Dead Body Found During Filming Of The Scariest Movie Remake
A dead body was found near the set of the Amityville Horror remake in 2005.
Ryan Reynolds is not one that is known for his horror movie filmography; as a well-known action comedy actor, scary movies are a bit of a stretch. That didn’t stop him from leading a 2005 remake of one of the scariest movies of all time in the sub-genre of the consistently divisive based on a true story, The Amityville Horror. But like any good scary movie, strange things were afoot on the set of the remake, and according to Radio Free, The Amityville Horror got a real-life fright with the discovery of a dead body.
According to an interview with Ryan Reynolds’ costar, Melissa George (The Mosquito Coast and Triangle), the team was filming out by the boathouse of the creepy house when they came face to face with a sheriff. The law enforcement officer was reportedly in a boat on the lake and informed them that a dead body had been found floating in the lake. While the incident had nothing to do with the movie set (Ryan Reynolds said in his own interview that he thought it was a mobster and a genuine accident), a dead body wasn’t exactly something that the crew was expecting to see on the set of The Amityville Horror.
That wasn’t the only odd occurrence to take place on the set of the film, as in true horror movie form, the set was surrounded by the creepy and macabre. The real-life Kathy Lutz (the character Melissa George portrayed on screen) passed away during the filming of the film at a young age, in her fifties. While she had a breathing problem that caused her death, it was unexpected and sad that she didn’t get to see the film many felt was returning the franchise back to its roots.
According to Reynolds, many people in the crew began waking up around 3:15 am, which is when many of the events occurred in the real-life massacre that inspired the movie. Melissa George also recalled that the dead body wasn’t the only thing she experienced on the set of The Amityville Horror. She revealed that one evening, while no one was at the house, the lights in the home mysteriously came on, giving everyone a little bit of a startle.
The film is one of many works inspired by the real-life crime of Ronald DeFeo Jr. in 1974, where he awoke in the middle of the night and killed his entire family. A year later, the Lutz family moved into the home on Long Island but moved out less than a month later, claiming to have been terrorized by a supernatural force while living there. The story spawned a total of nine books and forty movies that are a mix between embellished-inspired non-fiction and a totally fictitious story.
After all that has happened surrounding the story, a dead body on the set of The Amityville Horror film in 2005 could actually feel a little tame. Many other movies like The Exorcist, The Conjuring, and The Twilight Zone had reports of extremely weird happenings or even deaths on set. Acting in a horror movie isn’t always acting; sometimes, the terror is all too real.
