Douglas, Andrew (The Amityville Horror)
Of all the remakes that are being pumped out of studios nowadays, the one that’s caused the least amount of stir among horror fans is The Amityville Horror. Mainly this is due to the fact that the original 1979 film is flawed in many places and doesn’t hold up too well today. When Platinum Dunes decided to give it a shot, they brought it another music video director, Andrew Douglas, to helm it, hoping he would bring a new, updated vision to one of America’s most well known ghost stories.
Our man Sean sat in on the recent junket and talked to Douglas about how he approached his first horror film.
Question: Are there any plans for the Amityville Dollhouse remake?
Andrew Douglas: Um, is that a trick question? I wouldn’t know. I’d be the last person to know. I hope this isn’t Amityville 10. I didn’t intend for it to be Amityville 10, I intended it to be a modern adaptation of Amityville 1.
Q: But could it be a franchise for more families to move in to the house?
AD: We’d have to shoot a different ending. That’s not really a question for me. I’m just the working guy. People hire me shoot a film and I go, “Horror? Ok, alright, I’ll try horror.”
Q: Were you a fan of the original? Did you read the book as well?
AD: I wasn’t a huge fan. I saw it as you do as a teenager growing up, but at the time, I wasn’t a fan. Even when I was invited to do this, it was sold to me really as a psychological horror, more like The Shining. Which of course was a clever sell because it appeals to your vanity, doesn’t it? If they had told me it was going to be a different kind of movie, then maybe not. But certainly, the first courtship and the first proposal from the producers to me were at that level. What we wanted to do with this is make it not a slasher movie but a psychological movie. A movie which is really as much about a dysfunctional family as it is about bleeding walls. When you get down to it, you end up doing both.
Q: How much of one discounts the other? In other words, the more gore and torture scenes and flashbacks that you put in, the less impactful is the psychological stuff. How do you know where to balance it out?
AD: You don’t, really.
Q: Is it taste? Is it instinct?
AD: There are so many authors to a studio film. You lot know that better than I do, really. I know it now. But there are so many authors. You might have a perfect, immaculate conception of what the film is going to be, and then the studio will argue that they know the audience, or other producers might argue that they know about rhythm and speed, so what you end up with in the studio world as opposed to the independent world, which is not necessarily better, but what you end up with is really a kind of optimum film. My feeling many days during the shoot, one of the things I was scared about was sure we all like the roller coaster bit that goes down, but we like it more if you have that long build-up. For me a roller coaster is more about the part that goes up, that pays off. When I was immersing myself in Wes Craven and trying to see the mathematics of horror and working on all that stuff, really for the first time as a filmmaker and not a spectator, I wanted it to be a very suspenseful film. And I think it’s now a mix of, you know, both sides of the roller coaster. I’m pretty proud of it, but I’m not a good judge of whether it worked. I think maybe it errs a little on the side of ADD. It errs on the side of that kind of constant gratification where things may be stacked too closely together. And then there are other parts in the start of the film where I think it does a good job of ratcheting up the psychological element in a lot of ways. It’s a funny genre, horror, really….
Q: What’s your opinion on the whole story? Do you believe it?
AD: What, do I believe in ghosts? No, I believe in ghosts as much as I believe in God, really. As an intellectual leap, I’ll believe in ghosts in order to make the best possible horror film. But no, I don’t.
Q: What do you think are the major differences between your version and the original version? And what were you trying to do differently?
AD: I haven’t seen the original version since I was a kid and I deliberately didn’t see it here because my understanding was that I was being asked for a new interpretation. So, I mean the script, the kind of basic architecture of the story is right on the original film but I just deliberately didn’t see it because I think one of the things I was being asked to do by delivering a new interpretation was to some extent, to try and deliver new scares. We’re scared out at the moment. This is a danger. Horror is in such a big thing now that I think one of the reasons we’re gravitating so strongly towards Korean, Chinese and Japanese horror films is that we’re beginning to tap out our Gothic Edgar Allan Poe or religious scares. In some ways, there’s a strength and value to genre and stereotyping. We have an expectation, and as an audience we’re comfortable with genre pictures because we have an expectation. I think that one of the things that, for me, made some of the Japanese films like Ringu and more recently The Grudge so powerful was the iconography of it wasn’t Judeo-Christian iconography. It wasn’t about good and evil or sin, it was about “I’m going to scare the shit out of you. I’m going to have my hair in front of my face and scare the shit out of you.” Almost without that kind of moral dimension that western horror has, and I just think that’s fascinating.
Q: How important is this idea of the true story to audiences, because they do spend a lot of time establishing that it is based on a true story. And that was part of the success of Chainsaw Massacre, too.
AD: Yeah. It’s true enough, and then after that it’s an author’s conceit, I think.
Q: But why do audiences respond to that so much more?
AD: I think if it comes into your world, if horror exists in lets say a Van Helsing world for example. Clearly a fantasy world, that’s a certain kind of film. But if it exists in a real world where you recognize the t-shirts or the jeans or the music or the telephones, I think it has a lot more potency.
Q: It means it can happen to you.
AD: It means it can happen to you. To some extent, I think some of the power of the original Amityville is that there is a place called Amityville and it’s a suburb of New York and there really was a grotesque murder there. The result of which, a young couple that moved in were scared out of their wits because they saw certain things. There were one and a half very real things that happened. There really was a murder, so that house one ghastly night was drenched in blood and everybody in the burrows knew of this event. Subsequently, a year later, there was another scandal, which was a net result of people being affected by what happened in the place, on a psychological level, or on a supernatural level. And I think those things are true, and everything else is… I think it’s legitimately a true story, but as storytellers, we elaborate on true because, as you say, it gives us a way in if it can happen to you or next door to you or behind that curtain, it has a lot more potency and value. Releases more seratonin or whatever horror films do.
Q: What do you think about the reports that the Lutzes were hired by the Defeos attorney to concoct a story for his insanity defense? What’s your personal opinion on that?
AD: I think it’s a plausible story. I’m European, I’m secular, you know died in the world kind of rational person. I think that’s a plausible story than any other. The story I find more entertaining is the haunting story. That taps a deeper level, even for rationalists. It’s no accident that horror material, not film but literature is durable. For a thousand years now, we’ve responded to horror literature, to scary stories, to fairy tales. We respond to this on some kind of subconscious level with whatever our rational mind tells us, “No, this can’t possibly happen”. In a place where God has a white beard maybe that can happen but I still think that it has value. What was interesting for me when I was making it and what would sustain me at the points where I got bumped out of the mindset of horror, was the value of fairytales. I know that sounds intellectual, but you find reasons in the fog of fatigue like after shooting for 20 straight days you find lots of ideas to carry on shooting. One of them was that fairy tales constantly dip into, and then exploit, the archetypes. The archetypes are the components of psychoanalysis. That’s where it interested me. The other thing that interested me, overall, was that I was so interested as a filmmaker in the nuts and bolts of suspense, and by that I mean what Wes Craven does so well, where it’s beautifully timed. What he does, with clowns and beds and lights and corridors, what he does is so beautifully… He has the mathematics of it. As a newish filmmaker, I was terribly interested in that.
Q: What was behind the casting of Ryan Reynolds? Did you sense a kind of creepiness beneath the comedy stuff he’d done?
AD: I didn’t, actually. Much as I liked him, I was worried about him for so long because I thought he was bringing too much beauty and too much comedy to the piece. But actually when we cast him, it just changed. His performance was chilling. What I was scared of was his handsomeness and his size, you know, he’s a beautiful looking man, but he just sold it so strongly, that the very things I was scared of he just managed to, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, make that even more creepy. He used his physicality and his handsomeness to create something far more chilling than somebody who already looks mean. And I think that’s why Michael had the instinct to cast him.
Q: Can you talk about the headaches of working with kids and night shoots and rains and pets all at the same time?
AD: That’s almost the answer to the question, isn’t it? It was very challenging. You’ve also got to add stunts to that, and we really did shoot on a very high roof 60 feet above the ground. A really high roof with an extreme pitch with slippery shingles with a 7-year-old child at night in the rain. Who thinks of that stuff? Who writes that stuff?
Q: Scott Kosar?
AD: I know. But he writes it in the horizontal world of his living room. He goes, “Yeah, that’d be cool!”
Q: You’ll have some cool stuff on the DVD, right?
AD: I don’t know about that. You mean like the people that fell off? They’re all buried in shallow graves now, that place is haunted now.
Q: Was there any consideration of using the real house in Amityville of the one built for the original film in Tom’s River New Jersey?
AD: Yes there was. There was a lot of talk but I think in a way Michael decided he was really looking to up it. You know to amp it up. To make it more gothic without being gothic. So he is allowed to decide that and then I have to solve all of the problems of working sixty feet up in the air.
Thanks to MGM for allowing us to take part in the junket, and especially to Mr. Douglas for taking the time to talk to us. The Amityville Horror opens on April 15th, be sure to check out it’s official site right here!
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