Like any good urban legend, the allegedly horrific history of New York State's Mt. Misery Road and its thick, surrounding woods located on Long Island, New York has spawned its fair share of campfire warnings.
And, depending on the website, you can find claims online that Mt. Misery Road is haunted by a host of supernatural terrors, including a hellhound, a ghostly lady in white and even the Mothman.
What you won’t find is much factual evidence to support those claims.
That didn’t deter Land O' Lakes residents Chuck Morrongiello and his wife, Karolina, from using the titular highway as the basis for their first feature film, Amityville: Mt. Misery Road, which was released May 7 on DVD from ITN Distribution. It's also now streaming via outlets like Amazon Video.
Chuck grew up hearing stories of Mt. Misery Road in Suffolk County from his grandparents, and it was during a fateful 2015 trip to his hometown with Karolina that the decision to turn those tales into a movie was born.
“I said, ‘I want to take you to a place that’s been cursed,’” said Chuck, 59, a longtime musical collaborator with the late Marty Balin, who co-founded Jefferson Airplane. “I get this idea as we’re walking through the woods: 'Let me start filming you.'”
Karolina, who emigrated to the U.S. from Poland, was all in.
The Morrongiellos had never made a movie. That didn’t deter them, either.
The couple spent $2,500 to fund the endeavor, and the film’s end credits basically repeat their names, over and over and over: director, producer, writer, cinematographer, editor, art director, set decorator, visual effects. The only thing missing is craft services.
The fact that Chuck and Karolina made a movie is newsworthy, but the fact that they made this movie is something special.
Hollywood has long loved the underdog, the oddball and the eccentric, whether it's Ed Wood (Plan 9 from Outer Space), John Derek (Tarzan, the Ape Man), Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2) or Tommy Wiseau (The Room). And every generation seems to have its own torchbearer, a director whose singular work is championed as a cult classic or gets elevated to a higher status through word-of-mouth because the film is so technically deficient that it defies criticism.
Chuck and Karolina’s Amityville: Mt. Misery Road falls squarely in this category, largely because of their on-screen alter-egos, Charlie and Buzi, two ghost-hunting enthusiasts in the Sunshine State who receive a letter with several photographs of glowing orbs taken off Mt. Misery Road.
The orbs prompt the pair to travel north to Long Island, determined to uncover all of the secrets buried there. Along the way, they receive multiple dire warnings to avoid the woods at all costs.
Do they listen? Have you ever watched a scary movie? Of course they don’t listen.
In person, Chuck and Karolina are a less caffeinated, but still effervescent, version of their screen selves. They are incredibly gracious, not to mention sincerely grateful that a reporter would come meet them, and you genuinely like them once you’ve spent any time in their presence.
But it’s their wonderfully innocent and honest answers about the experience that captures your heart.
“I was a flight attendant for five years. I had to be in front of people every day,” Karolina explained, when asked if she was nervous prior to starring in, directing and editing her first film. “We showed everybody it’s doable. If you believe in something, you can get what you want.”
“We didn’t want to do an over-produced movie,” Chuck said, when asked about why they made a horror movie in which absolutely nothing horrific happens. “We didn’t want to do special effects. We wanted to do an organic movie.”
In all fairness, you should know that Amityville: Mt. Misery Road plays like an amateur version of The Blair Witch Project, minus the witch.
Practically nothing happens for the first 25 minutes of the 73-minute feature. And once Charlie and Buzi actually make it to the woods, very little happens then, either. They talk and talk about Mary, the lady in white, who supposedly burned down an asylum, killing everyone inside. They talk and talk about the orbs and the hellhound, without ever showing an orb or a hellhound.
The lack of spectacle would cripple most low-budget productions, but not Amityville: Mt. Misery Road. It succeeds because of its lack of technical prowess, not in spite of it, subverting conventional found-footage tropes to create an epic depiction of two clueless characters fumbling toward a supernatural encounter.
Nearly every scene is filmed from multiple angles that Karolina then edited together to make even the most mundane action seem to have a purpose.
“We were trying not to make it boring,” she explained. “When you can see it from different angles, it looks like more is going on.”
They shot 10 takes of each scene, using only an outline. “We didn’t want it to sound like a script,” Karolina said.
They also refused to have anyone else hold their camera. “We wanted to be in control,” she continued. “We didn’t want the drama of someone taking over our idea.”
They strove for DIY-realness at every turn. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance of West Virginia’s famed Mothman is actually Karolina in makeup, encased in decorative lights to achieve the creature’s glowing red eyes.
“I wrapped her in lights and plugged it in,” Chuck said.
They chose to tack on the word Amityville, in part to reference other well-known hauntings associated with the area, i.e. The Amityville Horror.
“We wanted people to know the movie is about Long Island,” Karolina said. “It’s not about Mt. Misery Road, Texas. We wanted to direct people geographically.”
More than anything, Chuck and Karolina just want viewers to believe that what they are watching is really happening, even during long stretches of them just wandering in the woods or stopping to pee.
Amityville: Mt. Misery Road is nothing if not authentic.
“She really went to the bathroom too,” Chuck said excitedly.
“In the woods! In the woods,” Karolina exclaimed. “That was real.”
Naturally, the couple is already hard at work on a follow-up film, which Chuck describes as being inspired by The Shining and Misery.
“It’s going to be very sinister,” Chuck promised.
Just don’t ask for details. Like a seasoned pro, Karolina has already mastered the art of shutting down nosy reporters.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said, firmly, yet with a smile.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in May 16-23, 2019.