Sisters (1973) – Staten Island
Brian de Palma laid claim to his title of “king of the Hitchcock homage guys” with this dizzying thriller about a reporter for a Staten Island newspaper who witnesses the stabbing death of a man by a young woman who could either be a French-Canadian model named Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder) or her separated Siamese twin sister Dominique Blanchion (Margot Kidder), who may or may not be dead. De Palma used his grab bag of tricks, including POVs, split diopters and split screens to tell his tawdry tale, with famous ’70s movie industry socialites Kidder and Jennifer Salt in the central roles, along with the always creepy William “Bill” Finley.
The Amityville Horror (1979) – Long Island
NYC’s suburban neighbor in the northeast, Long Island, gets the frightmare treatment. One of the most strip-mined franchises in horror started as a grounded haunted house tale based on the “true case” of the Lutz family who moves into a home in the Suffolk County village of Amityville only to fall prey to some bad supernatural juju. Family patriarch George Lutz (James Brolin) gets the brunt of the possession mambo, which is partly deserved since he DID move his family into a murder house built on an Indian burial ground to save a few bucks.
