Amityvilleville

Summary

Hyperfixed – “Amityvilleville” (Amityville 3-D Watch-through) April 2, 2026 — Host: Alex Goldman, Guest: Caroline Thompson

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Episode Overview

This episode of Hyperfixed is a crossover presentation of “Amityville Ville,” Alex Goldman and Caroline Thompson’s side project in which they undertake the harrowing task of watching every single Amityville movie—there are currently 92! In this installment, the pair deep-dive into 1983’s Amityville 3-D, offering a scene-by-scene walkthrough with copious tangents, horror movie history, and new discoveries about the real-life personalities who inspired the series. The tone is irreverent, skeptical, self-deprecating, and full of deadpan horror fandom.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Bizarre Legacy of Amityville Films (02:04 – 04:05)

• Alex explains the explosion of Amityville movies, from the true crime origins to Asylum Pictures realizing “Amityville” can’t be copyrighted: “There are now 92 Amityville movies. Some are standard horror, and some have titles like Amityville Outhouse, Amityville in Space, Amityville Death Toilet, and coming full circle, the 92nd Amityville movie, Amityville NATO.” (02:40)
• Alex and Caroline introduce “Amityville Ville” as their chronicle of subjecting themselves to every single Amityville film, horror-fan gluttons for punishment.

Amityville 3-D: Initial Reactions & the Lost 3D Experience (04:05 – 09:02)

• They lament watching a non-3D version, humorously debating if the 3D effects (frisbees, a swordfish, a boom mic) would have made it any better (“There’s a moment where a frisbee gets thrown at the screen and it’s really intense. I’m really sad I missed it.” – Alex, 06:13).
• This installment is described as the most competently acted of the first three, yet “not scary,” with surprisingly solid writing and story (07:39).

Plot Recap and Scene Analysis (09:02 – 47:00)

Opening Seance & Hoax Reveal (09:02 – 16:41)

• The film opens with a seance as a sting by Reveal magazine journalists posing as bereaved parents. A glowing “loofah sponge” as a ghostly child is exposed as a hoax (A: “Seance, their son looks like a glowing loofah sponge.” – 13:46).
• Personal tangent: Caroline shares her own teenage seance experience, where a Ouija board allegedly predicted her death at 69 (09:02 – 11:15).

Real Haunted House Shenanigans (16:41 – 31:08)

• Skeptical journalist John impulsively buys the house—an ethical and narrative oddity: “Would you call it bad journalistic practice to purchase a home from someone you are planning to write an expose about?” —Caroline (17:37)
• Noting the film’s marked lack of religious symbolism compared to prior entries (“There’s not a cross to be seen,” 19:09) and instead, a focus on paranormal investigators over priests.

Fly Attacks, Creepy Attic, and Unjustified Deaths (24:13 – 47:00)

• House owner Sanders’ death by a supernatural fly attack is dissected, and the film’s penchant for making people mysteriously die is repeatedly mocked.
• Melanie, previously a skeptic, is traumatized by the house and presents eerie “ring face” photos (distorted, half-skeleton snapshots) to paranormal experts.
• Sequences highlighting the horror’s MO: confining victims, chilling cold blasts, supernatural fly attacks, and a heavy emphasis on locking doors—frequent, genre-bending jump scares.

Teen Hijinks, Seances & The Haunting Escalates (47:00 – 55:54)

• Susan (Lori Loughlin), her best friend (Meg Ryan), and friends conduct a seance, which ominously singles her out (“the cup goes toward the letter S for Susan before the glass flies toward the wall”—49:45).
• Notable scene: The horror kills Melanie in a car accident via a fly distraction and supernatural flames—one of several moments both hosts found genuinely unsettling (“There’s just probably 15 seconds of her screaming and hitting her arms and banging on the window...” – Alex, 45:03).
• After Susan’s death by drowning, her ghost returns home and is seen by her mother Nancy, leading to a deeply disturbing moment of denial and grief.

Poltergeist Parody and Climax (56:12 – 74:55)

• A full pseudo-“Poltergeist” paranormal investigation takes over the house (“...there are probably like 50 to 100 paranormal investigators set up around this house.” – Caroline, 57:00).
• The orb/ghost motif from the seance reappears, leading Nancy to the basement well, where a “fire-breathing alien water monster” attacks, burning and drowning the lead investigator.
• The climax: The house freezes, explodes, and the swordfish-on-a-rope 3D effect goes flying, with only John and Nancy surviving.

Behind the Scenes, Lore, and Tangents (61:17 – 78:02)

• Alex shares trivia: Director Richard Fleischer (son of Betty Boop’s creator), filming difficulties after the house was remodeled, and the interiors being shot in Mexico for budget reasons.
• They discuss the real-life inspiration for the film’s “skeptical investigator”—Stephen Kaplan, founder of the Vampire Research Center, who also spent decades denouncing the Amityville haunting as a hoax while still believing in literal vampires (“...in the book, he is like, I fully believe, though I have never met, I fully believe that there are, like, Bela Lugosi can turn into a bat style vampires.” – Alex, 65:33).
• Caroline muses on the “lore” of the series: Each film changes its rules, the “horror” manifests in increasingly wild ways, and the lack of religious themes in this installment shifts the dynamic.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On 3D Gimmicks:
  “There’s a moment where a frisbee gets thrown at the screen and it’s really intense. I’m really sad that I missed it.” (Alex, 06:13)

• On Journalistic Ethics:
  “Would you call it bad journalistic practice to purchase a home from someone you are planning to write an expose about?” (Caroline, 17:37)

• On the “Horror”’s modus operandi:
  “The horror is very good at locking doors in this movie. That’s one of its main attributes.” (Caroline, 45:29)

• On existential dread:
  “I would say that the fear here is more ambient than actual scares. There’s not—the fear is more like, ‘I’m scared of dying, and I’m scared of my loved ones dying.’ I would say, like, a two.” (Alex, 74:55)

• On Amityville Lore:
  “The house blew up. How are you gonna make another Amityville movie?” (Alex, 74:22)

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• 02:04 – Introduction to the Amityville franchise’s wild expansion
• 04:05 – Amityville 3-D: Premise and key cast
• 07:39 – Caroline’s review: “by far my favorite of the movies so far”
• 13:46 – The “glowing loofah sponge” scene at the fake seance
• 24:13 – Discovery of “ring face” photographs; Amityville meets The Ring
• 34:09 – Hilarious Dolores jump scare (“He’s not here now!”)
• 45:03 – Melanie’s flaming car death scene
• 53:38 – Ghost Susan walks in as her own corpse is found outside
• 57:00 – Paranormal investigation parody; full “Poltergeist” setup
• 61:17 – Caroline: “It’s kind of a cute Parent Trap love story. Like how my parents fell back in love after my divorced dad moved into a haunted house that killed me and then exploded.”
• 65:33 – Alex describes Stephen Kaplan’s deep belief in vampires despite debunking Amityville
• 74:55 – Final scare and quality ratings discussion (“I’d give this one a 6.5…”)

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Humor, Tone, and Style

• The episode’s mood is a blend of gallows humor, pop culture expertise, and genuine horror fandom. Alex and Caroline riff relentlessly on plot holes, 1980s horror cliches, their own teenage ghost stories, and the miseries and delights of being a completionist.
• The show exhibits a “friends on the couch” energy, packed with off-hand pop culture references and digressions (e.g., comparing ghost scenes to Bugs Bunny, riffing about the real Amityville house, and even Looney Tunes character debates).

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Final Ratings and Series Ranking

• Scary rating (1-10): Both give a 2 (“just for the existential dread of existence” —Caroline, 75:07)
• Overall enjoyment (1-10): Both rate it 6.5; it’s their favorite so far (76:10)
• Caroline ranks the first three Amityville films: 3D (best), Possession (second), original (third).

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Preview and Closing

• Next up: “Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes” (NBC made-for-TV, 1989): “I’m excited to see how the continuity works with a series that already has no continuity between the first three. And especially since the house blew up.” (Alex, 77:52)
• The episode closes on a note of mock-exhaustion, mutual support, and the promise of continuing their masochistic Amityville journey.

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For Further Exploration

• Listeners interested in the real Stephen Kaplan and his Amityville Horror Conspiracy are urged to help the hosts find rare copies.
• “If anybody who listens to this knows anything about Stephen Kaplan, I would love to know more about him… Please feel free to purchase that [book] for Alex.” (Alex & Caroline, 64:18–64:31)

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Summary prepared for listeners who love horror history, cult films, or just want great company on a journey through the weirdest corners of pop culture cinema.

Transcript

[A]

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[A]

Hey, this is Alex and I started a new podcast. This podcast is not going to affect Hyper Fixed in any way, but I just wanted to let everybody know that was here and give you the opportunity to check it out so very, very quickly. In 1974, there was a series of murders that took place in Amityville, New York. And the following year a family moved into the house where the murders took place and claimed it was haunted. That spawned a couple of very successful movies, followed by many more less successful movies. And then around 2010, Asylum Pictures, which is the movie studio that made like Sharknado, realized the name Amityville isn't copyrightable and made their own Amityville movie. That kind of opened some very strange floodgates because as of this writing, there are now 92Amityville movies. Some are standard horror and some have titles like Amityville Outhouse, Amityville in Space, Amityville Job Interview, Amityville Death Toilet, and coming Full Circle, the 92nd Amityville movie, which premiered on streaming last week, Amityville NATO. Anyhow, my friend Caroline Thompson and I, both horror fans and apparently gluttons for punishment, decided to watch every single Amity Amityville movie and chronicle it for a podcast we're calling Amityville Ville. This episode is our watch through of Amityville 3, which features a very young Meg Ryan and also Lori Loughlin, the lady from Full House who went to prison. And you can watch along with us by searching Amityville Ville. Wherever you find podcasts, if you want to watch this particular movie, it's on tubi and we'll be back at you with another hyper fixed episode next week. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of Amityville Ville. Welcome to Amityville Ville. I am Alex Goldman.

[B]

I am Caroline Thompson. And we are back at it again, ready to see what that kooky Amityville house has in store for us today.

[A]

You don't sound convinced that you're Caroline Thompson. You sounded a little doubtful of it.

[B]

I mean, I'm honestly not. I wake up every morning and look in the mirror and wonder, who is she?

[A]

I wake up every morning and look in the mirror and wonder who you are too. Okay, this week's episode is about Amityville 3D, which we were not able to watch in 3D. We had to watch it in the normal version.

[B]

No, and honestly, that I think disrupted the experience a little bit. However, we'll get into it, but there honestly wasn't a lot for them to show in 3D.

[A]

Oh, I strongly disagree. There are a lot of 3D moments in that movie. Like a lot of moments where they deliberately shot it so that someone is going toward the camera. And then at the end, there's an amazing part where a swordfish flies off the wall.

[B]

I would say the last five minutes there was a lot of exciting 3D action. I just think four. You would think with a name like Amityville 3D that it would be just like left and right gore splattering all over you. And it is very much not that.

[A]

Like, right around this time, there was a big 3D craze. There was Jaws 3D and Friday the 13th 3D came out the year before. Have you ever seen Friday the 13th 3D?

[B]

No, I have not.

[A]

A huge part of the 3D aspect of that is he, like, chucks a pitchfork at someone and I think he shoots someone with like a. One of those spears they use when you're trying to spear fish. But a lot of it is just like, oh, God, the annoying guy's gonna juggle. And then they shoot it from the top so that the perspective is of the balls flying at the camera. Like, that's a lot of the 3D in the movie. It's really.

[B]

I was imagining modern 3D, which is usually just like blood, guts, and gore. Like, I didn't think that, like, you know, there's a point in this movie where a boom mic is shown in 3D and I'm just like, all right, let's pack it in here. Like, that's. But that's not, like, interesting enough for me to see 3D. But we'll get into it. We'll get into it.

[A]

I did, like, there is a moment where a frisbee gets thrown at the screen and it's really intense. I can imagine what it would have been like in 3D. And I'm really sad that I missed it.

[B]

Everyone probably was screaming.

[A]

All right, so Amityville 3D. Let's do it. The movie opens much like the first two movies where the entire credits are just a shot of the house.

[B]

I will say the house is looking a lot nicer in this one, though. It seems to have been fixed up. Like, it looks lived. It looks like it doesn't look as. I mean, it looks menacing because, you know, it's got those like, scary house eyes a la the incest attic windows. But it looks nicer. It looks like a house that I could see myself wanting to move into if I wasn't aware that, like, multiple people had been murdered there and then, you know, driven out by the ghosts of God knows what.

[A]

Is that really what we're going with? The incest attic? Is that what we're calling it?

[B]

God, I mean, you know, if the shoe fits.

[A]

The thing I did notice about the opening was to accentuate the 3D. There's a lot of parallax. So there's like very up close trees. And then every 30 seconds or so, some poor PA has to whack the camera with a couple of twigs. There's like some tree branches from the right side of the screen that every 10 or 15 seconds someone just waves in front of the camera. It's really good. It's an incredibly menacing effect. I'm criticizing the opening. I did like this one.

[B]

Oh, yeah. This is by far my favorite of the movie so far. This is well written. I mean, you know, comparatively, like, compared to what we've watched so far. Well written, well acted, interesting story. Not scary in any way, but definitely top of the line in terms of, like, just me buying any of the characters for doing what they're doing. Like, the acting was phenomenal.

[A]

I do think the acting was the best in the series. I don't know if I think it was my favorite, and I don't think that it wasn't scary. I think there were some scary parts. I think you and I might have a difference of opinion. We may so get your. Get your mind right and agree with me instead of arguing with me all the time.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Okay. So the movie opens on the windiest night in history. I've never seen wind like that in my life. There are hurricanes that are less windy than that opening scene.

[B]

Incredibly windy. And just like the last two movies, it opens after the, like, five minute long shot of looking at the house from various angles. A car pulls up to the house with a couple with a man and a woman inside and, you know, hijinks ensue after this. It's different, though.

[A]

Unlike the other ones where it's people moving into the home, this one begins with some people arriving at the Amityville house to do a seance.

[B]

Indeed. And I will say this, like, this entire movie really brings me back to my high school days in so many ways. Like, I feel very seen by this movie, though. I like that that beginning scene really was bringing me back to that fateful Halloween when a demon told me that I'd be the first to die first in the room.

[A]

You need to describe this to everyone else because I'm very familiar with the story of how Caroline is going to die at age 69. But can you please. Yeah, can you please explain what. What happened here? How old were you? How did this happen?

[B]

I was 16 years old. It was Halloween day, Halloween night. In fact. My good friend's parents owned a duplex and their tenant had just moved out in the downstairs part of the duplex. So, you know, being little enterprising 16 year olds, we were like, let's go get drunk in the empty duplex.

[A]

And there's truly nothing more frightening than an Abandoned duplex.

[B]

So we went downstairs to the empty apartment. We had a Ouija board, we had a lot of alcohol and we got kind of drunk. We lit some candles and we decided to do a little seance. Ouija board situation. And you know, we asked it a bunch of questions and we, we were getting some weird answers. You know, we were getting like the plan shot was moving around. We were. Seemed as though there was a spirit in the room. And so somebody asked this question, who in this room will die first? And the plan chat spelled out CT69. So could that have just been, you know, one of my friends playing a joke? Perhaps. However, I have like, I've recapped this with my friends that were there and I thought that like I, when I initially looked back on it, I remember it being like a mixed group of boys and girls. If it had been, I think it probably would have been a joke. However, other people's memories say that it was just girls. And I don't think any of them would have made a 69 joke. You know, we just, we have higher falutin humor than that, you know, as 16 year old girls. And so I've just been kind of living on the assumption that I'm gonna die when I'm 69 and. Or in 2069, which would make me 79, but you know, I'm just kind of live fast, die young, I guess. Baby, what are you gonna do?

[A]

Yeah, Rip.

[B]

So this movie really took me back because this was not the only time that I, that I had a. In an empty, potentially haunted house while drinking. And.

[A]

And it's not the only time that a seance takes place in an empty, potentially haunted house in this movie.

[B]

No, in fact there are. Yeah, we'll get into it. So the man and the woman get out of the car, come inside the house. They are greeted by an elderly man and woman who sit them down at a table and start doing a pretty classic seance. You know, they're all holding hands. They're apparently attempting to contact the child of the couple, the young couple that has come in the door who allegedly died in a fire. But we find out very quickly that this couple are not who they pretend to be and are in fact journalists.

[A]

Journalists. John Baxter and Melanie. No last name.

[B]

Yep. Don't know what her last name is, but they are a partner. They work for. What's the name of the magazine? I can't remember.

[A]

The name of the magazine is Reveal.

[B]

Reveal magazine. So they're doing an expose on the Amityville Horror House. For reveal magazine. Because this old couple that has been renting the house, I guess, since the defeos moved out or. Not the defeos, the. Whatever the. The second family was. Can't remember their names.

[A]

The Montley?

[B]

The lutzes. No, the Montelli were the defeos.

[A]

Right. I'm sorry. Excuse me. So they're there after the lutzes. However, because there was an ongoing lawsuit, they were still not allowed to use the name Lutz.

[B]

So before I knew that this was a hoax, I was really excited about a new haunting mechanic that was gonna drop. A green orb floats across the room Carrying the disembodied voice of what appears to be a dead child, going, mommy, I am here. And I was like, this is a new haunting mechanism for this house. I've never seen a disembodied spirit orb before in the amityville house. Mommy.

[A]

Ricky.

[B]

Ricky, where are you? Ricky, where. Look, mommy, I'm here. But turns out, it is not, in fact, a disembodied spirit voice, but instead, like, a large, like, hunk of saran wrap, maybe.

[A]

When I saw it, I wrote in my notes, seance their son looks like a glowing loofah sponge. And then, of course, it does fly at the screen for the 3D effect. And then they start taking photographs, and we see that it's actually basically a guy holding a fishing pole with a loofah sponge on it or saran wrap or something. And then they expose these people, and then the woman doing the seance spits on Melanie. Like, what indignities this woman has to endure in this movie. Can I just say, I know truly,

[B]

she really is the ultimate victim here. Justice for Melanie in so many ways. Her story arc does not get wrapped up in a neat little bow or any bow. In fact. In fact, it gets wrapped up in flames.

[A]

But she doesn't get a last name. She gets spit on. But she takes a bunch of photographs. Cause she is the photographer for reveal. And then, like, the next day, they meet the real estate agent for the house.

[B]

Yeah. The next day, they come back after they've done this. You know, the huckster couple is banished from the house. The district attorney walks in and is like, yeah, you'll see. See here, like, ready to be arrested for the huckstering. And they flee. And the next day, it's so weird

[A]

that they managed to have enough sway to get the district attorney to show up at the haunted.

[B]

I think they actually say it's someone from the district attorney's office. So I don't think it was the district attorney himself, but you know, still like, pretty crazy for, you know, a pair of undercover journalists to have that kind of power. But, you know, these were different times. Different times.

[A]

So the next day they come back because the power goes out when they are about to go into the basement and investigate what was going on. Like, they were like, the control room's probably in the basement and they're about to go in the basement and then the power goes out and they're like, can we come back the next day? And Melanie seems particularly scared. Skeptic John seems like he's like, nah, whatever. And then they come back the next day and meet with Clifford Sanders, who

[B]

is the owner of the house, who had been renting the house.

[A]

Owner of the house?

[B]

Yes, he'd been renting the house to the couple. He claims that he had no idea that they were doing this. They quickly kind of go back on him and say, well, some people say that you have. And then they start taking pictures of him, like, gotcha. Haha, bitch. He falls through the floor in the basement, which is hard to do, you know, like that, that would be so. I thought, like, that would be so embarrassing. Imagine falling through a basement floor. Like, how. What does that say about. About you? I would be extremely, extremely self conscious about my body.

[A]

It's like if I sat on a chair and it broke. You know what I mean?

[B]

Right? I mean, but so much more than that, because it's a basement, you wouldn't think that it would even be physically possible to fall through a basement floor. But apparently there is like an old well, and he falls into the old well and has to get pulled out and then kind of storms out, being like, I'm a real estate agent around here. I. I don't need any of this smoke, you know, this is ridiculous.

[A]

He's also like, I gotta sell this house. I can't even sell the houses next to it. And then strangely for plot expediency, John, who is in the middle of a divorce from his wife Nancy, is like, yeah, I'll get it, I'll take it.

[B]

I need to move out of my tiny little apartment. I think me, a bachelor, needs a giant house on a lake. Giant haunted house on a la. And my question here to you, Alex, as someone who I consider to be a very ethical journalist, would you call it bad journalistic practice to purchase a home from someone you are planning to write an expose about? And do you think that he, like that the real estate agent slash owner, maybe knocked off a few Coins to, like, get him out of the story. We know that the story is published, but, like, we never actually see, you know, who is called out in it. I feel like there are some things here that are a little bit unsavory from an ethical perspective, but I would. I would love your take.

[A]

I'm sure it's fine. Yes, it is unethical and not great. Also just incredibly weird for the skeptic to buy the haunted house. Like, what are you trying to prove? Are you just getting it cause it's cheap? Are you getting it because you want to prove how brave you are? Are you getting it because you want to do more skeptical journalism in it? Like, what is the deal here? Is he going to write a thing six months later that's like, revealed? I lived in the Amityville house? Like, what is his. What's his end game? Never really explained.

[B]

Well, his ex wife does kind of like drag him for being like, what, you're going to sit in the attic and write the great American novel, Which he does kind of do. I don't know if. I don't know if he would call it the great American novel. But, like, this guy, also John, the male journalist, I will say, is just like the most insufferable Reddit atheist that you could possibly imagine. Like, he's. He's constantly talking in, like, soliloquy. Like, it's just like, all right, brother, like, we get it. Like, you're educated. You probably have an English degree. So do I. Let's move on. Let's. Let's grow up a little bit here. I don't. We don't. You don't need, like, a lecture on Greek mythology every time someone's like, geez, I'm scared of the fact that there were a bunch of people fucking murdered in this home. Like, he's annoying.

[A]

He is a little annoying, but he means well. I genuinely think he's like, he, like, means well and just wants to show people the truth.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Whatever that may be.

[B]

And this is another thing I notice about this movie is this is the least religious that we have gotten in a Amityville movie so far. Like, there is not.

[A]

That's a really good point. There's not a cross to be seen,

[B]

not a hint of Catholicism, not a priest. There isn't a church. Like, while in the other movies the priests were kind of the heroes of the story and this one, the kind of paranormal researchers are the heroes. So we're kind of getting an interesting look at, you know, I don't know what the early 80s were like from a culture perspective. But maybe at this point was the satanic panic getting a little too much and everyone was like, all right, we gotta cut this out.

[A]

No, the satanic panic was just ramping up at this point. Like, this is early days, so, I

[B]

mean, missed opportunity then. I mean, they really should have thrown in a couple, you know, devils and priests or whatever. But, yeah, we don't. We don't.

[A]

I feel like the satanic panic kind of hit its downward slide in like, the late 80s. Like 89. But like around this time, Right about the time Judas Priest was accused of being responsible for the deaths of people. And so they're all chit chatting in the basement. No, not in the basement. So they agree to buy the house, but then they're back at, like, their offices, right? And they've developed the pictures.

[B]

No. Then. So after he agrees to buy the house, he goes to pick up shit from his bitch ex wife. And it turns out she's not a bitch, actually. She also is a little bit, I would say, put a pot in this. She's kind of the only voice of reason in the entire movie, and she really gets a bad deal of it all. But he goes to pick up stuff from his old house. His wife is there. She makes the crack about the great American novel. And then we get the most exciting cast reveal because apparently I was texting during the opening credits. Lori Loughlin plays his daughter Susan. And fucking Meg Ryan is Lori Loughlin's like, masc. Lesbian best friend. I mean, she is.

[A]

I've got so many questions here based on what you've just said, the first of which is I don't really know the story with Lori Loughlin. All I know is she went to jail. And second of all, I need to get your. Like, I need a more detailed read of Meg Ryan's character because I did not read her like that at all. So please.

[B]

Well, there's a scene later in the movie that I'll explain why I see this, but I just. I like her. She's got a little androgynous haircut. She's, you know, wearing a little, like. She just. She's wearing a very androgynous, you know, early 80s outfit. Especially in comparison to Lori Loughlin, who is looking very preppy, very. Like, her hair is incredible throughout this entire movie. Distracting, to be honest.

[A]

Her hair is amazing.

[B]

Absolutely. Like 10 out of 10 hair. I would pay my entire savings account to have hair like that naturally grow out of my head. But in this initial scene, you're right. It does seem that Meg Ryan's character is actually kind of flirting with John, which I was a little stressed about.

[A]

Yeah, she's incredibly young in this movie.

[B]

Yes. They're both teenagers, I think. And she goes, oh, I hear you bought yourself a haunted house. Seems a little sweet on him. And I wrote in my notes, I swear to God, if there is an unsettling hookup scene between the two of them, I am done with this podcast. And thankfully there wasn't.

[A]

But can you tell me really quickly the story with Lori Loughlin? Why did she go to jail? All I know about her is that she was the John Stamos girlfriend in Full House, right?

[B]

Yep. She was John Stamos girlfriend in Full House, and she went to jail because she and her husband, who is the, like, brand director at Mossimo or whatever, they basically paid to get their daughter, Olivia Jade, influencer. Olivia Jade, currently dating Jacob Elordi, for those who know, they paid to get her into usc. They were a part of that whole, like, you know, scandal where rich people were paying to get their, like, underachieving children into usc. And it was especially kind of embarrassing for Lori Laughlin because Olivia Jade, the daughter that they paid to get into usc, like, was vlogging the entire time she was going to USC being like, God, I hate school. My mom forced me to go to school. I, like, really didn't want to. I just want to be an influencer. Would never go to class. Like, clearly was not engaged. And, like, it was. It was just like. So, yeah, Lori Laughlin did. Did end up going to jail, as I believe did her husband as well. And they may be divorced now. And I think that she has of late, since her jail sentence, been in a couple Lifetime movies. But I would have to fact check that because I'm not a big Lifetime movie connoisseur.

[A]

Got it. Okay. Thank you for catching me up. So those two characters are introduced. He goes to pick up stuff from his ex wife. And then we cut to Melanie Sanders. We cut to Sanders, don't we?

[B]

First, Melanie is developing photos back at the office, and she's looking at the photos that she took of Sanders, the owner of the. The owner and the real estate agent of the Amityville house. And she sees that all of the pictures of him, his face is distorted, like, in the same way that in the ring, you know, all those pictures

[A]

of that thing that I wrote in my notes, I was like, yeah, he's got ring face.

[B]

He's got ring face. So in a similar Sense of like in the ring, when you see photos of people who have received the ring phone call and their faces are distorted. He's got one of those.

[A]

So I thought that those pictures were genuinely unsettling. Cause rather than just being kind of like twisted like they are in the ring he looks kind of half skeleton, like it's like half skull. It's like I found them genuinely upsetting.

[B]

It's a little reminiscent of the prosthetic makeup that the possessed boy had in the previous film.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So. But at the same time that she is developing these photos and seeing this very unsettling image of Sanders face. Sanders walks back into the house and takes a look around. He hears a pitter pattering coming from upstairs and he assumes that it's John. So he walks up the stairs while the mirror in the front room like freezes. At this time, I wasn't really sure what was going on here. I think it is freezing, given what happens later. But it's very, very cold in the house. He walks upstairs and unfortunately for him, he does in fact get trapped in the fly infested insect incest attic. Incest attic room. Yeah.

[A]

And there is a great 3D moment. It's just a bunch of flies and then there's like a blue screen giant fly that kind of floats toward the camera. At one point it looks really bad, but he gets basically choked to death by flies.

[B]

Yeah. And at this point I had kind of. I had actually forgotten already. Even this is like 10 minutes in the movie. I'd forgotten it was supposed to be 3D and I was just like, man, these, these fly swarms are like really crude rudimentary cgi. Like they like, they need to get back those like bonafide fly actors that they had in the first movie. Like I want to see some real, like some real practical fly stuff. But I do.

[A]

I'm sorry, did you think they were cg?

[B]

Well, okay, obviously a rudimentary form of cg. I don't know. Like what is computer? Original computer graphics. I'm sure they were made with some kind of.

[A]

Those weren't made with computer. Those weren't made with a computer. That has to have been like old school animation. Because unless you're Tron, this predates computers. This is 1983 dog.

[B]

Old school animation. Yes. And there is that very funny shot where the large purple fly kind of like stares him down and then he is drowned by flies flying down his throat. As this is happening, John pulls up carrying a very rectangular bag that I cannot figure out what could be inside of it for the life of me. And I don't think is ever explained, neither here nor there. But he hears the realtor choking on the fly. So he heads up to the attic where he finds him dying on the floor. Not a fly in sight, by the way.

[A]

Yeah, no flies.

[B]

Where the hell did they go?

[A]

I'm thinking, you know, this is just the supernatural power of the horror, you know?

[B]

Okay, so it's like it choked him with supernatural flies, and then it all went away when the skeptic was there to see.

[A]

Right? And then what happens?

[B]

Melanie then pulls up carrying the creepy photos. Just as the body is being removed out of the house, John tells Melanie that Sanders had a heart attack. I said, I'm once again asking where all the flies were, but I think we've figured that out. I think you're right. I think it's a supernatural thing.

[A]

The thing that I notice right away is that Melanie is part of the sting to expose the fakers at the beginning. But pretty much immediately, like, from the moment they finish the sting, she's like, ooh, this house is creepy. Can we get out of here?

[B]

With no evidence, really at all. Like, the creepiest thing that's happened to her so far in that house is that the power went out. And, I mean, it's an old house. Like, that's not that weird. So she immediately just is on board with this being a haunted house. She pulls up, she tries to convince him there's something weird going on in this house. I don't think you should have bought it. Here's. Look at all these pictures. He's got a distorted face. John, meanwhile, is. He drags poor Ned Sanders just out of his grave, essentially being like. I mean, come on, like any. But just take one look at that guy. You could tell he was sick. He was so mean.

[A]

I couldn't believe that line because he was, like, just a normal guy.

[B]

I'm like, I don't. I don't know. I didn't. He didn't seem particularly ill at all.

[A]

I mean, all they needed was, like, one shot of him taking out, like, a handkerchief and coughing, and then you could have justified that line. But instead he's just like, hey, you want to buy my house? And then he's dead. And that's it. There's nothing indicating that he's, like, sick or fucked up.

[B]

You could tell that old man was sick as hell. He was ugly, ready for. He was fat enough to fall through a basement floor, you know, I don't know. He's on his way out. So Melanie, you know, deter like undeterred by John's skepticism, decides to bring the photos to the paranormal investigators who helped them at the beginning bust the old couple. He this paranormal investigator Dr. Dude, he tells her he thinks it's probably nothing but he's gonna look into it. So we've got a, you know, potential ally to Melanie on the case right now. Meanwhile, John decides to bring his beautiful young daughter into the incest death house. What could possibly go wrong? Gives his daughter a tour of the house and wow, okay, guess what room she chooses to be hers? The fucking incest room. Yeah, he says sold to Ms. Susan Baxter for one enormous hug. And I personally do not like the callback to the brother sister attic hugging from.

[A]

I don't think the writers were like. I don't think the writers were like, you know, I don't want to do any incest in this one, but we gotta toss a nod to incest at

[B]

least in the movie, just one. I mean I was perched for it because of how incest forward the other one was. I was ready for it in any given moment. Thankfully that is not something that I had to deal with in this movie. So I enjoyed it so much more.

[A]

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[B]

There's a scene here where I was a little confused as to Melanie comes over to the house and I don't really understand why she needs to be at the house or why she needs to be waiting at the house for him for a long time. But she comes over and basically straight

[A]

up she says do you want to do something tonight? And he's like yeah, come over. If I'm not there, Dolores will let you in. And I don't know if Dolores is a housekeeper or what.

[B]

I think Dolores is a housekeeper.

[A]

Okay. But she goes instead of being let in by anybody, the door is just unlocked and she walks in.

[B]

Yes, she Walks in, and then she immediately gets locked in. Like, she cannot leave the house at all. Every door and window is locked. She can't find. Like, there's footsteps everywhere. You know, Same kind of shit. And so far, I will say this movie is kind of minus the, like, fly death scene. Like, this movie is kind of boring from a horror perspective for me at this point. The acting is good, but again, from the immediate child abuse, incest, and possession that was happening from the jump in the last movie. I was really perched for this to be a little more exciting from the jump. And there's this very funny scene that the music that they're playing while she's frantically trying to get out of the house is something that would play when Bugs Bunny was trying to sneak up on that pig that he hates so much. Sat. Who are you? I'm Melanie. I'm waiting for Mr. Baxter. He's not here now. I know. Did you.

[A]

Did you just say that pig?

[B]

Is he not a pig? Like, doesn't Bugs Bunny have a. Have a whole thing about not liking that fucking pig?

[A]

First of all, Porky Pig is not Bugs Bunny's enemy. Porky Pig's a good guy in the Warner Brothers mythos. It's crazy to me that you. I mean, I know that I'm like an old. Like a. Like a withered old man. And this is just like the water I swam in as a child was like Looney Tunes. But Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd are his enemies.

[B]

Elmer Fudd looks a lot like Porky Pig, right? Porky. Porky Pig, Yes.

[A]

And Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd look absolutely nothing alike.

[B]

I swear to God, they look identical.

[A]

Elmer Fudd is a hunter. He wears a hunter's outfit. Porky Pig wears a blue shirt and a bow tie with no pants. They are completely different in every way, especially since one of them is a man and another one is a pig.

[B]

I feel I'm not gonna Google it right now. I'm just gonna, like. I'd like to trust my own memory on this one. But in my own memory, like, they have very similar facial structures, despite being.

[A]

I understand that that's what your memory is telling you, but reality is just not. Not on your side on this one.

[B]

All right. All right. Well, I trust you.

[A]

Okay. But there's Looney Tunes music playing.

[B]

Yes, right. Looney Tunes music playing in the background. And then she comes face to face

[A]

with the housekeeper Dolores in the funniest moment in the movie. Because, Dolores, one line is, he's not here now. She Just screams, he's not here now. In Melanie's face. And that is the jump scare for the scene.

[B]

And then Melanie starts to laugh and she's like, oh, thank God. John, meanwhile, is stuck at work because he is being stalked by a menacing singular fly in the elevator at the office. And suddenly he is thrust upwards so fast in this elevator that he's pinned to the bottom of the floor of the elevator. And then he is thrust downwards so hard that he's pinned to the top of the elevator.

[A]

Again, a very Looney Tunes kind of situation.

[B]

Very Looney Tunes situation. And I don't understand how he didn't die because he, like, allegedly goes down, you know, 15 floors so fast that he is pinned by physics to the top of the elevator. And he just, you know, is kind of limping a little bit. When he gets out, his boss is like, oh, man, sorry about that. Like, we just. That's a new elevator. And he's like, yeah, don't worry about it. So we're once again entering a kind of first movie esque haunting style in which the house does most of its haunting outside of the walls of the house, actually. So this is kind of the first instance.

[A]

My notes for this moment are, the horror is back up. Oh, by the way, I've started calling the actual entity that is doing the haunting. I've started calling it the horror in the same way that, like, Wendy Williams refers to the killer.

[B]

The killer. I like that because it is the Amityville Horror. We're not sure. Is it demonic? Is it a Native American burial ground spirit?

[A]

Is it the ghost of the Defeos?

[B]

Is it the ghost of the Defeos? We are not given answers in this film, and I doubt we will be given solid answers in the rest of the 89 movies that we have yet to watch.

[A]

But what I wrote is the horror is back up to its old tricks. Fucking with elevators and whatnot, which seems like it seems, you know, it is. It's back up to amityville1 style behavior.

[B]

Yep. And so he, you know, is dealing with kind of the aftermath of this, what is probably an OSHA violation, honestly. But that's, you know, neither here nor there. And the housekeeper leaves while Melanie is still waiting for him. And Melanie is, like, really not happy to be at this house by herself. She's like, are you sure you're. You have to leave. And the housekeeper's like, yeah, I'm out of here, girl. Like, by the way, the fuse box has been fucking up all day. Like, the power might Go out. You know where the fuse box is, though? It's in the basement. And she's like, yeah, it's fine. And of course, like, the moment that the housekeeper leaves the house gets so cold that Melanie is, like, physically trembling and shaking as though she's, like, having a seizure. Like, she is so cold. And I'm like, girl, at this point, like, go wait in the car. I don't know. Like, it seems like it's really. You don't like being in there. Like, you could just be sitting in the car with the heat on, waiting for him to get home if you're really that uncomfortable being in this house. But she tries to go down to the basement to mess with the fuse box, gets spooked, and then. And then gets completely blasted by a large gust of freezing air. And at first I thought she was, like, literally being murdered by, like, being frozen to death in this scene. But she's not dead because John comes in right after this happens, and she flips out being like, don't touch me. Leave me alone. She runs out of the house with no explanation whatsoever to John. John, from his perspective is like, okay, bitch. Like, what the hell? He sees nothing wrong. The lights are all on. Like, everything is fine. So this happens. She runs out of the house. Now we flash to a scene where John's ex wife is, for some reason, at the paranormal investigator's office. And she's basically telling him that I don't want my daughter. Like, I don't know why the hell my psychotic ex husband decided to buy this house. Psychotic, again, not the right word. I would say pretentious ex husband decided to buy this house. I really am uncomfortable with my daughter spending any time there. And I just. I don't know what to do. Like, and he's basically like, eh, you know, like, maybe we can do some investigating there. Like, but it doesn't really. There's not really an answer. She just. You can. You can see that she's concerned about the idea of her daughter spending time at this murder house.

[A]

And meanwhile her daughter is spending time at the murder house.

[B]

So this is the scene in which I was getting some masc lesbian vibes from Meg Ryan herself. Because I'm being so. Like, Meg Ryan and Lori Loughlin come into the house while John isn't home. Because Meg Ryan's character is, like, kind of a ghosty horror enthusiast. And she really wants to see, like, all the places where, like, these gory murders took place. She's dressed again in a very kind of, like, soft mask. I don't mean like full mask, like, I mean like soft mask. Like there's a difference here that, like, you're, you know, queer listeners will understand. Like, I'm not going to explain it to you because that's actually not my job to educate you.

[A]

Yeah, you don't need to. That emotional labor. I understand.

[B]

She's getting soft mats. And she's also kind of like heavy flirting, in my opinion. She's kind of like, lori, babe, like, come on. Like, getting in her face, like, and I'm being like. It kind of seems like she's like, come on, babe, like, let's go get up in here and just like make out in this haunted house. Like. And I'm being so serious that, like, this is the exactly the kind of shit that I was up to in high school. Like breaking and entering, having seances, getting drunk in haunted houses, and then using that as an excuse to make out with my hot girlfriends. Like, that was certainly everything I was up to. Like, in a nutshell. Did you know you could have sex with a ghost? Really? Yeah, really. I've been reading up on it. Seems that it's happened to a lot of women and they all say that it's fantastic. What do you think? I think you're weird. Maybe that's why your father bought this house. He's got some sex starved ghost up there with boobs up to you. Well, somehow that doesn't sound like my father. I've read all of his articles, you know, I know the whole story. I know exactly where all the murders happened. And. And Laurie's like, oh, my God, Meg. Like, come on. But I'm just like, I feel, you know, I think that there's something here. She also says maybe that's why your dad bought this house. Like, maybe there's a sex starved ghost up there with boobs up to here and like, does a little like boob motion kind of. Again, a callback to the conversation that the brother and sister have in the attic about boobs with the arm movements that are being.

[A]

I think you're giving this series way too much credit to imagine that they're actually callbacks.

[B]

Sure. But that's, you know, I'm watching it through a critical lens. I'm watching it through, you know, and I'm just. I'm gonna call it where I see it. So again, Laurie's hair is fucking incredible. And they go downstairs to the well and Meg Ryan says, you know, this was. There was an Indian burial ground here. This was. I don't remember exactly what she says about the. Well, but there's something happening. This is.

[A]

I don't remember. What I do remember is that Meg Ryan's sole role in this movie, aside from being kind of like a horny miscreant teen, is exposition. She gives, like, a monologue about the history of the DeFeo family, about the potential for haunting. She knows so much about this house.

[B]

Yeah, I can see why she, like, clearly she's a fan of, you know, the amateur. Like, clearly she's really into this lore, and I can see why she would be excited, like me as a teenager, if one of my friend's parents bought a known haunted house that was, like. That had several books and a movie made out of it. Yeah, I would absolutely be the Meg Ryan character in this. Just, like, walking around, showing where all the murders took place, et cetera. So John comes home, he finds him in the basement. They're like, you know, Meg hits on him a little bit again. So maybe she's. Maybe she's bisexual. We'll give her that. She's into this family. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever it is. So John comes home, then he's writing his little great American novel. And then we get a very interesting scene with Melanie. We get the final scene, in fact, with Melanie, which is that.

[A]

Wait, before that happens, doesn't the steam happen in the bathroom? Isn't there that weird scene where suddenly he hears a bunch of hissing and he goes into the bathroom and there's steam pouring out of the bathroom sink and he.

[B]

Like.

[A]

I don't know if you noticed this, but it seems like that was going to be a larger scene because he goes in there, he's, like, sweating his face off. He's got, like, a washcloth, and he's trying to tighten the gasket on the sink so that steam stops pouring out of it. And while he's doing that, it cuts to a shot of him, and you can see the wall behind him moving toward him as though the room is getting smaller. Did you notice that?

[B]

I did not notice that. Maybe that was a, like, 3D kind of thing where we're supposed to feel very claustrophobic, like, trapped in this, like, bathroom with him.

[A]

It felt like it was supposed to be scarier. And then all of a sudden, the steam stops. The scene is over.

[B]

The scene is over. And, yeah, I didn't notice that. But we cut to. After that strange steam scene. We cut to Melanie driving. Okay, Melanie is not driving to or from the house. So I don't really understand, like, you know, the mechanics of this. But we now have the horror back with the ability to cause car accidents again. So the spirit in the house basically almost final destinations her with a pole. Like she gets into a car crash with a truck that's carrying a bunch of poles and one goes straight through the windshield and almost like goes through her head. And I was like, holy shit.

[A]

That is like the most 3D action you get in the whole fucking movie. It is such a good. It's like such a good deep focus shot of this like crazy pipe smashing through a window. Also, she. The reason she crashes into this thing is because she's again distracted by a fly.

[B]

Of course. Right. I actually missed that and wasn't aware. So. Thank you. I guess the flies are the horror's mechanism for, you know, creating chaos and mayhem outside of the house and inside of the house, I guess.

[A]

But then once she crashes, you would think that the crash would be like, bad enough. But once she crashes, a fire starts out of nowhere on the. On the photographs that she is carry that are in her passenger seat.

[B]

And you're like, oh yeah. She survives the crash in a way that I was kind of disappointed by. I was like, oh, I kind of thought she was going to get impaled by it. And I was like, okay, here we go. Like, it's picking up. We're going to get some horror. Nope, doesn't get impaled by it. Instead just burns to death inside of her car in a very upsetting way.

[A]

Like that to me was also really scary. They like, the thing catches on fire, the photos catch on fire. And then she catches on fire and she's just screaming. It's just probably 15 seconds of her screaming and hitting her arms and banging on the window. And then the last shot we get before she dies is her hand pressed against the window and just covered in flames.

[B]

Yeah. And she's locked inside. The horror is very good at locking doors in this movie. That's like one of its main attributes. It's very, very adept at making sure that people cannot get out of the confined spaces that the horror traps them in. And this, her burning car is come upon by a random man on the highway who like goes over and looks inside and sees her. Oh, wait.

[A]

It's very important to note at this moment that when he finds the car, the car is like completely hazy inside with smoke, but there's no burn damage on the outside. And then he opens it up and finds a completely burned and pretty gruesome corpse that very three dishly leans toward the camera and like Its hands go toward the frame, toward the camera, and then the whole thing goes up in flames again. I found that whole scene really unsettling. Like, I did not like it. It upset me.

[B]

Yeah, I was not happy about that either because, like, justice for Melanie, like, she really got a raw deal in this whole thing. Like, she was the only one from the jump that was like, I don't feel great about this. And then you. She was right, and there's no vindication whatsoever. She just get burnt up. And also, I don't really understand why, because she wasn't. I guess she was kind of trying to stop him from living in the house. But, like, I. She didn't. She wasn't going over there with, like, holy water. She wasn't, like, actively fighting against the presence in the house. I don't really get the. I guess this version of the horror has an interesting agenda on who it kills and who it possesses.

[A]

And not only that, like, not only does she get a raw deal in that she just wanted to warn people. And then she gets. Got. It immediately cuts to a scene of Jon arguing with Nancy, his ex. And he doesn't seem that upset that Melanie is dead.

[B]

No, not at all. And Nancy's basically like, dude, you gotta sell this fucking house. Like, now. Two people who are connected to it, like, the dude died in the house the day you moved in. There was a bunch of murders before, and now, like, your partner is dead. And he's like, well, she didn't die anywhere near the house. She wasn't driving to it, and she wasn't driving from it. Like, this is a coincidence. Like, I'm sick of this. Like, keep in mind, like, they seem to have had very good working relationship. He was concerned, you know, when she ran out of the house to the point where he, like, came up to her the next day at work and was like, hey, man, like, we're partners. We gotta talk about this. Like, what happened? And. But he doesn't seem to care that much that Melanie has met her demise seemingly at the hands of a random car accident.

[A]

Also, I found his relationship with his ex wife, or soon to be ex wife, very confusing. They seemed to be still very much in kind of a romantic relationship.

[B]

Yes, well, we'll get there, but I have some things to say about that in the end. So then we get to the part where the teenagers, all Meg Ryan, Lori Laughlin, and two nondescript white boys decide to kind of sneak into the house and literally play Ouija. Like, this could truly be a documentary about my High school experience. It is so very funny. So they do it. Like, it gets to be kind of creepy. I don't actually really remember what, like, nothing that big happens when they're playing Ouija itself. Like, there's a couple, like, spooky things that go on, but there's not, like, a ton of stuff that, like, no one dies while they're playing Ouija. They go outside and they decide to get into the boat that is, like, tied up on the dock outside of the Amityville house. Because if you will remember, this is a lake house.

[A]

But first they do the seance, and they put a bunch of pieces of paper on the ground with letters, and they ask it, who's in danger? Well, first they ask, who's gonna. Which of us is gonna die? And Susan, John's daughter, is like, come on, guys, don't do that. And they're like, oh, she's scared. And then Meg Ryan is like, no, seriously, who's in danger? And the cup goes toward the letter S for Susan before the glass flies toward the wall and smashes with the most broken glass ass. ADR sound effect I have ever heard. It sounds like it's from another planet, not just another movie.

[B]

It is very funny that, like, once again, like, they are playing Ouija in a haunted house, asking who's gonna be the first to die. Like, I just. Like, I could have written this movie from memory. And I mean. And if this movie is any indication, I think we should set our clocks for the day that I turn 69. Because it does seem that Laurie was, in fact, in danger. Because, yes, they go outside. Laurie is very shaken up after this whole incident. She's kind of sitting out there. And then they're playing.

[A]

By the way, for anyone who's confused, when she says Lori, she means Lori Loughlin, whose character's name is Susan.

[B]

Yeah, I'm sorry. Susan. Her name is Susan. Lori Loughlin. Susan goes outside, is upset, sitting on the lawn. There's that very funny Frisbee throw that you mentioned earlier, where one of her guy friends throws a Frisbee at her. And it's a 3D effect, really comes right at you. It must have been a really terrifying experience to have in the theaters. Just horrifying. Imagine a Frisbee coming at you.

[A]

I can't even. It sounds terrifying. So they're hanging out. They're hanging out, and then they decide to get on a boat and go for a ride on the lake. And at the same moment, why is Nancy in the house?

[B]

Nancy can't Find Susan. Nancy goes home, she can't find Susan. And she's like, I bet I know where the fuck she is. She's probably back at that fucking house. Cause she's told her she's expressly forbidden her to go back into the house. But again, like I don't think that that really works. Like you know, with their legal custody arrangement probably. And also like Susan is like 17 years old. Like she can kind of, she's kind of a self starter at this point. I don't think you can really tell her where, where to go or what houses to not enter. So she heads into the house to find Susan and admonish her for being at the house. And she walks into the house as the kids are out in the boat. And she sees. And Susan walks in the door and she's completely wet. She's like head to toe, dripping wet. And Nancy's like, what the hell? What's going on Susan? And Susan like doesn't say anything and just walks up to her room and shuts the door. And at the same time that this happens, we see John pull up with a bunch of groceries and he looks down to the lake and Susan's three friends are getting out of the boat carrying her body. It seems that Susan probably we don't see what happened. But I mean I would assume given the mechanism, there's probably a fly related boat accident.

[A]

All we get is one of the boys says she fell off the boat. That's like all we learn about what happened to her. So yes, it's safe to assume a fly was involved.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

But he goes running down there and then Nancy comes out and says, hey, what the heck's going on everybody? And John has to explain to her.

[B]

Cause remember, she has just seen her daughter. Apparently the ghost of her daughter walk upstairs into her room and shut the door and she was like pounding on the door, trying to yell at her. Cause she was mad that she was at the house at all and also mad that she was wet and wasn't explaining herself. So she, her reaction in this moment seems crazy to everybody else. And I actually really like the way they kind of play this throughout the rest of the movie where like she like if you're looking at it from an outside perspective or from John's perspective, like she seems fucking absolutely nuts. Because her reaction is like, that's not Susan. I literally, I just saw Susan. She's inside. Like that's not that, that can't be her. That doesn't make any sense. I just, she's Inside her room. She just came in, she was all wet. But, like, to somebody that's like, looking. That didn't just see the ghost of his daughter inside the house, he just thinks that this is like a hysterical reaction to grief and that Nancy is just freaking out. And Nancy obviously does freak out when she kind of realizes, like, oh, that is Susan's body. But she still won't believe it. She's like, that's not her. That's not her. She's here. She's in the house. Like, we have to go see. And she runs back into the house and tries to show him. And, you know, there's. There's no one there.

[A]

I found this scene to be profoundly disturbing too, for two reasons. One, the idea of, like, being told that my child was dead right after I saw them is really unpleasant. And the idea of having died and like, realizing that you're stuck in this shitty house seems very scary to me. And that I feel like that's what Susan was dealing with in that moment when she's sort of wandering, dazed, away from the accident that killed her. She's going into this house being like, oh, I'm stuck here now.

[B]

Yeah, like rip to a baddie. Rip to the best head of hair that we have ever seen. You know, she didn't deserve that.

[A]

This feels personal.

[B]

She didn't deserve that. So they, you know, grief ensues. I think it's. Nancy locks herself in the attic and is kind of like rocking back and forth in horror.

[A]

John gets drunk and then passes out on the couch and then has a dream where he goes into the basement and the well is shimmering like a hot tub. They've replaced the muck. Yes, the, like, slime, the black slime that was in the first two movies with a very attractive looking hot tub that's also a well.

[B]

Yeah, it's very. A nice little mystical hot tub. And at first I thought. When I wasn't sure that this was a dream, I thought that. Cause in the dream, he goes down to the basement and Nancy's sitting there looking at the hot tub well. And inside the hot tub well, underneath the water is Laurie. Sorry, is Susan. And so I thought that this was real and that they were kind of like pet cemeterying their daughter's body here in the magic well. But then he wakes up.

[A]

Not before Susan leaps out of the water and is like, horribly disfigured. Like Jason in the first Friday of the 13th.

[B]

Yeah. Yes, in a way that she was not when she was pulled out of the water. Because I guess she drowned pretty quickly. Also will say none of them were doing any rescue breathing or CPR prior to the ambulance getting there. Like, was that not a thing? Like, did the general population, like, not know? I mean, as maybe this just pissed me off as a former lifeguard, but I'm like, you would just. You should immediately do rescue breathing. I don't think that, like, she probably would have died. Like, I think you probably could have cleared the airway, you know, gotten the water out of her lungs, and she probably would have been okay.

[A]

The safety club showed up.

[B]

All right, well, you know, you better. You better hope that I'm around. If your daughter ever goes on a boat ride with her friends after breaking

[A]

a boat, don't even speak that into being. What is wrong with you?

[B]

Anyway,

[A]

Amityville ville will return after these messages. So Nancy's losing her mind. She is refusing to leave Susan's room. She's just hanging out in there all the time. And then the movie, I would say from the moment he falls asleep and has the dream about his daughter, this movie becomes poltergeist in the same way that the second one for the last hour becomes the Exorcist. So John goes to his friend Elliot, who is there at the opening, in the opening scene, and says, I simply don't know what to do anymore. And Elliot says, well, let me and my team come in. And they come in and immediately set up a poltergeist like operation with a bunch of cameras and television sets.

[B]

And I mean, it's so many people in this house. Like, there are probably like 50 to 100 paranormal investigators set up around this house.

[A]

Like, it's like seven. Come on.

[B]

No, no, no, no. Go back and watch it. There are so many people in this fucking house. And especially, yeah, there's way more people that need in this house that than I would suggest bringing to a paranormal investigation. I feel like that's going to drive the ghosts away. But in this case, it certainly does not deter them in any way. Anyway, Nancy's up in the attic, and they're like film. They put cameras everywhere. They're filming, they're watching the film. They're watching what's going on downstairs. And they're watching Nancy in the attic. And the orb shit from the beginning, the fake orb shit from the beginning comes back. Except this time it's real, baby. This time that orb ain't fucking around. That orb is calling to Nancy. And the paranormal investigator is like, dude, it got your daughter. And now it's bringing Nancy down to the basement. It wants her to go in the well. And he's like. Jon's like, absolutely not. Like, we can't let that happen. And so instead of stopping, but then

[A]

he says, wait a minute. I think we can release her. Meaning we can release your daughter from the hold this cursed house has on her.

[B]

Right, right, right.

[A]

But we just have to let Nancy follow the specter, this sort of floating blob of purple, down into the basement.

[B]

Yes. Huge miscalculation on the paranormal resourcer's end here. It does not end well for him. So they do this and all hell breaks loose, quite literally. She goes down to the basement and instead of Lori Laughlin's lifeless body in the well, there's like a fire breathing alien, fire breathing alien water monster who immediately grabs the paranormal researcher and pulls him under the water, lights him on fire.

[A]

Well, it first burns his face. Yeah. Sets him on like, like breathes fire on his face. He screams. And then as he's being pulled into the well, he's like, you can still save yourself, Helio. Susan, get out. Save yourself. Susan.

[B]

Susan, we gotta get out of here. And he gets pulled into the well. And then all of a sudden the well freezes in like a pillar kind of a thing that is like reminiscent of like a pillar of salt. Like it freezes in like a big like geyser upwards and the whole house freezes. And then the house just kind of explodes and is frozen at the same time. And everybody in the house, like all the 400 fucking paranormal investigators are being killed left and right, thrown out windows. Everything's breaking. Nancy and John like cling to each other and they a king as they're trying to desperately leave. This incredible 3D scene of a kingfisher that's on the wall comes loose of the wall. It almost impales John in the head, but it, you know, doesn't.

[A]

I could very, very, very obviously see the line that the swordfish, the kingfisher went sliding to go toward the screen. It was pretty good.

[B]

And then, yeah, basically the movie ends with Nancy and John huddling, holding each other outside, watching as the house explodes. And this is where I will say, like, this is the first movie. Again, no religion. Also no domestic violence. And I actually think it's kind of a cute parent trap love story. Like how my parents fell back in love after my divorced dad.

[A]

Do you think that Susan died so that her parents. She's like, I got a great plan.

[B]

No, precisely.

[A]

To get my parents back together.

[B]

You're probably wondering how I ended up Here. Here's how my parents fell back in love after my divorced dad moved into a haunted house that killed me and then exploded. And that's the end of the movie.

[A]

We've got the episode description. We've got the episode description. That is the end of the movie. And now I get to get tell you about my favorite part of this movie, which is the great behind the scenes stuff.

[B]

I'm so excited.

[A]

So, first of all, the movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, who I've never heard of, but his dad was Max Fleischer, who did all of the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons in like the 20s and 30s.

[B]

Maybe that explains the Bugs Bunny music.

[A]

Maybe. But Richard Fleischer had been directing movies since like the forties when this came out. Like, he'd been directing movies for ages. This was one of his last movies. He did this Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, and like, one more movie, and then he was done.

[B]

Damn.

[A]

But like, super weird old Hollywood dude, he'd been making movies forever. The interesting part of this is, okay, so they're like trying to come up with a movie. What do we come up with a movie about? And it turns out that they decided to base this on a guy named Steven Kaplan. Now, now, primary information about this dude is super, super hard to come by on the Internet. But what I can tell you about him is that he was a guy who lived in Long island and then moved to Queens later in his life. He worked for the New York City Department of Education, but founded both the Parapsychology Institute of America and the Vampire Research Center. Oh, in Long Island.

[B]

Vampire Research Center.

[A]

I know. And in the 70s, he. After the Defeo family was murdered and after the Lutzes moved in and moved out, he contacted the Lutzes and was like, hey, I would like to investigate the house. I'd like to go into the house and look around and see if we can find anything supernatural. According to Stephen Kaplan, the Lutzes said to him, I don't know, does it cost anything? And he said, no, it doesn't cost anything, but if you're a fraud, I will expose you. And they never got back to him. According to the Lutzes, he got in touch with them and they were like, this guy's a vampirologist. We don't want anything to do with this weirdo.

[B]

You know, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, I would say.

[A]

But at the time that this movie was being made, Stephen Kaplan had embarked on a many decades long, like two decade long investigation into the Amityville house in an effort to prove that it was a hoax.

[B]

Okay, it wouldn't be two decades long, because it would be like a full decade long because the Amityville murders happened in 1974, and then this movie came out in 1983.

[A]

But he was still doing his investigation during this time.

[B]

Oh, God.

[A]

He actually released a book called the Amityville Horror Conspiracy in the early 90s and died like two years later. But I looked everywhere for, like, a PDF of this book. I looked at libraries to see if I could get it. I looked all over the place. I could not find it anywhere.

[B]

Damn.

[A]

It's on Amazon for 500 something dollars right now.

[B]

A used copy, but anybody want to send us a little thank you gift for this incredible podcast? Please feel free to purchase that for Alex.

[A]

But according to, like, Goodreads, the people who've read it are like, he really tears the Lutz as a new one. Like, it is a full takedown. Which is weird to me because part of the reason that I only finished watching this movie about 15 minutes before we started recording is because last night I was reading about Stephen Kaplan and I found a PDF of a book he wrote about vampires. Okay, so first of all, the guy is a cut up in his. In his vampirologist book. It's called Vampires are like Vampires A R E. Like vampires are figured.

[B]

And.

[A]

And the introduction is full of vampire puns. It's him being like, listen, I was bitten by an interest in strange phenomena at a very early age. No. I tried to put it away, but my interest in them kept rising from the grave. And I started coming up with theories, and there were plenty of theories I wanted to sink my teeth into. Like, the whole. It's so funny. And I got like 75 pages or 100 pages into the book.

[B]

So does he believe in vampires then? Like, it.

[A]

Like, that's the thing that was so crazy to me is that in the book, he is like, I fully believe, though I have never met, I fully believe that there are, like, Bela Lugosi can turn into a bat style vampires. But for some reason, he was like, the Lutzes are frauds. Like, he seems primed to believe the story the Lutzes told.

[B]

You know what that tells me? That vampires are real. Like, he's probably just right about everything.

[A]

So one of the very funny things about the book is that like, many, many, many dozens of pages are just transcripts. And I think they are remembered transcripts, not recorded transcripts of phone calls he got at The Vampire Research center, which, according to the book, is like. Is the way the book presents. This is. It's like Ghostbusters headquarters, and there's constantly vampire stuff popping off there. But I assume that it's just like, his house, right? And then.

[B]

Right. Yeah.

[A]

The other thing that is important to note about as much as I read of the book is that he meets with two vampires in person in the hundreds or so pages I read. And both of them are, like, sadomasochists and, like, generally only drink blood while they're having sex. And also, in addition to that, both desperately want to fuck him every time he's like. They're like, are you sure you don't want to stick around and see what happens? You drink a little bit of your blood.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, he really should have. He could have. He could have become the thing he was so excited about. Like, he could have become a vampire through that. You know, like that. That seems like a missed opportunity.

[A]

He writes with this, like, arch. Like, I was interested, but who am I kidding? I don't want to be eaten alive. It was. It's so good. We'll put a link to the PDF in the show notes. It is almost impossible to read because it is the worst quality scans of a hard copy of a book. But it's so worth it. It's so weird. And, like, many pages that I read were just hoax calls from people on his vampire hotline.

[B]

I love that. Like, it kind of seems to me that you wouldn't need to have two disparate organizations. Like, you would think that the vampire one would fall underneath, like, just the general paranormal one. But, like, he really was, like, focused on the scourge of vampires, vampires in America. That's. That's incredible. I will absolutely be checking that out.

[A]

If anybody who listens to this knows anything about Stephen Kaplan, I would love to know more about him. He wrote three books. He wrote In Pursuit of Premature Gods and Contemporary Vampires. He wrote Vampires Are, and then he wrote the Amityville Horror Conspiracy, which came out in 1995, the year he died. I would love to know more about this guy.

[B]

I mean, allegedly died. Do we know for sure? Has anyone seen his corpse lately?

[A]

I know he's probably out there just still punning it up with his vampire buddies. The only other thing to note about this movie, which was very surprising to me when I read it, is that, first of all, the house had to be filmed from the back rather than the front, because the Amityville house at this point had become such A popular destination for people to go by that they changed the front windows to no longer be the sort of half moon, quarter moon shape that they are in the front. So they had to film it from the back.

[B]

You know, I actually noticed that they were filming from different angles. I was kind of appre. I was like, oh, I like that we're getting like a new angle of this house. Like I think I've seen the front enough at this point. And I actually was not aware that this house that they're filming at is the actual Amityville.

[A]

It's the same house though that they filmed at the first and second at. This is the same house they filmed the first and second at. But the owners were like, fuck this, we don't want people coming to our house anymore. We're going to change the windows. And the only other thing to note is that all the exteriors were filmed at the Amityville house in Toms River. All the interiors were filmed in Mexico.

[B]

Really? Why?

[A]

Because this was a co production between a Mexican production company and an American production company. So they just to make it cheap, they did everything inside in Mexico.

[B]

Huh. Very interesting.

[A]

Yeah, but I'm obsessed with Stephen Kaplan. I want to know so much more about this guy.

[B]

I am going to go down a very deep rabbit hole about Stephen Kaplan. Was he like hot? Like, why were these vampires trying to fuck him?

[A]

No, no, he wasn't, but he, it was him and his wife actually. Who. Hold on, I'll show you.

[B]

Maybe, maybe his wife was a babe.

[A]

I'm going to send you a picture of both of them and you can decide for yourself. Hold on just a moment. I'm gonna do it in the. In the Riverside Chat.

[B]

Oh, okay. For the listeners at home, I am looking at a siblings are dating style couple. Like, not. They look very eerily alike.

[A]

Large, they're both kind of like rosy cheeked, big glasses. They look very 70s. I wonder if Roxanne's still alive because she helped him write the book.

[B]

Yeah, Roxanne's wearing like a very say something headband, which I like. But yeah, not a couple that I, if I were a vampire, would try to get to fuck me. But you know, who's to say? I'm not gonna yuck any vampires. Yumps out there. You know, maybe there's someone out there for everyone. There's a vampire out there no matter what you look like. Let this be a lesson to you that there is a vampire out there that is willing to fuck you and drink your blood in the process. So I just. I hope that's encouraging.

[A]

Okay, so we want to talk about the lore differences between this one and the last one.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And the first one also. So the horror is much more outdoors these days. It's doing stuff all over the place.

[B]

It's very fly based overall. More fly based than. I mean, I would say, you know, flies have been a recurring theme overall, but, like, the flies really are pulling.

[A]

The flies are actually killing people in this one.

[B]

Yeah, they're pulling their weight there for the horror. So the flies are good henchmen here. Like I said, the horror can lock doors and windows very well. And that, I guess, has been a running theme throughout all the movies. A new thing in this movie is this blasting people with cold air kind of thing. Like fire and water and ice are big themes in this. Like, there's. There's a lot of mixing of those things. It also has a well and fire breathing alien water monster who can take people and rip apart the entire house and then freeze the whole house. So that's new. We haven't seen that before. Curious as to the origins of that guy. I'm sad that we didn't get more into his backstory, but maybe the fourth movie will be a full prequel on how that guy got in there. Here's hoping it can also, you know, change the face of its next victim in a photograph, which is interesting. That's a new one that we haven't seen yet before.

[A]

Yeah, this one seemed way more powerful than the others. It's causing a lot more deaths in, like, much more insane ways. And then at the end, it blows up the entire fucking house.

[B]

Blows up the whole house. And kills probably like 20 people at least. Like, there's a lot of death in that in those final five minutes. And it's interesting, again, that this is not a religious movie at all. So this is. There's no. There's no sense that it's demonic. There's no sense that, you know, the people that are being. Unlike the first movie where in the people that were able to be impacted outside of the house were either possessed by the spirit, by the horror, or were so pure and pious and religious that, like, they couldn't even be inside the house without barfing all over the place. Like the ants or the aunt. Aunt. The. My God, the nun aunt that threw up immediately after she left the house. So it's interesting to me, like, I'm curious about, you know, the motives here. He seems to. The horror seems to have moved past its grudge against the Catholic Church and has really widened its net in terms of the types of people that it wants to punish. Cause I don't really. Again, no one was really trying to stop it. It at all. Like, there was at no point anyone being like, you leave this house. Nothing. Like, even. Even Melanie, who was kind of like, hey, man, I think you should move. She wasn't actively doing anything, I guess, other than, like. I guess working with the paranormal investigator to look at the pictures. But, like, what would proving that those pictures are paranormal do? Like, John wouldn't believe her, so I don't. Yeah. I'm curious about what the. The motives are here, moving forward.

[A]

Yeah. I don't know. And I'm curious of, like, where. What. What happens next. The house blew up.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How are you gonna make another Amityville movie?

[B]

Well, I'm sure they'll rebuild it.

[A]

You know, I will say that this is the last movie that got a theatrical release until the remake in 2005. So we're getting into some rough stuff.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Well, going forward.

[B]

Well, I'm terrified. But on that note, how would you rate this on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of your fear, the fear that you felt while watching it?

[A]

I would say that the fear here is more ambient than actual scares. Like, there's not. The fear is more like, I'm scared of dying, and I'm scared of my loved ones dying. I would say, like, a two.

[B]

Yeah. I was also at a two, and it was just for, like, the existential dread of existence. That's literally the note that I wrote. Like, it's just.

[A]

I'm always at a 2 on that.

[B]

You're always at, like, a. A 17.5 out of 10 on that.

[A]

I wish I was dead. I'm also very scared of dying.

[B]

Those two things really, you know, like. Which is funny because, like, I think we work as friends because I don't wish I was dead, and I'm not scared of dying.

[A]

So, like, I know you really aren't. You're just like, well, I'm dying at 69. The Ouija board told me when I was 16. You talk about it all the time.

[B]

Well, you know, I'm like. I'm at the half point of my life at this point. Like, I've got a lot of. To squeeze in. You know, I've got a lot. You got to live life while you still have it. So at this point, I'm. I've accepted it. I'm ready for it whenever it. Whenever it may come. And I think I know I think I know exactly when it's going to go or at least the 12 month period in which it will be coming. But yeah, I would give it a 2 on the scary rating and then on just like the overall rating, I would give this one a 6.5. I thought it was.

[A]

Oh my God. I was going to say 6.5.

[B]

Wow, look at that. Just, you know, great minds, we think alike and we podcast about Amityville ville.

[A]

We are three episodes in and you sound exhausted.

[B]

I think I sounded exhausted, to be fair, from the very first episode. There's a lot happening in the world, in my life, in, you know, I'm just general. I'm not exhausted with you. I'm not exhausted with the Amityville movies. I'm just, I'm exhausted from these, I guess the existential dread of living in the United States of America at this very moment. But, you know, what are you gonna do about that?

[A]

Yeah, totally. Well, I would like to end this podcast by saying two things. One, next week's movie is Amityville 4 the Evil Escapes made for television.

[B]

Okay, what network do we know?

[A]

NBC.

[B]

And what year did that come out?

[A]

1989. So there was a six year break.

[B]

Okay, so it's been a couple years. So we get a fun little made for television. I'm excited. This is going to be great. I'm sure it's not going to be as good as this one because so far, if I were to rank these movies on how much I enjoyed them, I would say number one would be 3D. Number two would surprisingly be the Possession, even though I absolutely hated watching every second of it. But number three would still be the original movie. It's just, I don't know. The Possession had more fun stuff going on in it than the original movie, I felt. But this one's topping my list so far. So excited to add more to the bottom, probably.

[A]

I'm excited to see how the continuity works with a series that already has no continuity between the first three. And especially since the house blew up. Yeah, I'm excited to see what happens.

[B]

Well, you know, it's been four years. It's a, it's a great piece of lakefront property. Like I, I could see some enterprising developer getting out there and rebuilding the house and then kind of selling it as being like it's not haunted anymore. Cause we completely tore it down. It blew up, remember? And now it's. Now it's a totally new house. So now they don't even. Now they could probably film it at the same place, even though the front is different, because they would have a real reason for the. For the architectural changes.

[A]

The other thing that I wanted to say is that I found Roxanne Kaplan on Facebook and I am sending her a message as we speak.

[B]

Who is Roxanne Kaplan?

[A]

Steven Kaplan's wife.

[B]

Oh, sorry, sorry.

[A]

Who co wrote the Amityville Horror conspiracy with him?

[B]

Hell yeah. I'm sorry, Roxanne, if you listen to this and you guys are actually a really hot couple and if I were a vampire, I would absolutely ask you to join me in my lovemaking. I take it back.

[A]

Jesus Christ. Now she's definitely not going to talk to us. You fucking freak.

[B]

She talked to the vampires. She wrote a whole book about him. So I don't know.

[A]

He wrote a whole book about them. She probably. I wonder if he came home and was like, yeah, I decided not to have sex with him. She's like, we're married, dude. What do you mean you decided not to? Anyway, that's the end of this episode. I'm excited to watch the next one. I wonder where we even find it. All right, I'll figure that out.

[B]

Yeah, we're gonna have to do some digging. Yeah. But yeah, thank you for listening. You're welcome. Because this is quite the undertaking that we're doing for you. So just I hope you appreciate the weekly torment that you're putting me through.

[A]

All right, we'll see you next week.

[B]

Goodbye.

[A]

Amityville Ville is hosted by Caroline Thompson and me, Alex Goldman. It's produced by Tory Dominguez Peak and engineered by Noah Smith. If you like the show and you think I'm cool and funny, check out my other show, Hyperfixed for more documentary reporting type stuff. Amityville Ville is a proud member of Radiotopia from prx, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at Radiotopia fm. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

[B]

Radiotopia from prx.