After I saw The Innocents, I complained that there aren’t enough good old-fashioned haunted house movies that just let ghost stories be ghost stories, instead of trying to be meta-textual or making everything a metaphor. If nothing else, The Changeling, from 1979 and starring George C Scott, handles the “old-fashioned ghost story” part pretty well.
The premise is pretty intriguing. Scott plays a composer who, after a family tragedy, moves across the country to Seattle where he rents a huge, historic house that’s been left abandoned for years. As he’s settling into a new routine of composing music while lecturing at a local university, he starts to hear strange noises, faucets that turn on with no one around, and doors that open or shut mysteriously, all drawing him towards a locked room in the attic. He discovers that there’s a presence in the house that’s trying to communicate with him, presumably drawn to him because of his grief.
The first half of the movie is pretty solid and atmospheric. It all feels on the level of a late 1970s TV movie, and it likely only became a feature release on account of having George C Scott in the lead. And he, of course, is really good. I’d never seen him play a character who was good-humored and sensitive, and I appreciated getting the chance to see more of his range. He’s got all the intensity you’d expect from his more well-known roles, but he also manages to be scared, vulnerable, or just creeped out without ever seeming to be acting. The movie simply wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as it is without him in the lead.
It’s entertaining to see a time capsule of the late 1970s. It’s all corduroy, big cars, land lines, reel-to-reel tape recorders, researching newspapers on microfilm, and string-heavy orchestral music during the more dramatic moments. It has the brisk editing of a movie designed to be shown between commercial breaks, with scenes that end abruptly after telling you exactly the information you need to advance to the next point in the plot. You can also tell it’s the 70s because it has two adults reacting to a story of a murder by fainting or going into hysterics, before subsequent decades made everybody numb to it.
Even during the good parts, there are bits of “did they mean to do that?” weirdness. A medium conducting a seance does automatic writing, but also brings a large metal cone that gets placed in the center of the table to vibrate in the presence of a ghost, as if that were a thing that everyone is familiar with. After a long sequence from the ghost’s POV as it comes down the stairs and enters the room where the seance is being held, you can clearly see the camera person’s shadow enter the frame. (Or maybe it’s supposed to be the ghost’s shadow? Spooky). At one point, Scott distractedly drops a lit cigarette onto the floor, and I spent the next five minutes anxious about it starting a fire before finally accepting it wasn’t ever going to be mentioned.
I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that after around the halfway point, the movie transitions from haunted house to detective story, as Scott’s character and his sidekick/love interest try to uncover the truth of what happened in the house. It’s an interesting departure from what I’d been expecting, and it keeps the story intriguing instead of just repeating the same beats of “spooky haunted house” over and over again. But it’s also where the movie starts to fall apart, with the characters making choices that don’t make sense, and things that happen because the movie needs them to happen.
Also it does this weird thing of having recognizable actors in parts that are only on-screen for one scene before disappearing. Why is Jean Marsh in this movie again? Or Baltar from the original Battlestar Galactica? Or the professor from Space: 1999 and like a billion other TV appearances? I’m guessing that it was a situation involving maintaining SAG benefits or something, but it was very distracting.
And the distractions were a sign that the movie was losing me, and all through the last act, it had pretty much completely fallen apart. It felt like they needed a climactic ending, but had written themselves into a corner and couldn’t come up with a satisfying way to justify the fire and explosions that were clearly necessary. At the very end, our two lead characters drive to a location that would be the last place on earth they’d want to go in the moment, and it was obvious that they only did it to make sure they appeared in the final shots.
So it’s not the great, old-fashioned haunted house story I’d been hoping for, but it starts out really good and just has trouble sticking the landing. I’d still recommend it to people looking for an engaging spooky movie during October, especially if they’re feeling nostalgic for the late 1970s and movies that feel like they were made for television.
I do have a couple minor thoughts about the ending, so spoilers for a 45-year-old movie follow.
I thought the movie was as straightforward as it could be, but as I was looking for stills from the movie to use for this post, I kept seeing things that were over-hyping the movie’s scariness and calling it “multi-layered.”
As for the scariness: to each their own, but a growling wheelchair chasing a woman around a house is silly, not scary. (Especially since the woman had no clear reason to go back to the house in the first place).
But I did start to wonder if there was something else going on with the ending than “we need a fire and an explosion to end the movie.” The actual story is weirdly anti-climactic; there doesn’t seem to be any real justice done.
There’s some dialogue that suggests that the story and recordings of the seance are going to go public, and that Scott’s character is essentially just giving the senator a courtesy call in case he wasn’t aware of what his father had done. So maybe I’m supposed to conclude that it’s only when the senator threatened to suppress the story that the story turned from justice to revenge? And that’s what drove the ghost to get vengeance on the senator?
If that was the intention, it’s not the way the movie actually reads. When Scott’s character is in the house yelling “what do you want from me?!” it suggests that the ghost was never seeking justice in the first place. He was never going to be satisfied now that he’d killed Baltar and had a taste for blood.
Which seems like misplaced and unproductive anger if we’re all being honest. Shouldn’t he have taken revenge on his father? Maybe there were just no grieving dads around at the time to help him out?
As it is, it makes the ghost seem like kind of a petty, greedy little bitch. He’s yelling “my medal! my medal!” while giving the senator a fatal heart attack/burning and exploding his astral form. You can’t take it with you, kid! Get over it! So ultimately, The Changeling is about an extremely rich kid enlisting a grieving George C Scott and his rebound girlfriend to help him murder an orphan.
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