Screen Life Film ‘The Amityville Exorcist’ Needs More Pazuzu [The Amityville IP]

For more than two years, Joe Lipsett has dissected Amityville Horror films to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”

There’s been a significant amount of backtracking in order to cross T’s and dot I’s for this editorial series. Sometimes an Amityville film drops without notification. Or it is announced and then takes years to debut. Some, such as Amityville Shark House, have never gotten a release.

Finally, there are films like The Amityville Exorcist (2022), which are just difficult to track down without venturing into sketchy corners of the Internet.

The second Amityville film from writer/director/actor Tony Newton harkens back to his first: Amityville Hex (2021). Both films are screen life films that mostly involve actors delivering their dialogue in direct address to the camera via Zoom or Skype, with very little interaction between the cast. It’s a distinctly low budget approach, but it’s not particularly cinematic.

In Hex, this technique was narratively unsatisfying because it felt like individual performers were given a rough outline for the movie, asked to film themselves independently, and then the footage was spliced together. The result was repetitive, lacked cohesion, and was often boring.

The Amityville Exorcist (not to be confused with Amityville Exorcism) manages to solve one of Hex’s three issues in that it is more cohesive. The project is tighter because it only features a few folks in front of the camera (rather than roughly a dozen in Hex) and everyone mostly appears to be on the same wavelength.

The plot in a nutshell: individuals are experiencing sleep paralysis nightmares because they’re in danger of being possessed by demons, including Pazuzu (!). Father O’Breanne () offers his help to perform exorcisms over Zoom calls while imbibing heavily; none of his attempts work, and all of the individuals either die, get possessed, or both by the end of the film.