Original subtitles

Mary Pascarella was the lead psychic

who investigated the house.

Mary is a professional psychic,

a time walker who picked up on some truly terrifying things.

She said it was the first time

she had ever encountered something

she could only describe as pure evil.

People say this is a hoax.

It's done for money.

But let me tell you, you never sign

a contract with the devil.

This house chooses victims.

We just wanted to get the house fixed

so we could move back in.

I began to say my prayers.

And I was saying the Our Father.

And as I was saying the Our Father,

I looked out at the door,

and I had the impression of a young person.

I hope this is as close to hell as I'll ever get.

George and Kathy,

whatever happened to them in the house,

they got the kids,

they left all their furnishings,

all their clothing, everything in the house

and just ran.

They went to a motel for that first night.

After Kathy and I left the house,

we came to the conclusion that Ronald DeFeo,

physically, he did the murders,

but spiritually, emotionally, no,

I don't believe that he's, in a pure sense, responsible.

There's no doubt in my mind that he was influenced

by that house and that he was controlled,

at least for a point.

It would further the tragedy sitting in jail

for six consecutive life terms.

I didn't like William Weber.

He was writing a book about the DeFeo murder.

Through friends of ours, we met William Weber,

sat down and spoke with him.

He wanted George and Kathy to put their story

along with his story

so that it seemed like Ronald DeFeo

was into devil worship, or there was something

in the house that caused him to kill his whole family.

In the 1970s, the thought that the devil

could possess somebody became a very big deal.

In December of '75, Ronnie DeFeo

had just been convicted,

just two, three years after The Exorcist.

Mr. Weber says, listen, these people named

the Lutzes bought your house.

And we can use them and make money.

I said, what are you talking about?

He tells me, look, we got The Godfather

and The Exorcist all in one hand, Ronnie.

We're gonna make big, big money.

The devil knocks off the mafia.

The old box office champ, The Godfather,

is being flattened by that movie

about diabolical possession, The Exorcist.

Could you give us your reaction to the movie, please?

Could you give us your reaction to the movie?

It's something else.

- All glory to God. - Great.

Disgusting.

It was disgusting in what way?

It was just morbid.

Just all the gory, the blood and all.

It was a traumatic experience.

Didn't you like it?

It was... yeah, it was very interesting.

- Why? - Because it might be real.

You know, I get to thinking that, you know,

something like that might transpire,

you know, around here.

I don't know.

People who were agnostic,

people who were atheists

went into that movie and came out

and were sleeping with the lights on

and wearing crucifixes,

whether or not they were religious or not.

Everybody went to see this.

So here's William Weber, a defense attorney,

coaching the Lutzes on what they could say and do

to play up this haunted thing.

But when the Lutzes gave a press conference

in William Weber's office, it was more notable,

that press conference, for everything they didn't say.

The Lutzes did not claim that they saw, heard, or felt

the ghosts of the dead DeFeos.

They didn't say it was something demonic.

In fact, the Lutzes were very ambiguous

about what happened.

So the reporters were left with more questions

than answers, which might be a smart marketing strategy.

Leave them wanting more,

and people will leap to fill the void.

He tries to communicate by psychic force

with the plant world.

The plant in question

is a rather wan split philodendron,

which Vogel has hooked up to a polygraph machine.

Here, Peter Hurkos,

a psychic investigator, is attempting to help

a metropolitan police department

by looking into the past.

He does this by receiving images from the murder weapon,

hoping to reconstruct the crime.

He was hired to help find the Boston Strangler,

did police work on the Charles Manson murders.

Like a suitcase.

She was stabbed to death five times.

What you have just seen is part

of an astounding collection of psychic phenomena,

demonstrations of the powers of the mind.

At the time that the Lutzes held

the joint press conference with William Weber,

I had been assigned to produce a series

on the supernatural and paranormal at Channel 5

by the news director.

So I'm seeing this story

when it was reported in the Long Island Press Newsday.

It was fairly local.

Oh, wow, a real-life haunted house

that we could actually visit?

There was no way that this was not going

to be a big ratings grabber.

So at that point, nobody knew how to reach the Lutzes.

They were not living at Ocean Avenue anymore.

After they left the house,

the Lutzes moved permanently into Kathy's mother's house.

If I hadn't been sitting there and seeing how different

George was, I would have been a little skeptical

about what was going on.

He wasn't the same happy, carefree person

that he was before.

He seemed really broken, totally broken.

Seeing the way he was, I knew something happened,

something had had to have happened to him

for him to change like that.

The way they got it out of their system was,

they made audiotapes of each day of what happened,

every little detail.

They didn't want to retell it again and again.

If they retold it, it was like reliving it,

and they didn't want that to happen.

They just got everything out by putting it on the audiotapes.

We just sat down and did a series

of about 26 cassette tapes,

just talking about what happened

while we were in the house.

On those tapes, nothing was chronological.

We skipped all around.

Our language certainly wasn't the best.

We were drinking at times when we were doing

those recordings.

By the time I left the house, I was drinking pretty heavily,

without a doubt.

Nobody could find George,

so I called George's surveying company.

And I said, "Hi, my name is Laura DiDio,

"and I work for Channel 5 News,

"and I have worked

"with reputable paranormal investigators

like Hans Holzer, Ed and Lorraine Warren."

And I said, "I'd really like to help them."

George wanted the parapsychologists

to have seances in the house to validate

what happened in the house,

that there really were spirits there,

that there really was evil there.

The Warrens have devoted 37 years

to study of the supernatural.

The School of Demonology behind their Connecticut home

houses a collection of what Ed Warren calls unholy things

of historic value.

Laura DiDio convinced the Warrens to come down

and go through the house.

Our special guests tonight

are Ed and Lorraine Warren,

who, in their 32 years as ghost hunters,

have investigated over 3,000 cases of haunted houses

and demonic possession and have been involved

in numerous exorcisms.

Now obviously, you believe in ghosts.

I don't think it's a case of belief.

I think it's a case of the evidence.

So I called them up.

We set the date for March 6th

to go into the house and investigate.

They were giving Channel 5 and myself the exclusive.

George had asked me to go to the airport

and pick up the parapsychologists

that were flying in from Duke

and take them to the Amityville house.

There was a noted psychic with the team.

I felt while we were driving that this psychic

was trying to find out from me mentally

what had happened in the house.

It was a very strange experience.

I'm sitting riding in a car.

There's this man sitting here not talking to me,

wanting me to think about the Lutzes.

Finally, I got so fed up with the whole feeling

that, in my head, I said, "Stop it."

Like, I shouted it in my head.

Right after that, this psychic turned to me and said,

"I'm sorry," out loud.

And then I was convinced that it was him.

He was probing.

He was trying to find out what I knew about it,

which he wasn't supposed to know.

When we went into the house, it was jarring.

So it looked like a nice middle-class house,

just that the people were out for the day.

Kathy had made... And I'll never forget this...

She had made a gingerbread house

for the kids for Christmas.

And that was still on the dining room table.

All of the food was spoiling.

Laura DiDio and the crew and I,

we arrived around midnight.

Parapsychologists from Duke University were there.

They had cameras set up and different equipment

to sense any paranormal activity in the house.

There was a crucifix and a blessed candle

to provoke whatever beings were in that house.

Looks like a...

A black shadow that forms a hood.

And it moves.

And as it moves, it kind of...

It says, "I feel personally threatened."

It's... I think it's... Whatever's here.

Whatever is here is...

Is it trying to harm them?

Yes. And it's something that comes at you

and makes your heart speed up, that kind of thing.

Then Lorraine Warren said, "Come on, Marvin.

"We're going upstairs to the sewing room,"

which was the area which had

the strongest paranormal sense."

Lorraine said to me, "Marvin, this is the deepest,

the closest to hell I ever want to get."

And she was quite serious

and seemed quite concerned in that moment.

We went room to room.

But when we went upstairs to the third floor...

It was like she walked into a wall.

And she stepped right back.

She said, "I can't go in here. I can't go in here."

I just feel an overwhelming sense of oppression, dread.

And that was Ronnie's bedroom.

Lorraine sat down,

and she had a headache after that

that stayed with her.

There was a hush that came over.

We had gotten to the point where the house

had began to affect me.

And I had gotten up on the stairs,

and I called down to Ed, and I said,

"Ed, I'm as sick as a dog."

So I said to Ed, "I'm gonna lay down

in the bed for a little while."

And as I was saying the Our Father,

I looked out of the door.

There was a group of figures standing

outside of the door saying the Our Father backward.

The energy in that house remains.

It may take a hundred years of our time,

but it will implode again.

That house is purely evil.

We went back to the station.

We cut the piece. And it ran on the 10:00 news.

The response was overwhelming.

People just went wild over this.

We had great ratings that night.

Often, I'm asked if I was scared

during that night in the house at 112 Ocean Avenue.

No, I was not.

When the investigators were asked to come in,

we hadn't told them what we experienced.

But they had no intention of ever going back

and investigating further.

Their only suggestion was to have the house exorcised.

George lost a lot of money with the house.

So I think financially, they were not doing well at all.

Weber, the DeFeos' attorney, had asked us

to sign a book contract with him,

and we refused because he was gonna

pay DeFeo 5% of proceeds for murdering his family.

Plus, he was gonna get to say what we did

with the rest of our lives with regard to the story,

and it was just beyond belief.

Our story was ours,

and we were not gonna do a contract with him,

and we didn't want anything more to do with that.

We weren't interested in dealing with him.

And that was it.

I told them that it was their story,

and I felt that they shouldn't have to go with William Weber,

that the whole haunting or whatever happened

to them in the house was not part of the murder story.

And I happened to find the name of a publisher in a book

that I was reading about supernatural

because then was interested in it.

And I called up this publisher in New York, Prentice Hall.

And because of the publicity that was going on at the time,

they agreed to talk with the Lutzes.

So to George, this looked like a good way

of getting some money, which I agreed with him.

If it was being publicized now, just keep going with it.

If this is what happened, you know the story.

Then, the publisher got the writer, Jay Anson.

And they took the audiotapes.

And that's where The Amityville Horror came from.

We met with Jay Anson. We spoke with him.

We gave him the research materials

we had done on the house and some tapes

that Kathy and I had done over the weeks

after we had left the house.

And said, "Look, we're not gonna sit down

"to be interviewed about this.

"You can do what you can from the tapes.

"But we're just not gonna relive this.

"We've done it once, and we're not doing it again.

We did it for the tapes."

Then I spoke to the priest,

and I heard his story.

I was able to put together a chronology of the events

that took place within that framework of 28 days.

I was convinced there are things out there

that many people cannot explain.

I sincerely believe they took place.

George told me that he felt that

by staying in Long Island,

they were too close to Amityville,

and he felt that the further away he went,

the evil, it couldn't come with him.

So they moved as far away from the East Coast as they could.

On Mother's Day of 1976, we landed in San Diego.

I sold my business.

We gave the house back to the bank.

I couldn't stomach the idea of selling it to another family.

I think I want my family and my children

much more than I want a structure.

And if you view it in that perspective,

it's easy to walk away from.

The book known as The Amityville Horror

sold millions in hardcover,

and it's doing likewise in paperback.

When the book came out, the whole family

was just living off the proceeds of the book.

They were very happy about it.

George especially was very happy about it

because this was...

Helped financially for him, which he needed it

to take care of his family.

Of course, like a lot of people,

I went out and bought the book.

I remember reading pigs flying outside of windows

and swarms of flies coming in and walls bleeding

and weird sounds coming out of the ground

in the backyard and stuff.

And I was like, this is so... This is ridiculous.

After I read the book, I never talked to George again.

I read it. I put it down.

I couldn't finish it.

Oozing door locks, levitation of his wife,

stuff that I never saw or heard in that house.

Why did you come by tonight to look at this house?

To see what that book was all about

and everything about the house.

It's a joke. It's a joke, a complete joke.

I mean, pigs flying around, all these stupid stories.

Someone's trying to cash in here.

I truly believe that they believe all these things.

I was not there obviously.

They told me their story. The priest told me his story.

And I put it together in repertory style.

And I leave it up to you.

It was being sold and promoted as a true story.

I saw nothing to substantiate that word "true."

But it was a good story, and it was a big moneymaker.

Get out!

Anson sold the movie rights.

Cut!

He didn't ask us

whether we wanted that to happen or not.

He just went ahead and did it.

Then they came to us and sent us contracts

and said, "We're gonna do your movie."

The Amityville Horror is one of the first

motion pictures filmed almost entirely in New Jersey.

George went to the set a lot.

I don't think they really wanted him there on set.

But he just loved the fact that there were notable actors

playing him and his wife.

He really enjoyed that.

It was like a big deal,

something totally out of the ordinary

that ever happened to him.

Kathy, I felt at this time,

was just concerned about George.

And if this was gonna make him feel better...

Because he was changing back.

He was becoming more self-confident.

He was happy with the fame, to be part of it.

So that's what he did.

Well, the first thing I've got to ask you is,

do you believe in demonic force?

Um, hmm, good question.

Uh...

Yeah... uh, no, yes.

I sat with George,

and I watched his eyes as I talked to him

and asked him a specific question,

looking for the liar who would stare right at me,

look right at me, and tell me a direct lie.

And as he'd answer a question, I'd watch him think about it.

And as he'd tell me about some of the things,

his voice would begin to quaver a little.

Then he'd try to regain composure.

And I walked away saying, this man believes

that something went wrong back there, you know.

Twenty-eight states in America accept the results

of polygraph tests as legal evidence,

and the polygraph is now used as a matter of course

by the FBI and other government agencies.

Basically, it monitors three things:

cardiac activity, breathing, and sweat.

The movie company was getting ready

to release the movie,

and they wanted to give each of us a polygraph test.

And these are expensive tests.

They were willing to pay for it.

And we said, "Get us the best there is, and we'll do it.

"Otherwise, we're not interested in doing it

with someone that just got out of school."

We were so very pleased to have Chris Gugas come along

and give us a polygraph test

in his office with Michael Rice.

Chris Gugas, he was considered number two man

in the world at the time.

He had taught the use of the polygraph

throughout the world for the armed forces

and for their intelligence people.

He had been instructed personally

by the head guy at the FBI.

Among other things, he was accepted in California courts

as a witness.

It was a long process.

It's not like you walk in, strap on the machine, and go.

You have to agree to the questions.

He had five questions. They have to be yes or no.

And, you know, you get one shot

at doing this thing right.

One of the questions was, did you levitate?

One of the questions was, did Kathy turn into an old woman?

And you answered them all and went sailing

past the polygraph.

Absolutely. We passed the test.

Later, those findings were published

in the National Star of all things.

Well, George, you know, people who are lying

usually don't agree to a polygraph.

That's for damn sure.

Many of the people attending this invitation-only showing

of The Amityville Horror gave it rave reviews.

And you can judge for yourself this weekend.

Last night, there was

a gala sneak preview showing.

This was a private screening

of The Amityville Horror,

based on the best-selling book by Jay Anson.

Anson attended the screening accompanied

by the film's producer and one of the stars

of the picture, James Brolin.

Twenty-eight days after the Lutz family

moved into their dream house,

they were running for their lives.

What happened to them is an experience in terror

you will never forget.

The Amityville Horror, rated R.

Is The Amityville Horror for real?

I don't know, and I'm not planning to go

to Amityville and find out.

What I can say, though, is that the movie

is not very much fun.

Maybe it wasn't meant to be.

Oozing slime is hardly ever entertaining.

But the way the Lutzes are relentlessly persecuted

by their haunted house is finally just repetitive,

boring, gruesome, more than a little depressing.

I was going to say, who would want to see this movie?

But millions of people already have gone to see it.

It's a big hit at the box office.

Horror doesn't have to be good.

Even horror which is critically panned

can be really powerful.

The Amityville Horror sticks in the mind.

And I think that's what's given it its longevity,

not any kind of conception of quality,

but its ability for moments or ideas to kind of resonate

and stick with people for decades.

The great moment where one of the Lutzes' children

ends up with a hand smashed by the sash window,

and they're desperately trying to pull it back in,

but the two men can't lift the window.

The glowing eyes that appear outside the window

on the second floor.

Lots of people mention that as something that they see,

watching the film for the first time,

as being something that really sort of stays with them,

and I think because it speaks to a very deep-seated fear

of, like, you see something out of the corner

of your eye at night.

The oozing staircase and the bleeding wall,

where suddenly it seems like the entire environment

is coming apart at the seams.

Green slime, what was that on the wall in the movie?

George, did that happen?

As the movie did it, not exactly, no.

- Do you believe them? - Do I?

Yeah, when I'm sitting here with them, yes, I do.

It's hard to deny a lot of the facts.

Watching the Lutzes on Good Morning America

really drives home the importance of saying,

"This is based on a true story."

Somebody tells you a scary story about a haunted house,

you go, eh, that's fine.

That's just a scary story.

But someone tells you about it on the morning news,

and the people are right there, and the actor is right there,

you see this collapse of the distinction

between the truth and entertainment.

Rosemary's Baby,

The Exorcist and The Omen

are referred to as the unholy trinity.

All three of these films involving Satanism

and the supernatural and the occult present

an attack on the American family.

In Rosemary's Baby, she's pregnant.

It's a nice, young couple.

They move into a new apartment.

And then they realize that she has no control

over the antichrist spawn

that she is now bringing to bear.

And so this represents the dread of what it means

to be a woman in society, of the loss of control

over your own body and what eventually becomes

of your child.

In The Exorcist, where it's a single-parent household,

and it is an adolescent child,

an adolescent daughter, Regan MacNeil,

going through puberty,

new experiences happening with her body

that is going to rebel against her mother.

At the same time, The Omen that comes out in 1976

is about a young couple that, due to pregnancy mishaps,

have to adopt a child.

Little do they know that it is also the spawn of Satan.

Thus, not only do you need the transcendental authority

of the church, you need some male force,

represented by Catholic patriarchy,

to come in and save the day.

Do you plan to show the movie here?

No, we don't.

We've contemplated every maneuver possible

in the event that things get out of hand,

changing the name of the street,

eliminating parking along the hallway,

making the streets one-way.

We've come up with a plan just to have extra police

down there on a full-time basis

in unmarked cars just to keep traffic moving.

It seems local residents would retitle

The Amityville Horror The Amityville Nuisance

because all it's done is brought a lot

of unwelcome tourists, sightseers,

and a lot of extra traffic to what used

to be a quiet Long Island village.

Why did you come by tonight to look at this house?

To see what it was like.

I guess, we just specifically came from Chicago to see it.

It isn't a house that we want to sell.

It's a house we feel we're being forced to sell

because of The Amityville Horror.

In the two years the Cromarty family

has lived here, they tell us they

have never noticed anything strange or supernatural

taking place.

But we feel now we have to give up.

We need a night's sleep.

That people have nothing better

in the world to do

than to come and gape or do stupid things.

When the film first came out,

I was like ten or so.

We went to go see a movie with the babysitter.

And in a different theater down the hall,

The Amityville Horror was showing.

I told the babysitter I needed to go to the bathroom

and went out

and went inside the other theater.

This is a movie about my family,

and I was seeing this reaction from a crowd

as they're watching the Amityville movie.

And it was just, like, surreal.

And it was like, this is what the world

came to think was my story.

Here I was, a little kid with a New York accent

in a California public school with the same name

as in the movie.

It didn't take long for kids to figure out who I was, so...

I tried to tell them what happened if they asked.

And then it was like, "Well, that's not what

was in the movie. You're a liar."

I was like, what?

And then, at one point, they went on a world tour

talking about it.

The next one is this. This is really strange.

Now, if you look closely at this photograph here,

now, that's... you can't really see it too well here,

but that's a little boy.

And who is he supposed to be?

We don't know who he is actually.

But Missy knows him, our daughter.

When she saw the picture, which was discovered

now two weeks ago, she said, "That's the little boy

I used to always talk to."

They even had put us into a Catholic school.

They dropped us in The Orphanage.

That was a tough thing, man.

You know, the other kids in The Orphanage were like,

"Your parents aren't coming back for you,

just like they left us here too."

You know, it was definitely...

a hard time.

I asked Kathy a couple of times about the children,

and she told me that she was trying

to shelter them from everything

that was going on.

When I look back on it now, I feel for the children.

I didn't think, at that point, they were being sheltered.

It was just too public.

I'm Jackie Stone,

and this is supposedly where it all happened.

The DeFeo, Lutz, or Cromarty house...

Depending on how you look for it...

The site of the Amityville Horror

or the Amityville Hoax.

Do you believe it is a horror or hoax?

It's a hoax.

So you don't believe it at all?

- Not at all. - Definitely a hoax.

Why?

Well, I've been a longtime resident of Amityville,

and there's never any incident of this type

at any time in that home.

I think it was just a moneymaking bracket

that somebody put together with a lot of brains.

You know, they saw a good chance to make a lot of money,

so they put a film together,

and now they're making millions.

Do you believe that all that

- really happened here? - Yeah, I believe it.

I believe. I believe in the devil.

As far as we're concerned, the Amityville hoax

is the real horror.

Whether or not it was a hoax or a horror,

you'll have to decide that for yourself.

People were coming to think

that it was a hoax.

I knew that Mom and George had, like,

given the recordings over to Jay Anson

and that Anson wrote the book.

But I had never heard the tapes.

All I know is that this is what

he went around the world promoting

and thought it was fine.

Like, let me tell you a story about that photo

taken during the Warren investigation.

That photo has circulated all around the world

and all over the internet now.

But here's the thing.

You'll notice that head that's sticking out

of that doorway... Attached to that head,

it's a plaid shirt.

And it's consistent with the same shirt as the photographer

that's taking these photos.

And so it's not some spirit.

It's the picture of the photographer.

I never liked that he felt that it was fine

to add fiction to it.

It really pissed me off.

Because there's enough to the story

that anybody that has a real sense

of what paranormal activity is,

there's enough here.

There's no need to pepper it with any bullshit.

Is this fact or fiction?

Fiction, absolutely.

So this story evolved over dinner with the Lutzes

and a bottle of wine.

I think it was about three bottles of wine.

Yes, about three bottles of wine.

So the story grew with each bottle of wine.

Each bottle became a better story.

I told them there were flies found

in the house where the body of the older sister

was discovered.

From those flies, they created a complete supernatural scene.

And there was a greenish-black substance

around many of the doorknobs.

They were the result of fingerprint powders.

So we took real-life incidences,

and then we transposed them.

Green slime was actually spaghetti

that had been splashed on the wall at a time

when Mr. DeFeo supposedly had hit his wife in the kitchen

while she was carrying a plate of spaghetti.

There were times when one of the DeFeo

or a neighbor's kitten would jump on Dawn's window.

And just taking that little incident,

we developed it into a pig appearing at the window.

We could sit here for three weeks.

And I'll keep telling you each time, it's a fraud.

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