the amityville horror a true story jay anson

'We all live in this crazy world and have our own perceptions of what's going on and reflect that back to each other in different ways. A lot of what this series is about is the nature of truth.' 'Hearing what people believe, what they believe happened to them' was what excited him about the project, he said. There's a real human component to it.'Īnd he didn't set out to debunk the supernatural elements of the story or make a case for them.

'At the core,' Riccobono said, 'it's really a story about these two families and some of the things that happened behind closed doors and the secrets that families keep. George died of heart disease in 2006 when he was 59, but not before suing Chris for trademark infringement after his former stepson (he and Kathy divorced in 1988) bought the rights to upon finding out George had sanctioned yet another movie related to their ordeal. 'What really happened is, to me, more traumatic,' Chris says in the series' first episode, 'and it was something that I would have liked to have just forgotten about.' What happened-or, one must ask, did not happen-in the house has fueled its own true crime- meets-psychic-phenomena industry that all started with Jay Anson's 1977 book The Amityville Horror and the 1979 movie of the same name starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder.Īlmost 50 years later, warring mysteries endure, and the new MGM+ docuseries Amityville: An Origin Story sets out to unpack the different types of horror at play here, through the eyes of paranormal investigators, priests, detectives, lawyers, friends of the DeFeo and Lutz families and one of the kids who lived through it, many of them going on camera for the first time. is the stuff of, quite literally, legend. The 28 days the Lutz family-George, Kathy and her kids Danny, Christopher and Melissa from a previous marriage-spent at 112 Ocean Ave. had killed his parents and four siblings in the house barely a year beforehand-but the couple wanted a nice place to start their life together, so they offered $80,000 and bought the lot, including some old pieces of furniture dappled with visible traces of blood. Well, George and Kathy Lutz knew-23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr.

In 1975, a 4,000-square-foot house with a finished basement in a peaceful New York suburb, on a quarter-acre lot boasting a heated pool and its own boat dock, went on the market for $100,000.Ī listing that should have begged only one question: What's the catch?

The amityville horror a true story jay anson