Crew
Director/Screenplay – Thomas J. Churchill, Producers – Thomas J. Churchill, Phillip B. Goldfine & Steven Louis Goldenberg, Photography – David M. Parks, Music – Erick Schroder, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nick Kirastoulis, Special Effects – Joe Castro, Production Design – Matthew Rumer. Production Company – Hollywood Media Bridge/Actionhouse Pictures/Church Hill Productions
Cast
Kyle Lowder (Vincent Miller), Sadie Katz (Christina Weingarten), Michael Cervantes (Steve ‘Scratch’ Cooper), Eva Ceja (Lexy Collins), Alexa Pellerin (Nancy Weingarten), Brandon Alan Smith (Seth Cosmo), Johanna Rae (Janet Higgins), George W. Scott (Ottis Beaumont), Keavy Bradley (Lana Hill), Eileen Dietz (Edna O’Brian)
Plot
In Amityville, Christina Weingarten leads a filmmaking crew as they arrive at the house and adjacent funeral service of Vincent Miller to make a documentary about Miller’s family’s history during the Civil War. As they begin filming, the cadaverous Miller tells an incredible story about how his ancestor, also named Vincent Miller, was the one behind the conspiracy that killed Abraham Lincoln. However, the film crew have difficulty recording Vincent’s image and voice on tape. Meanwhile, two of the crew are conducting an undercover investigation into a girl that went missing at the funeral home. As they do so, some force in the house is preventing people from leaving and begins killing them.
The Amityville Harvest comes from Thomas J. Churchill who has been making low-budget films since the late 1990s. Churchill has also made the horror films Emerging Past (2011), Lazarus: Apocalypse (2014), The Emerging Past (2017), Big Freaking Rat (2020), Devilreaux (2023), Night Carnage (2025) and The Salem Chronicles (2025) and an episode of the anthology Xenophobia (2019), as well as several action films and even a couple of family films. Churchill went on to make several other Amityville films with The Amityville Moon (2021) and Amityville Uprising (2022).
The Amityville phenomenon originated with the non-fiction book The Amityville Horror (1977) by Jay Anson that claimed to tell the story of the Lutz family who moved into a house but were driven out after twenty-eight days by ghostly phenomena. The Amityville series gained its life on screen shortly after with the film adaptation The Amityville Horror (1979). Despite Anson and the Lutz’s story later being proven to be a hoax, this led to a large number of sequels and other films of increasingly slimmer connection to the original selling themselves solely with the Amityville name. (See bottom of the page for the other Amityville films).
By the point of The Amityville Harvest, Amityville is nothing more than a name that filmmakers have slapped on an otherwise unrelated film as a selling point. There is one scene where we see Eva Ceja pass through an office that has the name Amityville and a final shot that would appear to be on the sign of the entrance to Amityville township, but that is it. Take those away and you have a film that lacks any association with the original Lutz family incident or house. Indeed, the plot involving vampires and a haunted funeral home seems a far stretch away from the Lutz family and their cursed house.
Anything with Amityville in its title from the 2010s onwards has meant an increasingly lowered quality where one could say that most of them are fairly shitty movies or are evidently no longer taking themselves seriously as evidenced by titles such as Amityville Vibrator (2020), Amityville in the Hood (2021), Amityville in Space (2022) Amityville Karen (2022) and Amityville Shark House (2023). That said, The Amityville Harvest is one of these that has some moments of interest.
The film comes with a central character that is or may be a Vampire. In the role, Kyle Lowder gives a particularly cadaverous performance – he’s exactly the casting and look you would look for when it comes to thinking of the perfect person to play a vampire. He narrates a fascinating secret history where he claims to have been the one who masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Equally, the film sits with an ambiguity where it is not entirely clear if anything he says is true – the sole scene where Lowder comes out and confirms he is a vampire to Brandon Alan Smith is clearly taking place in Brandon’s imagination.
There are also weird scenes where there seem to be black tendrils constantly creeping up the walls, which you get the impression are a low-budget variant on the vampire’s independently minded shadow in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). The haunted house scenes tend more to be like pop-up Halloween haunt attractions but where the “boo” delivered is fairly muted. In the end, The Amityville Harvest never quite pushes the material to ever be much more than a passing novelty.
The other Amityville films consists of:- The Amityville Horror (1979), Amityville II: The Possession (1982), Amityville 3-D (1983) and Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1989). However, there have been a considerable number of other films also claiming connection including – The Amityville Curse (1989), Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992), Amityville: A New Generation (1993), Amityville: Dollhouse (1996), The Amityville Haunting (2011), The Amityville Asylum (2013), Amityville Death House (2015), Amityville Playhouse (2015), The Amityville Legacy (2016), Amityville: No Escape (2016), Amityville Terror (2016), Amityville: Vanishing Point (2016), Amityville Exorcism (2017), Amityville: The Awakening (2017), The Amityville Murders (2018), Mt. Misery Road/Amityville: Mt. Misery Road (2018), The Dawn (2019), Amityville Island (2020), Amityville Vibrator (2020), Witches of Amityville Academy (2020), Amityville Cop (2021), Amityville Cult (2021), Amityville Hex (2021), Amityville in the Hood (2021), The Amityville Moon (2021), Amityville Scarecrow (2021), The Amityville Exorcist (2022), Amityville in Space (2022), Amityville Karen (2022), Amityville Thanksgiving (2022), Amityville Emanuelle (2023), Amityville Shark House (2023), Amityville Bigfoot (2024) and Amityville Webcam (2024). The Amityville Horror (2005) was a remake of the original. There have been several documentaries Amityville 2000/The Amityville Horror: 25 Years Later (2000), The Real Amityville Horror (2005) and Amityville: The Final Testament (2010), which tried to examine what happened in the house, while the parapsychological investigation into the house is also featured in The Conjuring 2 (2016).
Trailer here