The Amityville Horror

The Amityville Horror is a 1979 artifact of pure, unself-conscious horror cinema, which is to say it is almost entirely devoid of the progressive social consciousness that would later become a cultural fixture. The film concerns itself with the supernatural menace residing within a Victorian home, not with interrogating the systems that enable financial desperation or the gendered vulnerabilities that the narrative casually exploits. Margot Kidder's Kathy functions as the emotional center of the family's deterioration, but her character exists to suffer and react rather than to embody any particular ideological position about women's agency or bodily autonomy.

The film's sole modest concession to what we might generously call cultural awareness is the presence of a Black priest character, Father Delaney, portrayed by Rod Steiger in brownface, a casting choice so thoroughly of its era that it serves as a museum piece of Hollywood's casual disregard for basic dignity. The family itself is presented without any particular diversity beyond whiteness, and their three children are there primarily to scream and be imperiled. There is no examination of disability, neurodiversity, or bodily difference of any kind. The narrative has no truck with climate consciousness, economic critique, or historical revisionism. It is simply a haunted house film, made with competent direction and a commitment to mechanical scares.

What emerges is a film that predates the cultural markers we are tasked with identifying by a full generation. It is neither progressive nor regressive in the modern sense; it simply does not concern itself with such matters. The Amityville Horror occupies a pre-ideological space, which is its own form of statement. In the calculus of 2020s cultural sensibility, it barely registers.