This week I’ve watched two movies: The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2. The first one seemed familiar about halfway through, and the more I watched the more I got the feeling I’d seen it before. One problem I’ve found with Netflix is that there’s no indication if you’ve watched a movie before or not. So it’s possible to find something and think it looks interesting, and start watching it, and only realise partway through that you’ve seen it before.
Anyway, it was still enjoyable, and I was inspired to watch the (first) sequel, curious if I’d recognise it too. But no, it felt completely new to me. One thing that stood out to me was the early scene inside the famous Amityville Horror house. It was instantly recognisable from those quarter-circle windows.
The Amityville Horror was a transformational part of my childhood. It’s actually one of the first movie experiences I remember. I was definitely too young to see it by any reasonable measure, but my mother took me and my brother into the city and the huge cinema complex there for a full day, in which we saw three movies. The other two were The Muppet Movie and Meteor. Amityville was obviously my mother’s choice – she’s always been into horror. And she was never shy about exposing us kids to it. I remember seeing a whole bunch of classic Hammer horror movies as a kid.
Anyway, I was instantly reminded of it by the house’s appearance in The Conjuring 2. That got me on a nostalgic Wikipedia dive to read up on it and remind myself. I was a little surprised to find that the Amityville house still exists. Curious, I checked it out on Google Streetview, but was disappointed to see that it’s been blurred out beyond any visibility. Presumably precisely because so many people want to gawk at it.
Today I took Scully out for a total of three walks, because my wife had a day off work but used the opportunity to go into the city and check out some shops and have a leisurely morning tea and so on. And otherwise I finished off writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I’ll photograph them tomorrow.
New content today:
I know the owner of the Amityville Horror house. (We work together.) He tells me that people stopping their cars in the street to photograph his home actually causes traffic problems sometimes. Other “horror tourists” will rent boats and be voyeuristic from the canal on the other side of his house. They have to bring the children inside to avoid having them appear in these random people’s snapshots.
Oh wow… Yeah, I can definitely imagine how frustrating and annoying that would be.