It’s not a secret that any horror movie to turn a profit finds itself in real danger of being sequelized, franchised, rebooted, reinvented, remade, or overhauled in perpetuity for the rest of time, but there aren’t many IPs out there that have been bastardized quite like The Amityville Horror.
The atmospheric 1979 supernatural chiller was a solid success at the time, and endures as one of the better entries from a decade that was as rife with duds as it was with classics, but nobody in their right mind could have predicted where things ended up heading from there. If you can believe it, we live in a world where there are over 40 Amityville flicks.
Redditors certainly didn’t see it coming, but when you consider that there were a mind-boggling 11 features released last year alone that carried the branding – which includes such instant classics as Amityville Christmas Vacation, Amityville Leprechaun, Amityville Poo: Killer Poop, and Amityville Karen – then it’s actually a little shocking there aren’t more.
Anyone who makes it their mission to track down and watch every single one of them should earn a medal or something, because the overwhelming majority of them are little more than bargain basement cash-ins that seem to operate under the pretense that sticking any old word after Amityville justifies its existence.
There’s self-parody, and then there’s whatever the hell this is supposed to be, but it’s not as if any noteworthy property being pulverized into submission, buried six feet under, and then exhumed three dozen times over is out of the ordinary for horror.