HOUSE OF EVIL   ActorJames Brolin is certain there was an evil jinx on the film The Amityville Horror, in which he starred. He played surveyor George Lutz who, with his family, was driven from his home by a terrifying series of demonic happenings.The film was based on the best selling-book by Jay Anson, to whom the Lutz family told their nightmare story. Brolin said: On the first day of filming I stepped into the elevator in my apartment block and pressed the button for the lobby floor. Before we?d gone three floors it shuddered to a grinding,screeching halt, the lights flickered and I was plunged into frightening darkness. I screamed for help but nobody could hear me. It was an eerie, frightening experience. You imagine all sort of hair-raising things in the silent darkness. My pleas bounced back like an echo. Those 30 minutes seemed an eternity. The jinx hit again the next morning. I?d been on the set less than minutes when I tripped over a cable and severely wrenched my ankle,? said Brolin. ?I hobbled around in pain for days.? The film recorded the horrifying events experienced by George and Kathleen Lutz and their three children after they moved to Long Island, New York, to a house which had been the scene of a multiple murder in 1974. Ronald Defoe, 23-year-old son of a wealthy car dealer, had drugged his parents, brothers and sister at supper and at 3:15am, he stalked from room to room shooting each victim in the back with a rifle.He claimed in court that ?voices? had ordered him to commit the crime. Defoe was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences. For the Lutzes, the house?s macabre history gave them the chance to buy a dream home at the bargain price of 80,000. It sloped gently down to the bay, and has its own boathouse. In the small, middle-class community of Amityville it was a showplace. Soon after the family moved in they asked the local priest, Father Mancuso to bless the house. Author Anson wrote: the priest entered the house to start his ritual. When he flicked the first holy water and uttered the words that accompany the gesture, Father Mancuso heard a masculine voice say with terrible clarity, Get out! ?He looked up in shock, but he was alone in the room. Who or whatever had spoken was nowhere to be seen.? For the first two nights in their new home,the Lutzes were awakened by strange noises at 3:15 am. But the real horror began on the third night. As usual, George Lutz checked that all doors and windows were locked before going to bed. The noises roused him again at 3:15and this time he went downstairs to investigate. He could not believe what he saw. The heavy solid-wood front door had been wrenched open and was hanging by one hinge. With mounting terror he realized it had been forced from inside the house. The thick steel doorknob spindle was twisted, and the forced outwards. From then on, the house seemed to have an evil life of its own. Windows opened and closed at will and a banister was wrenched from the staircase. Two weeks after the front-door incident. George woke in the night to find his wife Kathleen floating above the bed. George pulled Kathleen down by her hair and switched on the light. He was looking not at his attractive young wife, but at a hideous vision. Kathleen caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror and screamed: ?That?s not me. It can?t be me!? her appearance changed slowly back to normal over the next six hours. A few nights later Kathleen was in the sitting room with George when she looked up and saw two glowing red eyes at the darkened window. She and George hurried outside and found strange tracks in snow. Kathleen told Anson: ?the prints had been left by cloven hooves ?like those of an enormous pig. After only 28 days the Lutzes fled the dream house that had become a nightmare. As they hurriedly gathered a few belongings, amid a series of unearthly noises, green slime oozed from the wall sand ceiling and a sticky black substance dripped from the keyholes. Because of the curse, the film men dared not use the actual house. They found an almost identical building in New Jersey.They knew only two well of the frightening things that had happened to people connected with the story. A photographer went to take a picture of Anson immediately after car caught fire and billowed orange smoke as it stood empty with the engine switched off. Anson himself told of terrifying events linked with his book. He said: ?A woman to whom I loaned some early chapters took the manuscript home. She and two of her children were suffocated in a fire that night. The only item in the apartment that was not damaged by the fire was the manuscript. Another man put the manuscript in the trunk of his car and attempted to drive home. He drove through what he thought was a puddle. It turned out to be a 12-foot-deep hole into which his car slid. When the car was fished out the next day, the only dry object in it was the manuscript. Band when my editor picked up the completed manuscript at my office his car caught fire and he discovered that all the bolts on his engine had been loosened.? Anson himself suffered a heart attack, and his son and friend were nearly killed in a car smash. The Lutzes are today alive and well in California, and planning another book about their experiences. Their long Island house of horrors is now owned by James and Barbara Cromarty. They say the place is not hunted. Whatever the truth, the movie The Amityville Horror, will remain a chillingly realistic record of paranormal events. Director Stuart Rosenberg says that he would not have taken on the project if it was just another horror film. He insists, ?My first reaction was that it wouldn't be my cup of tea. But I read Jay Anson?s book and it had the ring of truth about it.
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