The "Amityville" trilogy

This one stretches back to the fall of 1980, when something came on, featuring the silhouette of a house that looked like a jack-o'-lantern.

Wow, what a strange one this was to me. I saw a guy get covered with flies, and then a scary voice whispering and then telling him to GET OUT!!! A toilet was flushed, and a bunch of black stuff came oozing out. Weird, oily stuff began running down the walls, dipping down the stairs in the process. And then the dad fell though the basement steps, landing in a hole filled with a black, oily substance that looked like tar.

Weird stuff to my four-year-old mind, yet I thought it was great. Prior to my teen years, I found a paperback copy of the book the movie was based on, and not only could I not put it down, I carried it around with me throughout my seventh-grade year. The movie wasn't shown on TV or cable very much at the time. It kind of had a reputation of being "dumb" and "not scary", but after a number of years, it became a cult favorite of many, and is now usually included on lists of "Greatest Horror Movies" or "Halloween/Haunted House Movies".

But I had seen a the two following sequels in the '80s when they came on cable. Amityville II: The Possession was truly frightening and disturbing to me when I first saw it. But, later on, I noticed that it was a weird rip-off of The Exorcist...the only things missing were the spinning head and green puke.

This one, however, was disappointing in the extreme. It's bad enough that it seemed like a rip-off of Poltergeist, but the 3-D effects were chintzy at best, and the movie really had no story to it. The poster art is laughable, and gives an idea of how tacky the whole idea was.

After a long gap, there were further "sequels", most of them centering around an evil object that came from "an old house in New York that was torn down"...a mirror, a clock, and even a dollhouse...I was waiting for one with either an evil sink-trap or a doorstop causing all the trouble. It might have made a better movie than that truly awful remake of the original 1979 one, done in 2005. The only reason I saw it was because the DVD boxed set of the original three movies included a free movie-ticket to see the new remake. The latter half of it seemed like a bad ripoff of The Shining, what with Ryan Reynolds going after his family with an axe. Another potentially good outlet for telling a creepy story was wasted.