For their follow-up, the group has again chosen to remake a horror film from the '70s, one that probably makes even more sense for a remake. The film is The Amityville Horror. While the 1979 version was a hit upon its release, it was never a highly regarded film, and the 25 years since have not aged the film well. Based on the real events depicted in the book by Jay Anson, Amityville is the story of a young family, The Lutzes, who move into a large house in upstate New York for a fantastic price. The catch is that a horrible set of murders happened in that very house years ago. On November 13, 1974, Ronald Dafeo shot and killed his parents and four siblings in a gruesome crime scene that brought the imposing house in Amityville national notoriety. While the Lutzes were perfectly happy upon their arrival, the house quickly took control of their lives. Within a month, the Lutzes left the house, not even taking the time to bring their possessions with them. This new version is said to be more faithful to Anson's book, opening with the Defeo murders.
Directing this second attempt at the Amityville story is first-time feature and acclaimed commercial director Andrew Douglas. For the two lead roles, producers went with lesser known actors on the rise Melissa George (Alias), as Kathy Lutz, and Ryan Reynolds (Blade: Trinity), as George Lutz. Rounding out the cast is veteran actor Philip Baker Hall and younger actors Rachel Nichols, Chloe Moretz, Jesse James and Jimmy Bennett.
IGNFF recently toured the Amityville house in Wisconsin and spent some time on the Amityville sets about 40 miles south in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. We got to look in on a few scenes and chat with stars Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George. The house is probably the best place to start since this is, after all, a haunted house movie. In The Amityville Horror story, the casting of the house is likely to wind up just as important a choice as that of the lead actors.
As we pull up and glimpse the first sight of the house, it's clear that this is no average house. First off, it is just massive, standing ominously in the center of a relatively normal suburban neighborhood in Wisconsin. We park by the side of the house, which is creepy looking enough, but the front view is definitely a sight to behold. The top of the house looks almost like a set of eyes looking down on you, daring you to enter. What's amazing is, this is an actual house, not a set piece. The filmmakers added a front section with a porch to make it more clearly resemble the real house, but otherwise, what you see is really a working house. The other addition is a stairway around the side which leads down to the boathouse. If you know the story, you already know that this boathouse serves as the setting for a crucial scene later in the film. The porch addition and the stairway and boathouse fit with the house perfectly. They have been aged to match the house. At closer inspection, it's impossible to tell where the old house ends and the fake aged parts begin.
Now inside the house, things don't get much more comforting. Filled with huge ceilings, huge rooms and huge staircases, this is a house one could easily get lost in. It's also beautiful in a gothic, creepy way. With the right decorator, this house could be made to look a little less scary, but for now it serves the purposes of the Amityville production quite well.
Back at the set in Buffalo Grove, the scene being shot is one of the quieter moments from the film. Six days into living in the new house, George and Kathy are already starting to feel the changes in their marriage. In an attempt to rectify the situation, the young couple have hired a babysitter and gone for a romantic dinner at a local Italian restaurant. In the scene, George tells Kathy that he is feeling better and that he loves her. They lean across the table over their pasta dinners and kiss. Between takes,
Ryan Reynolds has a constant side dialogue with Melissa George, which is cracking her up.
"You actually caught us on the cheeriest day in the entire movie," Reynolds says. "[The beard's] trimmed, everybody looks good… This is about scene 106, day six. So, yeah, George, at this point, he's just been ill. What I loved also is that the character becomes physically ill in the house as we progress… This is a moment where he gets out of the house... This scene he feels so cheery. It's like he's back, the old George is back. It's a really difficult role too, because you don't want the audience to absolutely want George dead. That was the weird thing about the first one, right? Brolin, that character lived and I'm sort of going, 'Why didn't they kill him, I mean or stop him?' We didn't get any sort of closure on it. I think the thing I'm trying to top in this one is I want you to see her bring George back and I'm hoping that happens. That's why these scenes are very important, when we're out of the house, you see why she fell in love with this person…"
"He's playing a serious role and he's doing it great," George says of her co-star. "For him to be doing a role like this, he's pulled it off I think, he really has, in a big way. And it's great because he has the improv and comedy before the take to make me laugh and keep the set happy. But when it comes to 'action,' he's very serious."
Reynolds appears to be having a pretty good time on the set, even though the scenes we are watching require him to downplay his noted smartass antics. He sports a thick, '70s style beard, a pretty different look than we are used to. "Actually, this is the Brolin 2000," Reynolds jokes, stroking the beard. "We had to do some pick-up shots for Blade, so it sucked. I had to go live in a gym again and grow a beard, all this stuff for basically for one shot. It was basically the worst hell you can imagine. So, when we started this, it was the '70s, so if you could grow it, you grew it. You're like, 'What the hell, I'll just let it bush out.'"
The original Amityville Horror film is serving only as one of the reference points for this version of the story, along with Anson's book and what is known of the actual occurrences. Unlike many remakes, the original film is not being treated as any sort of holy ground. "It's really in need of a makeover, that's what I think," George says of the Amityville story. "[In the original Amityville movie] they don't really show too much of what you really wanted to hear about the Amityville story. I think it just touched on things. There was nothing really much going on. I'm hoping that we've added a bit more. We've really gone into what the book was about. A lot of the original footage we're going to include in it. We have [a lot] available to us, like recordings, stuff like that, that'll be great… I think we just take it a step further, but not to the point where it's not real, we're sticking to what we think [happened]."
George says that, although she did some research on the real Kathy Lutz, she felt it was also important to have her own take on the character. "I read so much about her life and documentaries and, 'Where Are They Now,' that it kinda didn't really help me, to be honest… I watched the original just because my mother wanted to. I didn't really pick anything off that at all. I just wanted to make her really sweet and strong, and then the whole horror element too... You have to make the scares really real. I mean, there's a technique to making a horror film."
Reynolds has a similar perspective on the original film: "What I love about this movie is that we're remaking a film that deserves to be remade. The original, in my opinion, was not a timeless classic. I feel like, you know, I've done one remake before, The In-Laws, that's tenuous ground to get on. That's, like, in the AFI top five. It does not need to be remade. So Amityville, while it was financially successful when it came out, I don't think it was a great, super-inventive, new groundbreaking movie. So yeah, I thought it was a great idea to remake this… We're a little bit more faithful to Jay Anson's book… The book really sort of traces the psychology behind it, these people that walked into the house as this unit and, sixteen days later, were all on the furthest corners of the house from each other. [They were] as far away from each other as possible, emotionally and physically. A lot of the events that happened there, that was the thing that really interested me, was seeing George Lutz go in so in love and so connected and so one with this woman and, 28 days later, which is the duration of the entire stay, be just so far apart in so many ways."
George admits that she is a pretty easy scare. "Yes, I mean I just went to the trailer and the wardrobe girl was hanging up my dress. And I went, [makes a loud exhalation] 'God!'" Amityville's many intense scenes have been quite chilling for George, even behind the scenes. "We filmed in Wisconsin at the house for five weeks, and that was a lot, the rain stuff at the end, like when he had to strangle me. There's a lot of violent stuff. It kinda got into me a little bit. I have to admit [I was] little disturbed and shaken up for a couple of days. You just wanted to get really into the role and make it look believable. I had to be wet the entire week and the water from the lake, it was cold. The blood and mud. It's a heavy film. They say you only do one horror film in your career, and this is it."
"It's just sort of finding it in the moment and letting go," Reynolds says of his character's violent moments. "We all have a little kernel of rage in there and if it's just sort of stoked in the right way, it becomes a whole field. Those scenes are really hard. I almost stopped a couple of times in the middle, because one scene she just started crying right in the middle of it… You start to get into it so much. [Melissa] said something to me that was interesting as well, that, 'Your body remembers it, your body doesn't know the difference. Your body, when it's being strangled, when your body's being aggressive, it doesn't know the difference, so you react the same. You may cry.' So she started bawling in one of those scenes when I was choking her and it was just really hard to do… She looked truly terrified. And it left these huge marks on her. When you're doing it, you sort of have to do it, to a certain degree…
"I'm dealing with these kids and yelling at them. I'm even physical with Jesse, the oldest kid, I mean I slap him in the face in one scene and I make him hold a log while I chop it. I make him put his hands up there and he won't put his hands up there, so I grab his whole face and I pull him into mine and I smack him in the face and I tell him to, 'Put your hands on the log right now!'"
A lot has already been made of Reynolds' recent transition to serious actor, even though the first role to showcase this new side of him, Blade: Trinity, hasn't yet been released. "What drew me to it [is that] this whole year's been about, I think, just about taking on challenges that I previously thought impossible. This whole year's been really sort of a milestone for me. It started with Blade. So yeah, so I fought for it. I read the script and I said, 'I think I can do this.' I didn't know with any certainty until I actually got into it and started really working with it and started working with Andrew Douglas, our brilliant and wonderful director. And once we started working, I thought, 'Wow, I can actually do this.' It's a little different. God man, whoever said, Shakespeare is the one that said, 'Comedy's hard and dying's easy.' He can go hop-f**k himself sterile. That's a lie! It's hard, man. It's hard to do this kind of, just accessing this kind of rage. This character, George Lutz, to me, he's a very rageful person. He's a guy who's holding it back the whole time and, whether you want to call it a supernatural phenomenon or an actual psychological phenomenon, which is what I'm basing the character on, because I have to have something grounded. You can't just tell me, 'Demons are doing it.'
"I like classy, elegant scary films. I don't like screamy kind of films… Anything Hitchcock has ever done, for example. If I'm going to be in a horror film, it has to be something where, as an actor, where there's a psychological element to the film too… I want there to be a reason for what's going on. And the fact that [Amityville] is based on a true story is even better. You're actually performing something that went on… Something must have happened for them to leave and not come back… 28 days they lasted, they stayed in that house. And it was only because Kathy had such a religious belief in family and that demons don't exist… I mean, it's not like a slasher film, but I hope that every shot, just the fact that the house looks like it's living and breathing, makes it looks scary. Just the thought of these poor people. They're so happy to buy this huge house and you go, 'Oh my God, they have no idea.'"
"I love horror movies," says Reynolds. "I like more still horror movies. Andrew Douglas has created a very nice stillness to this movie and I'm very grateful for that. The Others had that… They allowed the audience to derive the story for themselves as opposed to having people just run around a house being chased with an axe or whatever… It's just allowing the story to unfold in a little bit more of an intellectual way than your horror lightning and thunder and crazy shots with backlighting."
So, being a horror fan, what does it take to scare Reynolds? "Shady editing scares me more than anything," he says with a laugh.
The Amityville Horror is currently slated for release on April 15, 2005.