2005’s The Amityville Horror is the second film adaptation of the controversial 1977 book of the same name, written by Jay Anson.
The movie, like the book, revolves around George and Kathy Lutz (as played by Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George), who, along with their three children, move into a house in Amityville, New York, where multiple murders took place. The previous owner, Ronald DeFeo Jr., had actually killed six of his relatives in the house depicted in the film on November 13, 1974.
As you can imagine, making a movie inspired by such grisly events is creepy in and of itself, but the eerie things that happened while the Reynolds version was in production didn’t ease the tension on set.
21 Years Ago, ‘The Amityville Horror’ Stars Shared a Disturbing Story From the Shoot
To begin with, the real Kathy Lutz died right after shooting commenced in August 2004. As if that wasn’t strange enough, Reynolds said that a lot of the people working on the film kept waking up at 3:15 in the morning, which was the precise time DeFeo murdered his family. “I think a lot of people make that stuff up to sell their movie,” Reynolds told MovieWeb in 2005, “but there was some weird stuff that happened.”
That weird stuff apparently included a corpse popping up near one of the filming locations. While speaking with Radio Free Entertainment ahead of the movie’s release, Melissa George said the police showed up while they were shooting a boathouse scene. “They were on the water there, and they said that they found a dead body that had floated to the surface,” she recalled. “We were like, ‘Awesome! That’s making everything much more comfortable in this movie!’”
Reynolds backed up George’s story during an interview with that same publication, telling them, “I know nothing about it, and we certainly didn’t treat the situation cavalierly.” He went on to say, “This was a densely populated lake area as well. I mean, it wasn’t like a secluded pond, and this Mafia member floated up or something.” In the end, Reynolds chalked the person’s death up to a “legitimate accident,” but very little information has come to light since.
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