Works based on the Amityville haunting

The Amityville haunting is a modern folk story based on the true crimes of Ronald DeFeo Jr. On November 13, 1974, DeFeo shot and killed six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, on the south shore of Long Island. He was convicted of second-degree murder in November 1975. In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into the house. After 28 days, the Lutzes left the house, claiming to have been terrorized by paranormal phenomena while living there. The house became the subject of numerous investigations by paranormal researchers, journalists, and skeptics, including Ed and Lorraine Warren. These events served as the historical basis for Jay Anson's 1977 novel The Amityville Horror, which was followed by a number of sequels and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1979. Since then, many films have been produced that draw explicitly, to a greater or lesser extent, from these historical and literary sources. As Amityville is a real town and the stories of DeFeo and the Lutzes are historical, there can be no proprietary relationship to the underlying story elements associated with the Amityville haunting. As a result of this, there has been no restriction on the exploitation of the story by film producers, which is the reason that most of these films share no continuity, were produced by different companies, and tell widely varying stories.

The Amityville Horror film, released in the summer of 1979, was a major box office success, and went on to become one of the most commercially successful independent films of all time.^[1] A series of sequels were released throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s through various distributors; some of the films received theatrical distribution, while others were direct-to-video releases. In 2005, a re-imagining of the first film was released.

Beginning in 2011, there was a resurgence of low-budget direct-to-video independent films based on or loosely inspired by the Amityville events.

In 2017, The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films distributed the first theatrical Amityville film since the 2005 re-imagining. Amityville: The Awakening, which was filmed in 2014, was released theatrically in Ukraine on July 27, 2017, and in the United States on October 28, 2017.^[2]