Beginning with William Castle's Rosemary's Baby in 1968, the B-movie studios discovered they could compete with Hollywood's big studios by supplying relatively low cost horror films in the Satanic/demonic possession vein as suspense is cheaper than special effects, and audiences were hungry for horror. By 1979 that had led to American International releasing The Amityville Horror.
For my money, the original Amityville Horror is better than the oft-cited 'best horror movie of all time', The Exorcist. While it shamelessly rips-off The Exorcist, it doesn't rely as heavily on shock value for instead building suspense in a day-by-day narrative that feels like it's leading to impending doom.
To be sure, there are a number of things that just don't work. Like a lot of haunted house type horror stories, it utterly fails when the entities so closely associated with a physical structure seem to be able to do things like affect cars on the road miles away, or attack people through phone lines (yes, it really happens in the movie).
And The Amityville Horror not only rips off The Exorcist, it also rips off The Shining, as male lead James Brolin slowly undergoes a mental and physical transformation similar to what Jack Nicholson's character experiences in The Shining.
But if you're going to steal, steal from the best, and what The Amityville Horror takes from other films it spits back with enough scares of its own to make it one of the most memorable horror films from a decade known for them.
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