Halloween is over, but if you’re a cinephile (or dark tourist?) looking to see the house from The Amityville Horror in real life, there are three choices. All of them come with a dose of mundane reality.
I spend a lot of time searching for information on travel locations online, and I’ll often come across a listicle or some other form of clickbait content peddling outdated info. Sometimes, they immediately fail the smell taste. Other times, they’ll have me chasing a lead that turns out to be a dead-end and a waste of time. I hate it when that happens; it’s counterproductive. So, to save the interweb the trouble of going off on a wild goose chase like I did, I’m going to turn it around here and tell the real story of The Amityville Horror houses as they look today, based on some legitimate sources that I found as I was doing my homework on the setting of High Hopes.
Rather than bury the lede any further, I’ll just say that the three houses associated with The Amityville Horror look nothing like they did in the movies or any old black-and-white photo you may have seen from the 1970s. This is a case where the sign in front of the house should really read, “Hopes Dashed.” As a consolation prize, however, horror fans can do what I did and spend the night in the cabin from Ringu, which almost looks more Amityville than the actual Amityville houses do now.
The Amityville Horror House on Long Island, New York
Photo by Doug Kerr. Utilized under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
The original house that inspired Jay Anson’s book, The Amityville Horror, and the 1979 film adaptation of it starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, is on Long Island, where the real Amityville neighborhood is located. This is the house that became a horrific mass murder site in November 1974, before George and Kathy Lutz bought it and moved in with their kids 13 months later. The hauntings they allegedly experienced have since inspired many movies, including last year’s ridiculous exploitation film, “Amityville in Space.”
In 2021, Ronald DeFeo, Jr., the man convicted of killing six members of his own family in the house before the Lutzes came along, died in prison. That year, the New York Post checked in on the house, noting that the address had changed from 112 to 108 Ocean Ave. It's a private residence with new owners, you understand, and it’s been repainted and remodeled so that the curved attic windows (often seen glowing like jack-o-lantern eyes in the movies) are now square on one side. The other side of the house appears to have a single, not-so-scary, cyclopean window on the third floor.
Viewable from the street, those new square eyes give the house’s face a flatter, less menacing expression, as you can see in this 2023 video from YouTuber WhiteNoise. Note the pedestrian on the sidewalk, who stops dead in her tracks when she sees the camera panning around. You can well imagine how it would be to live in this neighborhood and have tourists on your street all the time, posing for selfies.
Outside the house, there’s a “Private Property” sign, and in Google Street View, they’ve even blurred out images of it and the surrounding houses, making it more difficult to identify. Since it just looks like any old house now, the Amityville place on Long Island would probably be a disappointment for most thrillseekers. Turning up outside it uninvited might also disturb the local community. For reasons that should be obvious, they haven’t embraced the dark tourism surrounding DeFeo’s almost 50-year-old crime.
The Amityville Movie Houses in New Jersey and Wisconsin
Screenshot from The Amityville Horror (1978) via MGM.
When The Amityville Horror movie went into production in 1978, it had to find another filming location for its haunted house outside Long Island. Given its recent history as the scene of a local massacre, it’s understandable why officials in Amityville wouldn’t want any buzzards swooping in to film the real house on Ocean Ave.
Location scouts eventually found a new house at 18 Brooks Road in Toms River, New Jersey. As USA Today notes, the filmmakers added a superstructure around the house, altering its appearance and giving it those iconic windows, shaped like quarter-circle eyes, to better resemble the Lutz home.
Screenshot from The Amityville Horror (1978) via MGM.
Again, the windows are arguably the key feature that made the house look frightening, and now they’re gone in favor of plain rectangles. Back in Street View, you can see how the house has also been moved back from the corner of Brooks and Dock, with another house now occupying the property where it once stood.
The neighbors kept the boathouse that the filmmakers had constructed for The Amityville Horror. The township, meanwhile, put ordinances in place to discourage filming in the area, but as Jersey Shore Online mentions, the Ocean County Historical Society has retained a collection of production artifacts from The Amityville Horror as part of their stewardship of local history.
Screenshot from The Amityville Horror (2005) via MGM.
The 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror, starring Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George in the roles of George and Kathy Lutz, left the East Coast behind for the Badger State. In the movie, the Lutzes roll up on 412 Ocean Ave. and meet a real estate agent who tells them that the house, “built in 1692,” is “one of the oldest Dutch Colonials on Long Island.”
In reality, it’s a lakeside home with Queen Anne Victorian architecture, which dates back to 1880. The house, located at 27618 Silver Lake Road in Salem, Wisconsin, is called Oakwood Manor. According to Wisconsin Frights, its leering windows were again part of a façade added just for the movie. So, this house doesn’t look like it did onscreen anymore, either.
More Amityville Than Amityville at the Ringu Cabin
Cabin L-6 at America Camp Village in Okutama, Tokyo, on August 29, 2023.
While it’s not quite the same thing, there is at least one place on earth where you can have the experience of seeing a classic horror movie location with a distinct Amityville vibe at night. Two months ago, I spent the night alone in the cabin where the watershed J-horror film Ringu was shot. It was in this cabin where Nanako Matsushima’s character watched the cursed VHS tape and later excavated the well haunted by the onryo (wrathful spirit) of Sadako.
I thought I might write about the experience here, but I ended up finding a home for the idea at Dread Central. In that article, there’s a quote from director Hideo Nakata, where he says he was “influenced by the Amityville series of horror films.” (Nakata also directed the sequel to The Ring, the American remake of Ringu.) I could feel that influence acutely at the Ringu cabin after the sun went down and I stepped outside to see the windows glowing like “a malevolent jack-o-lantern,” to quote Sandor Stern’s screenplay for The Amityville Horror.
When I showed Azusa how the Ringu cabin looks during the light of day, she exclaimed in Japanese, “Kawaii!” I guess it’s a cuter log cabin now than it was in the movie. The windows do still somewhat resemble eyes and teeth, however.
In addition to those features, what makes this cabin a good substitute dream house of sorts, just for the night (keeping in mind that a horror fan’s dream vacation spots might be very different from the normies) is that you have the full run of the place. You don’t have to worry about intruding on anyone’s neighborhood — or, worse yet, trespassing on private property, like with the Amityville houses. I could wander the perimeter freely and even reposition the furniture inside so that it looked more like it did in the movie.
Below are some fresh screenshots from Ringu and comparison photos of the cabin that weren’t featured in my article. For the full story, you can head on over to Dread Central.
Screenshot from Ringu (1998) via Toho.
Screenshot from Ringu (1998) via Toho.
The cabin’s front step in 2023.
Screenshot from Ringu (1998) via Toho.
The genkan in the Ringu cabin.
Screenshot from Ringu (1998) via Toho.
Furniture repositioned to match the movie’s living room arrangement.
View from the cabin’s terrace.
The Ringu monument in the weeds outside the cabin. In the movie, Hiroyuki Sanada takes an axe to the trellis.
The crawlspace under the cabin. No sign of a haunted well.