In 2004, a Hollywood production took over Oakwood Manor on the quiet shore of Silver Lake and transformed it from the stately old Victorian inhabited by the same family for over 100 years into a monstrous and menacing new take on the infamous real-life Amityville Horror house.
The real house on Ocean Ave in Amityville, NY where Ronald Defeo, Jr. murdered his family, and the Lutz family fled after a series of horrific hauntings, is instantly recognizable for its Dutch Colonial architecture and gambrel roof with eye-like quarter round windows that seem to give it a sinister expression. This Wisconsin mansion had no such thing, so production built a $60,000 façade to give it that signature Amityville Horror look.
The entire film was shot on location, using the house for both exterior and interior shots. And for cast and crew, the experience was unnerving to say the least.
Where is the Amityville Horror House?
The Amityville Horror House filming location is located on the shore of Siler Lake in Salem Lakes, WI.
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Actress Melissa George, who portrayed Kathy Lutz, said of her arrival at the house on the first day of filming:
“I got to set and we were sitting in the car. You see a shot of me driving up to the house and I felt cold. It was exactly the same as the original house. It was no different. It had the scary eyes, the windows just watching you. There was something wrong with this set.”
“You walk up and it’s just upsetting,” Ryan Reynolds said of the house. “There’s something about the house that’s upsetting. There’s something about the colors around it, everything was just a little upsetting.”
That was just the beginning.
The next day, production got word that the real-life Kathy Lutz had suddenly died that morning. And that’s when things got weird.
“We were very sad and so I walked into the home,” George said. “I sat down in the corner. I just sat there with my script. Sad, very sad to know that she will never see the way I portrayed her life. I just felt this gush of cold air. Like icy cold air. It was a sunny day outside. The home was warm and I started thinking about Cathy Lutz and I started thinking about George Lutz, her husband. I walked out of the room. The icy cold patch was so distinct. It was almost like a thing. It was a mass of cold air that would follow me anywhere I went.”
The phenomena increased as the day went on.
“The day of Kathy’s death all the crew members witnessed lights turning on and off,” George said. “At one point a window opened and the door opened. We felt like there was a force. Things were just rolling off the table. People felt like they were being pushed. It’s documented in the production notes that some of the crew members were pushed down. I felt that there were hands on my neck. I felt like somebody’s hands were on my throat.”
That night, long after production wrapped for the day, security saw a shadow moving through the house, past the windows. They called the sheriff, who investigated inside the house and found no one.
That wasn’t the only time they encountered moving shadows. George had a direct encounter with one in the house:
“One day I was working on my script notes and I saw a shadow. My eyes did a double take. It felt like a body crossing the doorway and I shivered. I walked down the hall and I saw a shadow. Like a blur. I saw it for real. I was terrified. Absolutely terrified. It was as though I was being followed by an evil spirit.”
That night, while cast and crew were asleep in Salem, George suddenly woke up at 3:15am.
George Lutz himself reported mysteriously waking up at 3:15am during the family’s short but horrific time in the real Amityville house.
And Melissa wasn’t the only one experiencing it.
“I think a lot of people make that stuff up to sell their movie,” Reynolds said, “but there was some weird stuff that happened. A lot of the crew were waking up at 3:15 in the morning which was when all these atrocities in the house took place each time. I think it was a subconscious thing. You read the script and suddenly pop awake at 3:15 in the morning. The real Kathy Lutz died while we were making the movie. There were a few weird things.”
A few weird things.
Like the dead body in the lake that interrupted production one day.
“We were filming at the boathouse, and the police came by,” George said. “They were on the water there, and they said that they found a dead body that had floated to the surface. We were like, ‘Awesome! That’s making everything much more comfortable in this movie!’”
Melissa George and young Chloë Grace Moretz actually walked on the roof for one particularly harrowing scene in the film. They were taken to the roof with a crane, and then supported with thin wires.
“You won’t believe how horrible looking at everyone…they were like ants. They were so small,” George said. “You were up so high. And little Chloe had to have like a harness and hang over the edge. And then the crane would go around and shoot these great, gorgeous, romantic shots. And she was pretending like she was hung, as a joke. And I’m like, ‘That’s so not funny, little girl! You’re adorable and everything, but what you’re doing right now…’ She was dangling off the edge eighty feet above the ground, not scared at all!”
In another scene that’s a reaction to those on the roof, George was on the porch screaming, and she said, “it started to feel like it wasn’t just acting any more. It started to feel like it was really happening to me for real. I went into the room to get into the motion. I felt hands on my neck. I felt like somebody’s hands were on my throat strangling me. Taking the air out of the room, out of my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like my head was gonna explode and I hoped I wasn’t going to die from making this movie.”
George shared most of those stories in a 2011 episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories. When asked in a different interview if she believes in the supernatural, George said, “I don’t believe too much about the supernatural unless I see it or feel it. And I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t seen something telling me to do something.”
Props left behind at Oakwood Manor by the production crew, including a bed used by Ryan Reynolds and the evil eye windows, were sold at an estate sale in 2017.
The house itself was sold later that year. It’s easy to miss these days, as the French windows that enclosed the wrap-around porch are now gone and a new, modern home has been built right next door where a long, dilapidated building once stood.
That unusual structure had housed the estate’s antique bowling lane. that, according to local legend, was frequented by notorious gangster Al Capone, who often came to Wisconsin to hide out when things got too hot in Chicago.
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We were out on the lake fishing when they filmed the scenes in the boathouse. It was eerie to see the fog they produced only over the boathouse!
At the time of the film’s release, I was a manager for Suncoast Motion Picture Company, an entertainment retailer, in Eau Claire. Our entire staff were big horror fans and always had the current issue of Fangoria in our office for when we took our lunch breaks. I was aware of the Amityville story, but I have to confess my interest was much more piqued after reading that the Platinum Dunes remake was filmed in southern Wisconsin. The weekend the movie came out, I read Jay Anson’s original book and managed to watch three of the films before seeing the 2005 remake, which I actually enjoyed. (Coincidentally, as of this writing, there are THIRTY-ONE Amityville films).
As fate would have it, the company moved me to Des Moines shortly thereafter and a year later to the Milwaukee area for another year. It wasn’t until what was literally my last week in Milwaukee that my assistant manager and I decided to take a road trip to find the house, which is about 40 minutes outside Milwaukee).
With as much detail as this article states, there is a considerable omission: The house was only selected at the last moment after the land the production had been planning to build a full and assumingly more accurate facade on flooded in the Chicago area. This is also yet another of the events that have been cited as additional evidence that there may have been a curse on the production. Location scouts scrambled at the last moment to find either an appropriate replacement or one that could be easily modified. I mean, let’s face it: I’ve absolutely no doubt they were told “All you really need are the eye windows.” If I remember correctly, I seem to recall reading that one of the team members had family that lived on Silver Lake, and they settled on the location quickly.
Thus, the house that appears in the film looks virtually nothing like the actual house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. The Oakwood Manor in Salem is a massive Queen Anne Victorian style home that’s about three times the size of the original Dutch Colonial on Long Island.
Arriving at Silver Lake, I was grateful I’d taken the time to study the house we were seeking – it’s very difficult to recognize. Firstly, it’s on a curved road that’s heavily wooded. Secondly, the filmmakers decided to modify and shoot the SIDE of the house as its famous facade, having built a temporary addition above the wraparound porch with the “eye” windows at the top. I recognized the French windows on the ground-level. With them gone today, I would imagine it would be much more difficult to peg the house.
That day’s a great memory. I managed to snap some photos from the street side and keep them tucked away in my DVD copy. I have to say: Sharing the realtor’s video tour here was a great surprise; I had no idea so many of the interiors were used, but I recognized many of them immediately.