The Amityville Horror (2005)

The 2005 Amityville Horror arrives with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing. Andrew Douglas directs a haunted-house remake that trades the original's slow dread for volume, and the house itself is a handsome piece of architecture with a bad reputation and a surprisingly reasonable asking price. Ryan Reynolds chops wood. Melissa George looks worried. A dog dies. The whole enterprise is competently assembled and entirely without ideas, which is not the same as being without merit. There is a B CinemaScore in there somewhere.

A viewer searching for social consciousness in this material will find slim rations. The remake invents a backstory in which the Reverend Jeremiah Ketcham tortured and killed Native Americans on this land, and the haunting springs from that cruelty. It is grisly set dressing, deployed to explain the ghosts and justify a basement full of apparitions, not to say anything about the dispossession it borrows. Kathy Lutz eventually knocks out her possessed husband and gets the children onto a boat, a maternal protector beat that lands with a thud and no framing whatsoever. Elsewhere the ledger is blank. No queer subtext. No body politics. No climate. No economic grievance. No neurodivergence. No sermon. Just a priest who flees and a girl named Jodie who screams.

We could call this refreshing. We will call it what it is: a remake that knows its market and serves it without editorializing. George Lutz, for the record, called it drivel and sued the studio. He had a point about the research.