Why there are so many movies with the word “Amityille” in the title.

because the word “Amityville” is a real place name and consequently cannot be trademarked, there are actually 30+ Amityville movies, with some just being an unrelated movie they slapped the word Amityville onto and some that are actually attempting to remake/recreate/just do a haunted house thing the original.

Also: The science fiction/fantasy writer Diane Duane says she “grew up six or seven miles from one of the Amityvilles” and the “cognitive dissonance involved when the first film came out—knowing the sleepy suburbia that lay just over thataway—was hilarious.”

I, too, grew up a few miles from the same Amityville — the one featured in the first movie. One of the girls I was friends with in high school (who occasionally visits my Facebook profile) dated a guy who lived just down the street from that house.