Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.
Whenever I see a really good horror movie, several things occur to me right away. The first is that I’m happy there are directors who try to do more with the genre than just gross out the audience. The gross out is easy. To really scare an audience, to really get under the skin of an audience takes a lot more. It takes a smart director, a cast that agrees to go with it, and the willingness to really take a chance and go for it. I also quickly realize that I would be a terrible protagonist in a horror film. They’d have to kill me off in the first reel, because I’d get the hell out of the house the moment things started getting weird.
The Changeling, released in 1980, is the goods. It’s the real deal when it comes to spook films. It starts with a bang the way any good horror movie should, then dials everything back and works on the slow build of terror for the next hour. Much like the earlier film The Haunting, it relies on shadow and sound, using everyday objects and subtlety to bring the scares, and bring them it does. There is a genuine sense of the world beyond death here, done with the film equivalent of smoke and mirrors. It plays its audience like a virtuoso plays a violin.
