Frani and I went back to 1980 with this classic that she had seen multiple times but I have never really taken in, outside of a couple of legendary scenes that have made documentaries over the years. We've all seen the ball come down the stairs, or the wheelchair, ad infinitum. This is not fair to the movie, which has become sort of a minor masterpiece.
George C. Scott plays a grieving father who has lost his wife and child in a sad, tragic accident on a cold mountain side. I didn’t know that they put payphones out there like that, but hey, who am I to question the placement of public communication? As he deals with his grief, Scott decides to move to Seattle to get away from it all, and to reengage with himself as a musical composer, one of the best in the business.
He decides he needs some room, and the local historical society is plenty happy to oblige with a giant property that is creepy as hell, and really why in the fuck would one person wanna live there? It’s like a miniature Overlook, for crying out loud. Scott's real-life wife, Trish Van DeVere does the heavy lifting in the real estate department.
He becomes compelled and obsessed with the sounds he’s hearing and the things that seem to be buried in some sort of connection with his loss in life. So this is not only creepy, but at about the halfway point the chills turn to mystery as he investigates WHAT IN THE HELL is exactly going on here.
When it’s all tied together, it twists back into overdrive, bringing the creep factor back in. The Changeling is one hell of a Halloween chiller, despite the fact that it’s not a gore-ridden splat fest, like so many films of that era were. Nice to see that in the error of the slasher, there were still a few folks thinking about ghost stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment