Ah, the haunted house. A mainstay of horror movies, and rightly so. There’s something gut-level scary about the place that’s supposed to provide comfort and security mysteriously turning into something that wishes you ill and will do you harm. Of course, “gut-level scary” and “scary in this movie” are two completely different things. The Changeling is filled to the brim with badness, from the writing to the acting to the music and special effects. It’s actually impressive in its badness, delightful in its craptacularity. In short, it’s nearly perfect!

The Changeling opens with a happy family (albeit one with a severe age disparity between husband and ridiculously young looking wife), pushing their wood paneled station wagon (I love 1980) up a steep mountainous road. They’ve had car trouble! Yet they sing and laugh, see how happy they are! Oh, until a truck comes along and squishes the wife and daughter as the husband watches from a phone booth. Dang. You know that’s going to put a damper on things.

Cut to John (George C. Scott) several months later, as he expounds on his grief via stilted and stupid dialogue (a mainstay of the entire film) as a way to explain his decision to up and move to a place in the country. He’s a musical genius, you see, a noted composer who will be teaching at a university. But he needs a place to live! So, rather than just renting an apartment like any other regular person, he decides to rent a house so he can fill it with all his stuff. Well, actually, he rents it because it’s the haunted house and we can’t very well have a haunted 1970’s apartment, now can we? Of course not. We need a big old mansion. One with………history…….

John starts to slowly get into his new life with the help of Claire (Trish Van Devere), the woman with the vague accent from the historical society who helped him find this perfect house – a house just right for him. Despite the objections of a historical society colleague (another woman with a vague accent – all the women in this movie have them, which may well be the scariest thing about the entire film), he moves in, makes himself at home despite the ominous musical score that tells us this is wrong! Wrong! Wrong!!!!!

And it is wrong, for John will be haunted by this house. It will scare him. It will scare Claire. It will provide us with many, many opportunities to pretend we’re really the stars of Mystery Science Theater as we rip it to shreds and cackle with glee over its every bad moment.

And oh, yes, the bad moments are plentiful and rich. We have the aforementioned score (Rick Wilkins) that telegraphs every meager moment of intended shock, surprise, terror or even humor. The fact that oftentimes the score is the only clue we have as to the intended emotion a scene is supposed to elicit does make the too loud, too obvious music quite important for our viewing pleasure.

We also have the aforementioned dialogue. Filled with pregnant pauses that feel more like someone forgetting their lines, overflowing with short, easily digested sentences stating the obvious, the dialogue is ripe for mockery at every turn. It really isn’t a good sign when what we feel when our hero wakes in tears from his nightmares is not sadness and sympathy for the character, but sadness and sympathy for the actor who will forever have this film on his resume.

What ultimately turns this bad movie into a hilariously bad, perfectly bad, deliciously bad movie is the special effects. Loud banging in the middle of the night (at precisely the same time each night, of course), the haunted attic room with its haunted artifacts, each is worse than the one before. The movie isn’t just dated; it’s conceptually faulty in its visuals. The score tells us that we’re supposed to find a scene ominous and terrifying, yet we have to rewind several times to see what exactly changes in the room that is supposed to scare us so.

Layered over everything else are the performances. Oh dear, the performances. George C. Scott, I feel for you. I really do, even if you aren’t around to be embarrassed, I’m embarrassed for you. This character admittedly doesn’t give him much to work with, since he’s a dumb guy who doesn’t just leave the stupid house in which he really has no reason to stay. Scott apparently feels that John has no fear. As usual, the score tells us that things are really, really, really scary, yet John has the same blank expression on his face during the hilariously campy séance or his visions of past wrongs as he does when he’s weeping in the night or having a sandwich. Not a lot of animation here. Trish Van Devere is, if possible, even worse. Claire is supposed, I think, to be something of a nascent love interest for John, yet every line she speaks is monotone (with weird vague accent), punctuated by exaggerated body movements to show emoooooootion. Her very best moment is when she abruptly freezes in place, eyes widening as she spies something very scary. We know it’s scary, the music tells us so!

To be fair, the premise, the cause of the haunting, is creepy. But creepy in a curl your lip in disgust kind of way, not in a scary or deep or profound kind of way.

So what do we have here in this masterpiece? Well, The Changeling provides something above and beyond its humble bad horror movie roots. It provides unintentional hilarity at every turn, allowing us to pretend that we too are witty enough to mock with the professionals. This is not a movie to see alone, for what fun is mockery unless it’s a shared experience? This is a movie for a group, or a pair, of people with similar senses of humor and the ability to make fun of and enjoy the dated and absurd. So rent it (or better yet try and see it on cable for free), revel in its badness when you’re feeling particularly snarky and return it, never to see it again. Repeated viewings will only taint the memory.


Recommended:
Yes