Synopsis

A year after a brutal mass murder, George and Kathy Lutz move into the infamous Amityville house with Kathy's three children. At first, the family hopes the property will provide a fresh start, but increasingly violent and disturbing supernatural events begin to affect them. As George's behavior changes and the house's dark history emerges, the family struggles to escape its growing influence.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film is a remake of the 1979 supernatural horror movie and draws from Jay Anson's 1977 book, which presented the alleged haunting of the Lutz family as a true story.

• Although the story is set in Amityville, New York, much of the production was filmed in Illinois and Wisconsin. A real 1800s home in Salem, Wisconsin, was modified for the production.

• The filmmakers added the recognizable quarter-moon windows to the Wisconsin house. The temporary facade reportedly cost about $60,000, and sections of the altered exterior remained after filming.

• The movie changed the house number from the real location's 112 Ocean Avenue to 412 Ocean Avenue. This helped distinguish the fictional setting from the actual house.

• The remake became a substantial commercial success despite unfavorable critical reviews. It opened at number one in the United States on April 15, 2005, and earned more than $107 million worldwide against a budget of about $19 million.

• Chloe Grace Moretz made her feature-film debut in the movie.

• The production became involved in a legal dispute with George Lutz, who argued that the filmmakers did not have the right to remake the story without his involvement. The dispute was still unresolved when Lutz died in 2006.