The concept of ghosts and/or demons tormenting residents of the New York community of Amityville is well-trodden territory, especially now that many filmmakers are taking advantage of the fact that anyone can make a horror movie with "Amityville" in the title.
Writer/director Daniel Farrands is going to back to the root of all this Amityville horror stuff with his upcoming film THE AMITYVILLE MURDERS, which tells the story of the real-life murders that preceded the claims of hauntings.
That story:
On the night of November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo, Jr. took a high-powered rifle and murdered his entire family as they slept. At his trial, DeFeo claimed that “voices” in the house commanded him to kill. Thirteen months later, the Lutz family bought the house and stayed only 28 days before fleeing in terror. Their nightmarish ordeal shocked the world in The Amityville Horror. The Lutzes may have escaped from Amityville with their lives … but the DeFeos weren’t so lucky. This is their story.
THE AMITYVILLE MURDERS stars Paul Ben-Victor, Lainie Kazan, Chelsea Ricketts, John Robinson, Diane Franklin, and Burt Young. Franklin and Young previously co-starred in 1982's AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION, which was also (loosely) based on the DeFeo murders.
As we learned a couple weeks ago, THE AMITYVILLE MURDERS will be receving a theatrical, VOD, and Digital release courtesy of Skyline Entertainment on February 8th. In anticipation of this release, a new trailer and poster for the film have been released online and can be seen below. (This trailer is different than the one we shared in that article a couple weeks back.)
I'm really not all that interested in seeing a movie about the DeFeo murders at this point, but this does appear to be a decent telling of the tragic story.