Normal phenomenon What good can it be if, in one beautiful day, your beloved school turns into a blood-stained crime scene where dozens of children have died from gunshot wounds? Right now, while the bodies are not yet buried, the tears have not dried up, the blood is not washed away, and the quarter is still cordoned off, of course, nothing, but in a couple of years you can write a book about it and glorify your hitherto unknown name, and it does not matter that on the fateful day of study you were not, the victims you never knew, and the shooters did not want to know, literary Negroes will still help to formalize your scant knowledge about the local community in a more or less meaningful book about the tragedy. How to benefit from the work of a secretary at a sensational election campaign for the post of president, one of the main defendants of which in a very short time managed to scandalize a thousand times? Again, you can write a book about it, stealing the missing information from other sources, embellishing the key events for artistic expression, and, with the help of aides carefully provided by the publisher, the inconspicuous secretary suddenly becomes the most important link in one of the sensational political scandals of the century, who heard everything and listened to everyone. But what if your family moves into a new dream home, bought at a decent discount, which does not even need to deal with the situation, because the former tenants left all their furniture, and finds out that the past homeowners did not go to another city to look for a better life, but were brutally killed by a member of their own family, in this very new house? You did not know the people who preceded you, and the neighbors prefer to forget it like a terrible dream, but the Latsev family, unknowingly buying a home in which six people lost their lives, successfully coped with this task and turned attention to themselves, publicly announcing ghosts and supernatural beings pursuing them in the infamous house. Without thinking twice, hunters for paranormal sensations flocked to them, as a result of which the book Jay Anson “The Amityville Horror” was born, which later became the basis of the horror film of the same name, whose name is known to any fan of the genre, but the film history of the sinister house on this film did not end and in 2013 the youngest son of Latsev, Daniel decided to tell his version of the famous events in the documentary of the novice director Eric Walter.
As is often the case when an author chooses a story already known to all, the first question is whether he has discovered any new information, or at least whether he has found an angle of view that no one has thought about before. Growing up, Latz tells the same story that audiences learned in the work of Jay Anson, mentioning episodes of the emergence of paranormal phenomena that you can know without even reading the book, because Wikipedia will kindly provide you with the entire list, the director illustrates the story of the hero with photos, each of which is available by pressing a pair of keys on the Internet, and presents a replicated proof of the presence of the spirits of members of the deceased De Feo family, which you will see one of the first if you try to read this story online. The author did not find new interesting storytellers who could diversify the version of his main character, not to mention the fact that the Amityville Horror is a family affair, not only for De Feo, but also for Lats – according to them, every resident of the house observed paranormal phenomena, so the story told without their participation seems very incomplete, and from that even more not true. Regarding the latter, the director still thought wisely and towards the end of the film began to offer another version of what happened to Daniel Latz, according to which he was just a confused child whose parents divorced, and now he is forced to live with a bad stepfather, fascinated by black magic, in a house in which six people died. However, the inexperience of Eric Walter did not give him a fascinating design of this thought for the viewer, placing clearly visible clues that speak in favor of a prosaic version of the Amityville Horror from the very beginning of the film.
As mentioned earlier, the story of Latsev, that of De Feo, is a family story, and the author missed a unique opportunity to focus on the dramatic part of what happened, comparing two different cells of society, united not only by a common house, but also by the fact that in each of them there was a person prone to self-destruction, a person whose inner tragedy was not solved by the rest of the family, which in the case of De Feo led to a bloody end, and in the case of Lats in pursuit of cheap fame, as a result of which their offspring completely lost their sense of reality and are still trying to escape the stigma of children from Amitivilla. But the strangest thing about the phenomenon of this story is that no one ever tried to address the most interesting part of these events, which absolutely certainly exists, regardless of whether you believe in the supernatural or not, namely the personality of Ronald De Feo, who shot six members of his family, at a time when they did not expect a trick, thinking that their home is their fortress, a man who for some unknown reason decided that by killing his relatives he was saving them, a guy who became entangled in his own lies, repeatedly giving out various versions of what happened. Of course, Ronald’s story can be explored by searching the Internet, but it could not be helped by a skilled editor, who will arrange it into a fascinating cinematic tale of real-life horror, which Eric Walter could get if he chose the style chosen by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman in his Cropsy, which is almost the only film in the genre of documentary horror, and begins with a story about the paranormal legends surrounding Long Island and ends with quite real corpses, murderers and missing children, which successfully combines the natural and supernatural.