’
trope - was released in 1983, while Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” has
been with us since 1953. Add to this the fact that horror fiction was going
through a boom period, with writers like Guy N. Smith (Night of the Crabs),
Graham Masterton (The Manitou) and James Herbert (The Rats) making
enormous inroads into the zeitgeist, the world was primed and ready for
this horror explosion. And explode, it did.
After
the events had transpired, Jay Anson was contracted to write them up in book
form. He was given a large quantity of recorded discussions – tapes of
conversations that George and Kathy Lutz had made, guided by two lawyers who
were advising them. Anson took this material, which he claimed was largely
disjointed and non-chronological, and massaged the information into a coherent timeframe.
Essentially, he took a bunch of random data as recounted by George and Kathy
Lutz concerning their time at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville and focused them
through a specific and peculiar lens. He is on record as saying that he contacted
as many of the people mentioned in the narrative as he could, but there are
notable shortfalls in his due diligence. Errors are present in the text – of sense
and of chronology – and changes were made between editions of the book as it
gained in popularity. It’s clear that the 1977 first edition was simply a later
draft that was corrected at least two times in subsequent editions. That first
edition was copywritten to “Jay Anson, George Lutz and Kathy Lutz” – is it cynical
of me to think that a corrected later edition, with different copyright
benefactors, might have been a slick way to cut the Lutzes out of any royalties
owing from the property? Probably.
Anyway,
it took only a switch from an “old tan Ford” to a “Chevrolet Vega” as Father
Mancuso’s car of choice, to force an edition change, before reverting back to
the original model in the following edition. Which, for avid readers, begs the
question: what type of car was it?
We
can’t, of course, ask “Father Mancuso”. This figure is a fraught element of the
story. Apparently, the priest that the Lutz’s contacted to come and bless their
house was actually named Father Pecoraro; the publishers insist that the Church
intervened with an alias in order the protect the cleric’s identity. In the
book, it’s clear that, during the recounted events, the priest and the Lutz
family never encountered each other. The crucial scene where Father Mancuso
arrives at the house and is told to “Get Out!” by a disembodied voice,
occurs without either party actually interacting. Now, I don’t care who you
are, if you come over to my house while I’m out in my backyard and blithely
let yourself in for a spot of ritual purification, the person telling you to “get
out” will be me, pure and simple. This scene has been carefully constructed to
obscure the fact that the Lutzes never met a priest at their house while they were
in residence, and that no priest ever went to the house during that time.
Researchers have been able to verify that Father Pecoraro spoke by telephone to
the Lutzes before they moved in; during television appearances after the fact he
variously claimed that he had visited the house when it was untenanted,
that his visits to the house had been uneventful and also – going full volte-face
- that the events in the book were real, with the additional detail that he had
been invisibly slapped as well as being verbally abused. Which events were
factual then? The decision to rename the character “Father Delaney” in the 1979
movie seems like an attempt to dispense with the whole tortured issue.
Other
issues arise: the Prologue of the book claims that the Lutz family were
in residence from the 23rd of December 1975, while the first chapter
clearly states that they moved in on the 18th. Subsequent owners of
the property were able to verify that all of the fittings and appointments within
the house were original – no doors had been torn off their hinges; no windows had
been damaged; no balcony railings had been smashed; and no garage doors had been
bent and dislocated. Simple consultation with the weather agencies of the time
concluded that there was no snowfall or torrential rain of the levels described
over that period. There was no bar named “The Witch’s Brew” (or anything
else) in the location indicated in the book. No police officers had answered
calls from the Lutzes or made patrols in the area over the period. No
neighbours had noticed anything unusual during the Lutz residency. And – most damning
– the infamous “Red Room” in the basement of the house was simply a small
closet, painted in keeping with the rest of the place, and not concealed in any
way.
Claims
that the house had been built upon a Native American cemetery, designed to
dispose of the mad and the diseased, were disputed by the local Shinnecock population.
A burial ground had been designated somewhere in the region but had been
abandoned early on after torrential floods had caused the river to break its
boundaries and erode the site – that’s all, folks. Nothing to see here. The reference
to John Ketcham in chapter 11 is a confusion between several families and
individuals of that name who lived in, or moved through, the Amityville area
since the first white settlers landed in America – none of them are buried on
the Lutz’s old property; certainly, none of the Amityville Ketchams practiced
witchcraft in Salem, or attended the Trials there.
A
handy template is tacitly offered in the book to slyly inform the reader as to
what is taking place. In the Catholic Church, a formula exists to assess levels of demonic interference. First, there has to be an Invitation, or
an opening of an individual to the possibility of demonic traffic (in this case
we’re told that – somehow - George and Kathy’s fondness for Transcendental
Meditation is the key). Then there’s Infestation where the environment
surrounding targeted individuals is messed with – knocking, tapping, loud
unexplained noises and other poltergeist activity. Following this there’s Obsession,
during which the targeted individual starts to harbour dark and dissociative
thoughts. Then there’s Vexation, wherein the body of the target is attacked
by buffets, cuts and nicks, along with many other distressing ailments which
occur and disappear spontaneously. And finally, there’s full-on Possession,
during which the body of the target is taken over completely by the outside
entity. This system of identification was used in Blatty's book, The
Exorcist, and again in the movie of the same name; it was widely discussed
after the impact made by those two vehicles and so, of course, it gets jammed
in here to ramp up the spookiness.
In
the aftermath of their tenancy, the Lutzes engaged a “vampirologist” named Stephen
Kaplan to determine the cause of the uproar at the address. The Lutzes were
clearly looking for a sympathetic read of the phenomenon, but they had an
acrimonious falling-out after Kaplan declared that he was determined to
discover and call-out any instance of fraud that he unearthed. It clearly looks
as though the Lutzes had something that they’d rather remained hidden. Kaplan
and his wife eventually published a book in 1995 that gives a jaundiced reading
of the Amityville events.
Subsequently,
the Lutzes were given the partisan hearing that they wanted in the form of a
visit by Ed and Lorraine Warren. The self-styled “demonologist” and “clairvoyant”
– inspiration for all the “Conjuring” and “Insidious” films (and
their spin-offs) - roundly declared that the house was bursting with demonic energies
and went on to make huge bank on their involvement, all the while boosting the
book sales and box-office returns from the movie that launched in 1979. Once
the movie hit the silver screen, it was all over bar the shouting. I went to
see this film myself when it first came out and it terrified the pants off of
me; I can confirm that it was truly a seminal moment for the horror genre. (The
2005 movie, on the other hand, is fine if you’re a big fan of Ryan Reynolds’
abdominal development, but a hot mess, else.)
But
is it all real? Well, no – no it’s not. In the follow-up after its release the book
prompted many investigations by interested parties, some by television programs
and other media outlets, some by amateurs bothered by the inconsistencies
between the book editions. There were declarations of shenanigans and some bitter legal
fights ensued. It was revealed that the two lawyers who coached the Lutzes on
their original taped revelations had met with the couple over a good bottle of
red wine and declared that the case was a money-spinner that would reap them
great benefits. Researchers working with the Warrens after their moment in the
spotlight were told to “make up” material for their reports, the scarier
the better, in order to keep popular attention simmering. At the end of the day,
George Lutz was forced to amend his stance on the events downgrading the
mystery from “absolutely real” to “mostly true”. Which is to say, not at all.
All
told, Lutz is on record as saying that he and his family reaped about US$300,000
across several decades, an amount largely eaten into by legal costs and other expenses.
The lawyers, the publishers and the film production companies have benefited
from the lions’ share of the booty. And certainly, Jay Anson has never had to
work another day in his life. Along the way, they created the template for all
of the haunted house scenarios to follow in their footsteps.
*****
Fans
of the unexplained and the mysterious of course know the story of the Marie
Celeste. This ship was discovered adrift at sea in the Nineteenth Century,
completely empty of crew and passengers and with signs that, whatever had taken
place, it had happened quickly and without warning. Over the years, many
writers and researchers have tried to pin down what happened; in essence, they
have tried to find a frame that encompasses all of the elements of the mystery,
a lens which rationalises all of the myriad details that prompt questions of ‘Why?’.
Over the years I’ve read many theories as to what happened to the ship: UFOs;
Pirates; Madness Due to Spoiled Grain; Alcoholic Poisoning. None of them seemed
to adequately explain each and every recorded detail. The chosen frame didn’t
encompass all of the scene. As far as The Amityville Horror is
concerned (and, cheekily, Anson named it that in homage to Lovecraft’s “The
Dunwich Horror”) there is a frame that accounts for all of the goings-on,
hidden behind the bland sleekness of this carefully-constructed,
sleight-of-hand of a book. If you squint just so through the trashy writing, you can see it too.
Three
Tentacled Horrors from me.
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