At some point before dawn the clock struck 50 years to the moment that the town of Amityville on the South Shore of Long Island became destined to have its name appropriated for no fewer than 45 and as many as 54 horror films, the most recent of which, and we shit you not, is titled Amityville Backpack, the premise apparently that a possessed backpack originated in the house in which a tragic massacre occurred 50 years ago. Backpack is at least the third straight-to-DVD (and that’s DVD, not Blu-ray, not video on demand) Amityville film that became available for sale earlier this year on Amazon, right off the heels of Amityville Ripper and Amityville Bigfoot.
And actually Backpack is not the most recent, since that one’s Amazon page says it was released in June. Once Upon a Time in Amityville dropped. Apparently it’s a “Western” themed horror even though Amityville is on the East Coast and… You can get it in a $15.58 two-pack with Jurassic Exorcist. Both films list the director as Mark Polonia and bill Ken Van Sant as the lead actor.
Nice to see folks still getting work in the money laundering industry these days…
And holy fuck this Amityville: Where The Echo Lives dropped two weeks ago. That’s (at least) five this year now, with the team behind this last one evidently not even bothering to connect it to the half-century anniversary of the prosaic if horrific crime that led to the scam that eventually, way down the line “inspired” Amityville Karen (That one’s available on Blu-ray and on-demand).
The path to this “infamy” began on the evening of the 13th when 23 year-old Ronnie “Butch” DeFeo burst into the doors of a local watering hole in the town and screamed “You got to help me! I think my mother and father are shot!” Cops responded to the spacious DeFeo family home at 112 Ocean Ave and found the bodies of Ron Sr, Louise Brigante DeFeo, both 43, their four other children: Daw, 18, Allison, 13, Marc, 12, and John, 9. All had been shot dead in their sleep with a rifle, cops had found no signs of struggle or that the murderer had used a sound suppressor. Butch told cops he had gone to work that day and only found the bodies after having returned home that evening.
Less than a day later, Butch was getting grilled by detectives, trying to make it sound like it was a mafia hit that wiped out his family – which he didn’t completely pull out of his ass considering Ron Sr’s uncle Peter DeFeo was a capo in the Genovese Family. As such it was plausible the Amityville DeFeos had been “connected,” as Long Islanders are wont to describe certain Italian Americans.
[Example: In 2009 a then-27 year-old man was evicted from an illegal basement apartment in a neighboring town where over what may be the pettiest fucking reason possible. It’s really too stupid to explain. When asked why the man wouldn’t retaliate by informing on the dickhead landlord for renting out a space in violation of housing code, the man said simply “I can’t, he’s connected.”]
And maybe that would’ve worked if Butch had been smarter. Not confessing to slaughtering his family would’ve helped too, as Butch folded like a cheap suit and told the cops everything after they had poked holes in his story. Just over a year later a jury decided Butch’s insanity defense was bullshit and sent him up the Hudson River for life times six where he died once in 2021.
The next month, December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz and their three kids moved into the vacant home, paying $80,000 for it (roughly $469,000 in 2024 dollars), the DeFeos’ furniture included.
Four weeks later they were gone. The Lutzes moved out and eventually sold it to another couple for $55,000 in March 1977. That $25,000 hit was a loss leader, because their very much fictional book and its subsequent film adaptation, The Amityville Horror, made them pretty fucking rich.
It was all bullshit. The Lutzes made it up and cashed in as every red-blooded American is free to do with their reputation and capital on the line. Fake it until you make it and then keep faking it.
And then let others continue faking it to the point where everyone just stops giving a shit and some money launderers bankroll a movie relocating Amityville to the Wild West of the 1870s.
And then these fucking chuds are hiding behind quotation marks to imply to their dipshit subscribers that the house is “still” haunted, as if readers might have been concerned that the demonic entities that once plagued the abode had moved on to other mass murder scenes. Of course Butch DeFeo probably really did see demons, he constantly abused LSD before he killed his family with a rifle.
Beyond that dead-end townie getting more famous than most others of his ilk, there’s something very quintessentially Long Island about the whole story however. Sure, the place thrums with the small-dick energy of Billy Joel’s seminal “Big Shot” and the bellicosity of grown men who threaten to shoot each other at a flag football game (these men were playing the game, not watching their kids), but underneath that is a deep sense of unease and insecurity that drives people to seek comfort in the spiritual-ish. Renowned “psychic” con artists John Edward and Theresa Caputo hail from neighboring towns and have become pretty freaking rich too by preying upon those struggling with painful losses. Golden-haired messiah Donald Trump recently campaigned at the wake of a slain NYPD officer at a funeral home just miles away from the former DeFeo house. Further north in Melville a “Trump Store” just opened up in a space once occupied by a piano gallery, the purveyors of MAGA cult merch too lazy to remove the dated graphics of a baby grand from the windows.
Even if the symptoms, like sending George Santos to Congress, are quite obvious, the disease ravaging Long Island itself is complicated and we could be here all night trying to diagnose it. The topline is that a place that was once economically vibrant and innovative – where DNA was discovered, where the Apollo lander was designed and built as were the fighter planes that helped win World War II, where Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris, where Nikola Tesla built that lightning machine, where Walt Whitman, Thomas Pynchon, and LL Cool J were born, where Jack Kerouac got drunk, where arguably the first true video game was invented – is now more or less in a dead end.
Or a “cul-de-sac,” if you prefer the fancier term. Plenty do, and those are the type of people for whom a stagnant Long Island is perfectly fine, even great for them. Sure they’re going to bitch and complain “My Paulie Jr is 27 years old and he’s just moved back in because he borrowed a softball bat from his landlord and lost it but bought the exact same one brand new and the landlord threw him out anyway. It’s impossible for him to find another place with housing costs around here.” But then about two breaths later it’s “Oh did you see Newsday today? That son of a bitch Democrat town councilman wants to build affordable housing units a half-mile away and do you have any fucking idea what that’s going to do to the school district taxes? I can barely afford my lawn care costs and he’s trying to rob my home of its precious equity! It’s just so crazy! I’m going crazy!”
Kathy and George Lutz died in 2004 and 2006, respectively. Whether the two noxious boomers would complain that their original “nightmare” they completely made up is now getting appropriated for a Western-themed no-budget DVD piece of shit we have no idea. It would be pretty on brand for their generation though, buying what’s now no doubt a $3 million home for a fraction of that in current dollars and then bitching about how the local economy is steadily circling the drain because young families are priced out of a housing market that no property taxpayer wants fixed.
And that’s the real horror here: How much Long Island sucks and watching in real time as its suckery leads it into the resentments and misanthropy of MAGA. Sure, you might say “Oh yeah? Well my hometown in Methmouth County, Missouri just legalized polygamous beastiality,” but Methmouth County isn’t next to the financial and media capital of the world and never really had anything going for it. Long Island did, well past the post-war boom years. Even to the turn of the millennium it was a happening place, with new McMansions, shopping centers, and office parks going up left and right, a region that truly felt like a natural extension of the very great city it borders.
More and more these days it feels like a backwater you make up stories about (The “connected” landlord and the flag football death threat stories in this really happened though).