The Haunted House

The Changeling (Peter Medak, Canada, 1979)

THE CHANGELING is the first in the trilogy of films whose characteristics may be seen to anticipate those of the ghost melodrama cycle. The script – story by Russell Hunter; screenplay by William Gray and Diana Maddox – takes the basic material of THE HAUNTING (1963), the major haunted-house film to date, and develops it in new directions. First, it provides the house with a backstory that resonates in the present. The ghost here strives to communicate because it wants something. Second, this communication results in an investigation into a past injustice. In THE HAUNTING, the haunted house is deadly, but there is nothing that can be done about this, and Eleanor is killed by its power. THE CHANGELING has a different dynamic: here the haunting generates a quest, and this is the pattern in most of the subsequent ghost melodramas. Third, THE CHANGELING introduces a number of elements not in THE HAUNTING that would become common in ghost melodramas: water (the boy who became a ghost was drowned); a well (where the body was buried); an attic ghost zone. Finally, the film includes an excellent – and indeed seminal – séance.

THE CHANGELING interrupts its opening credits to show the hero’s personal traumatic event. Phoning for help after his car has broken down, John Russell (George C. Scott) is a helpless witness to a freak traffic accident in which both his wife and young daughter are killed. To help cope with his loss, John, a music composer, moves to a new teaching post at Seattle University. With the assistance of Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) of the local Historical Preservation Society, he leases Chessman Park House, a 19th-century mansion. But the house turns out to be haunted. Loud thumps resound through it each day at 6 a.m. One evening John finds bath water running and glimpses the figure of a ghost boy under the water. Glass is broken in an attic window, which leads John to discover, at the back of a closet, a sealed-off staircase leading to an attic room. In the room, John finds a child's wheelchair and a music box; the latter plays a tune which John himself had recently ‘composed’ at the piano – he now realises he had somehow picked the tune up from (forces within) the house.