Amityville A.I. – Through the Shattered Lens

Let’s give some credit to the Amityville franchise. It simply does not stop.

In November 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr., a heroin user, murdered his entire family in their home at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. After realizing no one was going to buy his original claim that the Mafia killed everyone but left him alive, he eventually said a demon had possessed him. Some people believed that story because some people will believe anything that involves demonic possession.

A family called the Lutzes moved into the Amityville murder house, lasted a few weeks, then fled and claimed they’d been haunted by the same demons that drove DeFeo to kill. It was a stupid story, but it fed the 1970s obsession with the apocalypse and demonic possession. That was the decade of The Exorcist and The Omen. A “non-fiction” novel was published and became a bestseller. In 1979 a movie was made and became a hit. In the years since, there have been dozens upon dozens of films with “Amityville” in the title. Some are actual Amityville films. Most are generic low-budget horror that just borrowed the name. What they all have in common is the claim that DeFeo was possessed by Satan and that the Lutzes weren’t lying about the house being haunted. If there really is an Amityville Demon, it’s probably furious by now. These films do not make it look good.

In 2024’s Amityville A.I., Stuart Birdsall (William Childress) is the latest person to move into a house in the Amityville area. (It doesn’t appear to be the original house, though a few shots suggest they share the same attic windows.) Stuart is developing an A.I. and he’s convinced he’ll get the work done in the new place. Unfortunately the house is possessed, and soon so is his program. Even worse, the demon starts possessing the other electronic devices in the neighborhood. Stuart’s neighbor owns a sex doll that is soon running around saying, “Do you want to have sex?” while flashing a knife.

Amityville A.I. mixes demonic possession with the current moral panic around artificial intelligence and data centers. To be honest, Stuart’s A.I. doesn’t seem particularly practical. Its name is VIC 3000 and it is clearly riffing on HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Setting Vic up means lugging around a lot of bulky equipment. There are several scenes of Stuart staring at diagrams on his laptop, and it’s never quite clear what any of it has to do with VIC or why anyone would pick VIC over the other A.I. options out there. Perhaps that’s why the demon starts messing with him. Hubris, not artificial intelligence, will be the downfall of .… well, it feels a bit too dramatic to say humanity. How about Amityville? Hubris will be the downfall of Amityville.

That said, I actually enjoyed Amityville A.I. It’s a low-budget movie that looks like a low-budget movie, but it commits to the bit. The sight of Stuart being chased by a psychotic, smiling sex doll belongs in the Amityville Hall of Fame. Whether it’s the demon, the A.I., or just his own twisted mind, Stuart is put through the wringer, and the film does tap the fear a lot of people have right now: that A.I. is both convenient and destined to destroy us.

If the first Amityville film’s message was that you should just leave the house, this one suggests you should consider disconnecting. Good luck with that.

Previous TSL Amityville Reviews: