Studio race for Amityville Horror remake

Two Hollywood studios are in a race to be first to the screens with a film based on the events that led to the 1979 horror hit The Amityville Horror.

A week after MGM signed with director Michael Bay for a remake, Dimension studios acquired the life rights of George Lutz, who lived in the famed Long Island haunted house and experienced the paranormal happenings attributed to the murder of an entire family that had previously lived there.

Dimension, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co, already has a completed script that revisits the house 25 years after the Lutz family fled and sources say the studio is in talks with an unnamed but established horror director to shoot a film to be released by early next summer.

“The race is on,” said Dimension chairman Bob Weinstein. “We don’t anticipate a lawsuit because the story and the events surrounding the house are in the public domain. MGM owns the remake and we will not touch that story; we’ve come up with our own take on the story.”