By: Hunter Bush
For: Moviejawn
It would be easy to compare The Changeling to more recent films; to imagine what it would be like were it made or remade in the now-times, but that would be doing The Changeling a huge disservice. I generally try to approach each film on its own terms and judge it for what it is, though I will admit this is easier with older films for some reason. Honestly the thought never crossed my mind with The Changeling because as it turns out, this movie is, as they say "extremely my shit". I was hooked from the opening scene.
And, damn. What a scene it is! I was not at all prepared for the trauma of John Russell's (George C. Scott's) tragic backstory. After their car stalls out on a snowy Colorado mountain road, John goes to a phone booth to call for roadside assistance and is momentarily, circumstantially unable to do anything but watch as his wife and daughter are run down and killed by a truck. It's shocking, even though it isn't exactly surprising and immediately after he witnesses this, the blood red "THE CHANGELING" title card appears. I barked with laughter. The Changeling came out swinging and, as I said, I was immediately hooked.
John, a composer, decides to move to Seattle and take a job teaching music theory at a college while he gets himself back together and works on a new composition. For that, he'll need a house where he can "pound away at the piano without bothering the neighbors" as he tells Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere), an agent of the local historical society from whom he ends up renting just such a house. The house is gorgeous; in reality, the gothic exterior is a constructed facade attached to a more modern building while the interiors were a soundstage in Canada. In the film the house is spacious and solitary, everything John had asked for. It's also haunted. This should come as no surprise to any of you, this is the ooky-spooky issue of Moviejawn after all.
The real meat of The Changeling is the haunting and the story behind it, so I will try to leave as much unspoiled as possible when discussing it. At first, John experiences some pretty common haunted house movie shenanigans: unexplained noises, doors opening themselves, windows breaking and the like and my favorite part about it all is how George C. Scott reacts to it. Having only recently lost his family, Scott plays John Russell as weirdly receptive to what's happening around him. Of course he initially checks with the caretaker to make sure he isn't totally cracking up, but after that he pretty quickly realizes and comes to accept that there is something uncanny in his house and that it's trying to communicate with him. This is my favorite aspect of The Changeling by the way. I love that it avoids the cliche of having an evil entity that wants John gone in favor of a forlorn spirit trying desperately to communicate with him. It makes the film both frightening and sad, and that emotional core, that connection makes me care about what happens to John. It also makes me hope he gets to the bottom of things.
I won't spoil details, but another thing The Changeling does masterfully is pay off the haunting activities. More often than not, I feel like spooky ghost behavior in movies is kind of chosen at rote. The ghost makes banging sounds because other ghosts in other movies have made banging sounds, and those ghosts did it because ghosts, reportedly, occasionally do make banging sounds. Etc., ad nauseam. Conversely, sometimes a movie ghost will do something wild just because it hasn't been done before. Any of these things can be enjoyable, but rarely are the specific activities themselves as thoroughly explained as they are here. I didn't choose the banging sounds example at random and its explanation here is chilling. The backstory here is so solid that it justifies two things that rarely work for me in similar films: a late in the film brief diversion to a new location and a conspiracy angle.
I also loved the relationship between John and Claire. It's plainly evident she has feelings for him, but she also knows it's too soon after his Horrible Tragic Backstory to make advances. None of this is explicitly said, but it comes across so palpably in the performances from Scott and Van Devere, who had been real-life married for seven years at the time. I'll take a well-acted, well-reasoned relationship that has a romantic future beyond the run time of a film over a shoehorned-in unnecessary romantic subplot any day.
Music is also an important aspect of The Changeling, in both the diegetic and non-diegetic senses. Diegetically, John is a composer and the fact that the house already has a piano is one of the reasons Claire thinks of it for him. Of course the piano becomes the focus of some poltergeist activity, but it also becomes a story point when John abruptly abandons the piece he is recently composing and seems to pluck an entire melody from thin air. Of course, that piece of music had to come from somewhere... Non-diegetically, the score from Rick Wilkins and Ken Wannberg is excellent; mournful and unhurried, full of chiming bells and creaking strings. It works beautifully with the film, conveying mood and adding to the atmosphere and it fits perfectly with the overcast Seattle weather (which, I'm sure my fellow Philadelphians are familiar with).
A lot of my appreciation for The Changeling came from the script, by Russell Hunter and where things get really interesting is, apparently this happened to him! Hunter was a composer as well as a playwright and screenwriter. Deciding to focus on his composing, he leased a house in Colorado opposite what is now Cheesman Park and at some point began to experience haunting activities apparently very similar to those depicted in The Changeling, down to a very similar history, though as far as I can tell there was nothing quite like the resolution depicted in the film. When I enjoy a film as thoroughly as I did here, I always relish the chance to find out more about its production and the Severin Films Blu-ray release was a goldmine!
The story behind the story, as it were, is not too dissimilar to the plot of Poltergeist, oddly enough. In one of the bonus features, Phil Goodstein, author of numerous books on Colorado's history including "Ghosts of Denver: Capitol Hill", explains that what is now Cheesman Park was originally a rambling and unkempt graveyard that the city decided to transform into a beautiful, green, centrally-located park area, which required moving the thousands of bodies buried there. The job evidently wasn't conducted with the utmost care, including remains being transferred to pint-sized coffins for easier transportation and storage; y'know, the usual disrespecting for the dead bit. It is also believed, according to Goodstein, that not all the remains were even moved appropriately, leading to a rash of supernatural occurrences in the area around the park. The Changeling, as I mentioned, is set in Seattle, but setting that opening scene in Colorado feels like a tip of the hat from Hunter, as does the name of the neighborhood mentioned in the film: Chessman Park, rather than Cheesman.
If you were to ask me, I would absolutely recommend you watch The Changeling. The mood is eerie, the music is emotive and the deliberate pacing builds to an exceptional finale. Stay spooky! Long live the movies!
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This piece was written for the Dec. 2018 Moviejawn print issue, the theme of which was Magic, Ghosts and Seances. Purchase your copy HERE from the Moviejawn shop!
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