Amityville: No Escape 2016

In April 1997, a woman named Lina Julia Gomez moves into 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. The house is dilapidated and cluttered with objects left behind by previous occupants, and as Lina works on repairing and cleaning it, she records a video diary for her absent husband, who is a soldier in the United States Army. Worsening paranormal phenomena begin to unfold, and Lina slowly uncovers a chilling history: this haunted residence was the site of an allegedly possession-induced familicide carried out by Ronald DeFeo Jr. back in 1974. The tension rises as inexplicable sounds, cold drafts, and unseen presences intrude on Lina’s routine, turning the act of cleaning into a fragile ritual of self-preservation. After a matter of weeks, an unseen presence finally attacks and kills Lina, leaving the house to hold its secrets.

Fast forward to August 2016, a college student George Harris is pursuing a video thesis on fear and recruits his girlfriend, Sarah Benning, his sister Elizabeth Wells, and their friends Lisa Sheets and Simon Tressler to accompany him on a camping trip in the woods near the same infamous address. From the very first night in the forest, the group encounters unsettling, almost folkloric signs: a woodsman who claims to be looking for his missing daughter, and a glimpse of a little girl dressed all in white seen by Simon. The next night, the woodsman is found disemboweled shortly after Elizabeth notices the little girl again, heightening the sense that something ancient and malevolent stalks the forest.

Driven by fear and a tightening sense of dread, the quintet tries to flee, yet they become hopelessly lost despite their efforts to follow their compass. The absence of cellphone service and a radio that emits nothing but distorted screeching amplifies the isolation and terrifies Lisa, who finds her nerves fraying under the strain. Simon dies while searching for the elusive child, and Lisa vanishes after being lured off of the path by the same presence, which remains invisible to George. The group’s cohesion fractures further as Elizabeth and Lisa are killed, leaving George and Sarah separated, with Sarah eventually standing at the threshold of the abandoned house at George’s insistence.

Inside the eerie silence of the derelict home, George calmly ends his life by shooting himself in the head, witnessed by Sarah, whose deepest fear had always been being left alone. The film then loops back to the 1997 footage, where the unsettling cadence of the past lingers. In a final, disquieting echo of the original haunting, Lisa—now appearing exactly as she did in 2016 and speaking in a distorted child’s voice—reaches out to Lina’s body and intones, “Tag, you’re it.” The confrontation between past and present leaves the audience with a lingering sense of fate, memory, and the inescapable pull of a house that remembers everything.