Hot Sheet: To Be Experienced

9. FILM: My Amityville Horror
Watching Amityville Horror — or better, reading Jay Anson’s 1977 book about it —  was supremely creepy for a kid. Imagine, though, if that experience, that haunting, was happening to you first hand while you were a kid? In director Eric Walter’s new documentary, that former kid, Daniel Lutz, speaks for the first time in 35 years about what it was like living in the infamous Amityville house that terrified his family in 1975. In 1975, Daniel moved into the house with his mom Kathy and stepfather George and two siblings. The unassuming Dutch Colonial in Long Island had been where a teenaged Ronald DeFeo, Jr. had murdered six members of his family. Lutz and his parents only lived in the house for 28 days, leaving because they were terrorized by the haunting that was going on. Their story inspires that best-selling novel and the subsequent films, which still fascinate audiences today. But what you get in this documentary is so much more; it’s less lurid paranormal terror and more real human horror as we see how growing up different (in this case as part of a world famous haunting that many people didn’t believe) has left Daniel with psychological scars that are worse than what any Hollywood film can create. Opening in theaters today; also available on VOD at SundanceNOW. Watch the trailer below.