Alright.
I’m doing it.
Right this second I’m watching the movie The Amityville Horror.
And I’m alone, in my new apartment, which is situated in a one hundred year-old building that used to be a hotel.
I’m fearless.
Fucking fearless.
You should know that I read the book back when I was kid in 1977. Honestly, I do believe that reading that book was just about the most horrifying thing I have ever done in my life. It was the “true-life” story of a family that moved into a huge Colonial home that just a year before, had been the place where the previous tenant has shot and killed six members of his own family. The people who moved into the home said they were terrorized by paranormal phenomena, with the father claming to have been feeling escalating urges to murder his family and commit suicide.
(In the movie, the father always woke up at 3:15 AM, the time of the murders.)
Set against an inky black, the house on the cover of the book was bathed in a thin and bloody red. The windows looked like the all-seeing eyes of Satan, and the pointed tail of a demon curled out of the H in the word Horror. I came to believe that the book itself, the physical presence of it, was evil, and threw it in a trashcan way out at the St. Laurent Shopping Mall.
Later, in 1979, the movie The Amityville Horror came out.
This was not a good experience for me, and was without a doubt that last horror film that I saw in a theatre for at least 20 years. The movie, which was probably all sorts of crappy, used the most chilling music to link scenes.
There would be a shot of the creepy house, in this kind of red-black x-ray, and while we’re staring into the eyes of this structure, the disembodied, joyless voices of children sang this creepy and hypnotic kind of reel. Whenever this happened, which was about every 15 minutes, I became so overwhelmed with terror that I had to flee to the lobby. It was there where I would try to compose myself for the next 15 minutes by figuring out whether Nibs or Glosette’s would be more calming. ( I went with the Glosette’s because the Nibs were red, the colour of blood.)
I think I spent at least half of the movie in the lobby.
At any rate, it’s a staggering act of bravery for me to be watching the 2005 remake of the movie right now.
There are letter magnets on the fridge in the movie.
They just spelled out the words “Ketch ‘em and Kill ‘em.”
Think I might just take the dog for a walk right now, maybe buy me some Glossette’s.