But as far as the movie is concerned, it just doesn't matter; either way it's fiction.

So let us see The Amityville Horror only as a story, unmodified either by "true" or "make-believe." It is simple and straightforward, as most horror tales are. The Lutzes, a young married couple with two or three kids (Cathy Lutz's by a previous marriage), buy a house in Amityville. Previous to their tenancy, a young man has murdered his whole family at the direction of "voices." For this reason, the Lutzes get the house cheap. But it wouldn't have been cheap at half the price, they soon discover, because the house is haunted.

Manifestations include black goop that comes bubbling out of the toilets (and before the festivities are over, it comes oozing out of the walls and the stairs as well), a roomful of flies, a rocking chair that rocks by itself, and something in the cellar that causes the dog to dig everlastingly at the wall. A window crashes on the little boy's fingers. The little girl develops an "invisible friend" who is apparently really there. Eyes glow outside the window at three in the morning. And so on.

Worst of all, from the audience's standpoint, Lutz himself (James Brolin) apparently falls out of love with his wife (Margot Kidder) and begins to develop a meaningful relationship with his ax. Before things are done, we are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that he is tuning up for something more than splitting wood.

It's probably bad form for a writer to recant something he's already written, but I'm going to nevertheless. I did an article on movies for Rolling Stone in late 1979, and I now think I was needlessly hard on The Amityville Horror in that piece. I called it a stupid sort of story, which it is; I called it simplistic and transparent, which it also is (David Chute, a film critic for The Boston Phoenix , quite rightly called it "The Amityville Nonsense"), but these canards really miss the point, and as a lifelong horror fan, I should have known it. Stupid, simplistic , and transparent are also perfectly good words to describe the tale of The Hook, but that doesn't change the fact that the story is an enduring classic of its kind-in fact, those words probably go a long way toward explaining why it is a classic of its kind.

Stripped of its distracting elements (a puking nun, Rod Steiger shamelessly overacting as a priest who is just discovering the devil after forty years or so as a man of the cloth, and Margot Kidder-not too tacky!-doing calisthenics in a pair of bikini panties and one white stocking), The Amityville Horror is a perfect example of the Tale to be Told around the Campfire. All the teller really has to do is to keep the catalogue of inexplicable events in their correct order, so that unease escalates into outright fear. If this is done, the story will do its work . . . just as the bread will rise if the yeast is added at the right moment to ingredients which are at the correct temperature.

I don't think I realized how well the film was working on this level until I saw it for the second time at a small theater in western Maine. There was little laughter during the film, no hooting ... and not much screaming, either. The audience did not seem to be just watching this film; it seemed to be studying it. The audience simply sat there in a kind of absorbed silence, taking it all in. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I saw that the audience was a much older one than I am accustomed to see at horror films; I'd put the average age between thirtyeight and forty-two. And there was a light on their faces-an excitement, a glow. Leaving, they discussed the film animatedly with one another. It was this reaction-which seemed to me markedly peculiar in terms of what the film had to offer-that started me thinking that a reevaluation of the film was in order.

Two things apply here: first, The Amityville Horror allows people to touch the unknown in a simple, uncomplicated way; it is as effective in this way as other "fads" have been before it, beginning, let us say, with the hypnosis/ reincarnation vogue that followed The Search for Bridey Murphy and encompassing the flying-saucer flaps of the fifties, sixties, and seventies; Raymond Moody's Life After Life ; and a lively interest in such wild talents as telepathy, precognition, and the various colorful pronouncements of Castenada's Don Juan. Simplicity may not always make great artistic sense, but it often makes the greatest impact on minds which have little imaginative capacity or upon minds in which the imaginative capability has been little exercised. The Amityville Horror is the primal haunted house story . . . and haunted houses are a concept which even the dullest mind has surely turned over at one time or another, if only around a childhood campfire or two.

Before going on to the second point (and I promise not to belabor you much more with The Amityville Horror ), let's look at a section of a review of a 1974 horror film, Phase IV. Phase IV was a modest Paramount release starring Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy. It dealt with ants taking over the world following a burst of solar radiation that made them smart-an idea perhaps inspired by science fiction writer Poul Anderson's short novel, Brain Wave , and then cross-pollinated with the 1954 picture Them! Both Them! and Phase IV share the same desert setting, although Them! shifts to the storm drains of Los Angeles for its slambang climax. It should be added that, similar settings or not, the two movies are a million miles away from each other in matters of tone and mood. The review of Phase IV I want to quote from was written by Paul Roen and published in Castle of Frankenstein , #24.

It's heartening to learn that Saul Bass, the imaginative graphics artist who designed the opening titles for Hitchcock's three greatest thrillers, has himself now taken to directing suspense movies. His initial enterprise is Phase IV , a blend of '50s sci-fi and '70s eco-disaster survival . . . . The narrative isn't always developed with logic and coherence, but Phase is, nevertheless, a grueling suspense exercise. Davenport is a delight to watch; his cool detachment crumbles by degrees, while his mellifluous British accent remains dignified throughout . . . . Bass's visuals are as sophisticated as one might expect, though often luridly colored; amber and green predominate [sic] the production.

This was the sort of fairly sophisticated reviewing one learned to expect from Castle of Frankenstein , the best of the "monster mags" and one that died much too soon. The point the review makes is that here we have a horror movie which stands in direct contrast to The Amityville Horror . Bass's ants aren't even big. They're just little buggers who have all decided to pull together. The movie did no great box-office business, and I finally caught it at the drive-in back in 1976, filling out the bottom half of a double bill with a picture that was much inferior to it.

If you're a genuine horror fan, you develop the same sort of sophistication that a follower of the ballet develops; you get a feeling for the depth and texture of the genre. Your ear develops with your eye, and the sound of quality always comes through to the keen ear. There is fine Waterford crystal, which rings delicately when struck, no matter how thick and chunky it may look; and then there are Flintstone jelly glasses. You can drink your Dom Perignon out of either one, but friends, there is a difference.

Anyway, Phase IV did poorly at the box office because for all those people out there who are not fans, who find it hard to suspend their disbelief, not much appears to be happening.

There are no "big moments," such as Linda Blair puking pea soup on Max von Sydow in The Exorcist . . . or James Brolin dreaming that he is axing his family to death in The Amityville Horror . But as Roen points out, a person who loves the genre's genuine Waterford (and there isn't enough of it . . . but then, there never is enough of the good stuff in any field, is there?) find a great deal happening in Phase IV -that delicate ring of the real stuff is there, it can be perceived; it ranges from the music to the silent and eerie desert vistas to Bass's fluid camera and Michael Murphy's quiet, understated narration. The ear detects that true ringing sound . . . and the heart responds.

I said all of that to say this: the opposite also applies. The ear which is constantly attuned to the "fine" sound-the decorous strains of chamber music, for instance-may hear nothing but horrid cacophony when exposed to bluegrass fiddle . . . but bluegrass music is mighty fine all the same. The point is that the fan of movies in general and horror movies in particular may find it easy-too easy-to overlook the crude charms of a film like The Amityville Horror after he or she has experienced films such as Repulsion, The Haunting, Fahrenheit 451 (which may have seemed to be science fiction to some, but which is nevertheless a reader's nightmare), or Phase IV . In a real appreciation of horror films, a taste for junk food applies . . . an idea we'll take up more fully in the next chapter. For now, let it suffice to say that the fan loses his taste for junk food at his or her own peril, and when I hear by way of the grapevine that New York film audiences are laughing at a horror movie, I rush out to see it. In most cases I am disappointed, but every now and then I hear me some mighty good bluegrass fiddle, eat me some pretty good fried chicken, and get so excited that I mix me some metaphors, as I've done here.

All of which brings us around to the real watchspring of The Amityville Horror , and the reason it works as well as it does: the picture's subtext is one of economic unease, and this is a theme that director Stuart Rosenberg plays on constantly. In terms of the times-18-percent inflation, mortgage rates out of sight, gasoline selling at a cool dollar forty a gallon-The Amityville Horror , like The Exorcist , could not have come along at a more opportune moment.

This comes out most clearly in a scene which is the film's only moment of true and honest drama; a brief little vignette that breaks through the clouds of hokum like a sunray on a drizzly afternoon. The Lutz family is preparing to go to the wedding of Cathy Lutz's younger brother (who looks, in the film, as if he might be all of seventeen). They are, of course, in the Bad House when the scene takes place. The younger brother has lost the fifteen hundred dollars that is due the caterer, and he is in an understandable agony of panic and embarrassment.