The Amityville Horror Movies Ranked Worst To Best

In 1977, a country hungry for true tales of horror and possession got The Amityville Horror, a bestselling book by Jay Anson. It claims to tell the story of what really happened to the Lutz family after they bought a too-good-to-be-true haunted house on Long Island.

Two years later, the hit book became a hit film, and The Amityville Horror and its iconic setting were etched forever into American pop culture. Because it arrived on the cusp of the 1980s horror boom (and the slightly-later VHS boom), Amityville was ripe for franchise building, even if it didn't have the same central characters that other horror staples of the era like Halloween and Friday the 13th could fall back on. The result was a lengthy series of films spanning the 1980s and 1990s (with a brief reboot in the 2000s), each offering a different take on The Amityville Horror. Some of them soar with strange new horrors, others fall flat. Now, we're taking a look back at what worked and what didn't. These are The Amityville Horror films, ranked worst to best.

 Please note: While numerous other films bear the "Amityville" name in some form, in the interest of brevity, we chose to focus on the core series of films released as sequels to the 1979 original, plus the 2005 remake and the last major 2010s spinoff.

The later sequels in the Amityville series move away from the famed house itself. As a result, they often have to contort themselves quite a bit to connect to the original haunting. A New Generation is perhaps the prime example of that level of stretching. The film plays like a horror movie written independently of the Amityville phenomenon, with the connections to the franchise added in only when the filmmakers realized it might get them a few more eyeballs.

Another one of the "cursed object" sequels of the '80s and '90s, A New Generation focuses on a group of artist friends living in a loft, one of whom receives a creepy mirror as a gift from a homeless man he photographs. Of course, the creepy mirror ends up having Amityville roots, and horror ensues. There are some interesting visual ideas at work in A New Generation, but the film falls flat in the back half as its reveals the mirror is actually activating the protagonist's suppressed memories of his own deep Amityville haunting connections. It ends up being convoluted and way too wrapped up in its half-hearted attempt at constructing a new mythology.

When it comes to the Amityville sequels following cursed objects with a connection to the infamous house, the general rule is that the weirder they're willing to get, the better they are. With that in mind, the best of the cursed object sequels is easily It's About Time, a film so named because it's about a haunted clock.

The clock in question once lived in the Ocean Avenue house made famous by The Amityville Horror. But it also once belonged to a French necromancer centuries earlier, and contains dark magic that warps time for the California family that winds up owning it. This leads to strange loops, missing hours, slowed-down time bubbles where seconds can last minutes, and a whole host of other time-related shenanigans. The film still struggles a bit in its third act, and the low-budget nature of it hampers certain things. But Hellbound: Hellraiser II director Tony Randel is behind the camera for this installment, and he's present enough in the process to insert a number of interesting visual motifs that call back to the original film. It's About Time is a bit of a mess, but it's an interesting mess, and that makes it the best of the cursed object sequels.

With the story of the Lutz family in the rearview, the second Amityville film decides to take a pseudo-prequel approach to tell the story of a family loosely inspired by the DeFeos, the family who lived in the house before the Lutzes and who all died at the hands of one of their own. In The Possession, the Montelli family moves into the Ocean Avenue house. Eldest son Sonny quickly starts to feel the effects of the place as something dark works its way into his psyche. While his father berates the entire family and his mother begs a local priest for help, Sonny begins to exhibit disturbing behavior, including a sexual desire for his own sister and a tendency towards violence that culminates when he gets his hands on a rifle.

This is all, of course, an attempt at a supernatural explanation for why one member of a family would pick up a gun and murder everyone else in the Ocean Avenue house. For much of its runtime, the slow-burn nature of the film's violence works pretty well. Then comes the third act, when it sputters and dies as the film tries to pivot into being a more exorcism-driven horror tale. It's two-thirds of a decent horror film, at least.

The most recent major Amityville release also features one of the most clever set-ups in the franchise. Set in the present day, The Awakening follows the Walker family, who move into the Ocean Avenue house to be closer to a local doctor in the hopes that he might treat James, their brain-dead son.  But the film isn't just set in the present day. It's set in "our" world, a world in which the Amityville books and films have all been made and released. This has rendered the house infamous, even if the stories surrounding it are assumed to be fictitious.

This somewhat meta set-up provides an interesting outlet for the film to explore the infamy around the house, especially since all of its recent owners claim nothing supernatural has ever happened to them. This premise also allows the filmmakers to build some amusing echoes into the haunting that call to mind previous Amityville movie installments. Throw in a solid cast led by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bella Thorne and you've got a rather competent haunted house film that's not afraid to take chances. Plus, it packs some memorable jump scares.

If there's a core philosophy to The Amityville Horror franchise, it's that these hauntings need to be a lot. It's never just one ghost — or if it is, it's one ghost that knows a thousand different tricks. From Jay Anson's original book to every film adaptation that's come along since, the core tenet of this series of films is a sense of throwing everything at an audience and seeing what sticks. Even now, after numerous sequels and spinoffs, no film does that better than the original.

James Brolin and Margot Kidder anchor the film (alongside an absolutely over-the-top Rod Steiger playing a tormented priest) as a happy couple who find the best real estate deal of their lives — only to find that nightmares are part of the bargain. Everyone in the film is absolutely committed to what comes next, as the Lutz family endures everything from swarms of flies to pipes full of black goo to blood oozing from the walls to a demon pig lurking in the window. There's a sense that everyone involved was trying to make the ultimate haunted house movie, and even when the horror elements start to falter, the sense of infectious fun endures. Is it the ultimate haunted house movie? Maybe not, but it's still worth watching all these years later.