Top 25 Greatest Halloween Films: #9 – 'The Changeling' (1980)

#9: The Changeling (1980)

Goddamn sonofabitch, what is it you want?!?

After four months of mourning the loss of his wife and daughter in a freak car accident, composer John Russell (George C. Scott) decides it’s time to put one foot in front of the other with a move to suburban Seattle where he’ll try to piece himself back together emotionally by writing music and teaching it at the local university. With the help of Clair Norman (Trish Van Devere) and the local Historical Preservation Society, Russell leases a mammoth Victorian-style mansion to lose himself in.

The banging starts almost immediately. A rhythmic, haunting sound that echoes throughout the cavernous house but has no source – no earthly source anyway. Other inexplicable events and strange coincidences convince Russell there’s something supernatural going on and with Clair’s help he engages a psychic to communicate with whatever this is through a séance. The ghost is Joseph, a young boy drowned in a bathtub in the attic near the turn of the 20th Century. From here Russell will pull the thread of an age-old mystery until it unravels dark secrets long held by the city’s richest and most powerful citizens.

Elegant, classy and EXTREMELY well-directed by Peter Medak, the best way to describe the finest haunted house movie ever made is “hair-raising.” The séance sequence alone will have you turning on every light in the house while you speed-dial your mommy and you will never look at a child’s red rubber ball the same way again. With almost no violence and the best scares being solely a product of your manipulated imagination, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen the film, for the last hour the only thing that interrupts the chill down your spine are at least a half-dozen genuinely effective scares that leave you looking like this:

At the center of it all is Scott who brings his usual integrity and intensity to the role, which in this particular case serves as the perfect character trait to help with the heightening of your own fear. Because Russell is a perfectly rational and sensible character who also happens to be very hard to scare, it not only helps to make sense of his decision to stay in the house, but throughout most of the story he’s nowhere as spooked as we are. The net-effect of this is that every time there’s a small crack in Russell’s calm; no matter how small the gesture – the dropping of a cigarette for instance – you want to throw a blanket over your head. Good grief, if he’s scared…

Supposedly the story is based upon real events that author and playwright Russell Hunter claims to have experienced during a stay at a mansion in Colorado. You can choose to buy that or not, but the lack of sensationalism, the use of seemingly mundane items to haunt us with (like a child’s antique wheelchair), and a ghostly mystery that peels away with a sense of credibility, works as evidence that back Hunter’s claim up. The underlying question, though, is always, what does Joseph want? He’s an immature child who was viciously murdered in cold blood. I’ll let you figure the rest out.

Almost as satisfying as the scares is the undercurrent of emotional despair and loss Scott quietly shoulders through every scene. Joseph chose to reveal himself to Russell because he knew the composer’s inconsolable grief was still so raw that he could never turn his back on a child in need – even a dead one — who had suffered through such a senseless crime. Van Devere, a beautiful woman who effortlessly projects warmth, class and competence, was married to Scott at the time and the unspoken chemistry they share also adds a layer of poignancy. Were Russell not still devastated over the loss of his family, you get a sense he and Clair might have shared something together. As the credits roll and your goose-pimples begin to un-pimple, you’re left with the bittersweet hope that they might find a way to be together.

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What didn’t make the list: The Haunting (1963)

I might have mentioned this in a previous post, but it’s still showing up a lot in the comments. The first and last few minutes are pure rock and roll. What’s in the middle bores me stiff. I’ve given the movie a couple of tries and it now sits on a pile with Raging Bull and 2001 as classics I wasted my DVD allowance on. And yes, I do have a DVD allowance, and no it’s not enough but negotiations between my wife and I are always ongoing.