Sometimes, a particular subgenre simply isn’t your thing. I can count the number of haunted house movies I like with no fear of running out of fingers: Robert Wise’s original The Haunting; The Innocents; Crimson Peak; Hausu; Beetlejuice if you count comedies. Lake Mungo is a borderline case, not truly a haunted house movie for me, but a great film. I might also say The Others, but I last saw it about 20 years ago, so who knows? There’s one more I enjoy a lot, and we’ll come to that, but to cut a long story short, The Changeling had a bit of a mountain to climb with me. I’ll say this upfront: if you’re generally into ghost/haunting movies, you can add a star to my grade here.
Composer John Russell (George C. Scott) loses his wife and daughter when a truck ploughs into their broken down car. A few months later, he takes a teaching job in Seattle and rents a long unoccupied old house from the local historical society. Soon after he moves in, strange things begin happening in the house, and he comes to believe it’s haunted. After holding a séance and hearing a voice, John begins to investigate and discovers that the haunting may be connected to a decades old mystery.
Following the effective opening sequence—Director Peter Medak makes the car crash a brutal shock without showing anything bloody—the first half of The Changeling settles in to being pretty much exactly what I’d expect a haunted house movie to be. Things creak, and it’s put down to old pipes in the house. The piano, which John does his composing work on, plays a note on its own just as he leaves the house. There are some false jump scares and other expected beats. In isolation, they work well. Medak and editor Lilla Pedersen (who cut only one other feature, horror comedy Big Meat Eater) manage to set the timing just off enough that you do get caught by some of these scares. What’s most effective about the sequences in the house though is the house itself; a 3 storey continuous set, built for $500,000 by production designer who embeds a lot of creepy, dusty, detail in the old rooms and especially into the genuinely eerie feeling attic space, which hides some key secrets.
This part of the film is inarguably brilliantly executed, and the grief we can see George C. Scott carrying in the beginning of the film seems almost to seep into the walls surrounding him. For me though, even when they running this well, the pure mechanics of the haunting aspect of the film just don’t particularly work for me. Where it eventually grabbed my attention more was in the second half, as John begins to investigate the clues he gets from the séance.
Richard Matheson’s Stir of Echoes was published in 1958, and made into a (still tragically underrated) film in 1999. The gap between the book and the adaptation makes me wonder, given how much things like the scene of finding a body in a well here reminded me of Stir of Echoes, whether writers Russell Hunter (story) and William Katz and Gloria Maddox (screenplay) took some inspiration from aspects of Matheson’s work. It’s a particularly interesting question given that Melvyn Douglas plays a key role in the second half of The Changeling, making for an intriguing figure who, for a long time, has you wondering exactly what he knows or believes, while his granddaughter, Illeana Douglas, has a key role in Stir of Echoes.
The investigative aspect of the film is well written, and the mystery unravels in a satisfying way, especially in the moment that John confronts his target with what he’s discovered. It also meshes well with the supernatural aspect of the film. Ultimately though, I still never quite got past the fact that the cliches of the haunted house film aren’t especially engaging for me, and as well worked as they are, the first half of the film didn’t do enough different, or manage to truly get under my skin with its scares, to overcome what, I admit, is just a block I have with this genre.
If the haunted house movie is your thing, then The Changeling will scratch every itch in that subgenre for you, before combining it with a well told mystery. I’m happy to imagine that it might be an all timer for fans of the genre. For me it’s just a well made example of something that, at least for half its running time, isn’t for me.
★★★
The Limited Edition of this release comes with a hard outer case, a soundtrack CD and a 108 page book of new writing on the film. These weren’t supplied for review, but with the lineup of writers I’m sure the book will be fascinating for fans who want to dive into the film’s themes.
The 4K scan and transfer are impressive, but definitely reflect the age of the film. Detail is excellent, but in a few of the exteriors, the frame is can be swamped with grain (though I’ll take that over a scrubbed DNR look), and there are still a few instances of flecks that appear to be minor print flaws that couldn’t be entirely erased. It’s still an incredible picture for a near 45 year old film, but it doesn’t hit the heights of Second Sight’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre disc.
Director Peter Medak is, as he observes, one of a handful of people who worked on the film and are still with us, and he’s a heavy presence on the on disc extras, first in an informative commentary with producer Joel B. Michaels, then in a wide ranging 74 minute interview with filmmaker Adrian Garcia Bogliano, and finally in a 20 minute piece on his early yers in the film business in late ’50s and ’60s London.
The remaining video extras are drawn from Severin Films’ 2018 Blu Ray. A 17 minute piece tells the alleged ‘true story’ behind the film (which took place near Denver’s Cheesman Park. I’m not convinced, but again, if ghost stories are your thing, your mileage may vary. The Music of The Changeling does what it says on the tin, talking to music arranger Ken Wannberg for about 9 minutes. He introduces the piece by saying “this is the main title to The Changeling, played badly by Ken Wannberg”, He’s lying, it still sounds as chilling as it does in the film. For Building the House of Horror, art director Reuben Freed contributes an 11 minute interview on his work on the incredible main set for the film. The Psychotronic Tourist sees film historian and theorist Kier-La Janisse, there’s a little analysis, but mostly it’s a fairly surface level piece comparing how the locations looked in the film to how they looked around 2018. Finally, horror director Mick Garris contributes a five minute appreciation of Medak and The Changeling.
Add a trailer and a TV spot and you have a comprehensive set of extras that will certainly deepen a fan’s appreciation for the film, and probably for Medak as a director as well. Again, it’s a sterling job from Second Sight, building on Severin’s edition.
