Ch-Ch-Ch-Changeling

I was in the mood for a good scare (hopefully), so I sat down and watched the movie The Changeling. (Not to be confused with Changeling, the Clint Eastwood movie starring Angelina Jolie.) Made in the late 1970s and starring George C. Scott, it's the tale of a man who, after losing his wife and daughter in an accident, moves into a house that was witness to a tragedy of its own, and is now haunted.

It bears repeating -- this is a horror movie that was made in the 1970s. As such, it has a really slow pace. People who like the way scary movies are put together these days are going to find it slow, and maybe even boring. In my opinion, though, this is actually one of the things this movie gets right.

It starts off with a bang. The very first scene shows the accident in which Scott's character loses his family, and while some of the camera work is a bit arch (it's just the style of the time), the drama and emotion of it is powerful and gripping. Then things come on with a deliberate slowness that I found rather effective. Overtly horrible things don't start happening right away. There's a creeping dread as minor things -- at first easily dismissed -- slowly build up a fairly effective tension. Basically, I really liked the first half of this movie, and they just don't make them like this anymore.

But then the second half of the movie doesn't really deliver on the set-up. Once the significance of the title is explained, it's a little bit of a head scratcher. And things get muddier from there. The motivations of whatever force is haunting the house get cloudy, characters get introduced for go-nowhere subplots... even the acting starts to get a little hammy.

If you do like movies in this genre, you'll probably want to check this one out -- even though the wheels do come off the figurative wagon a bit towards the conclusion. There are still a lot of good scenes early on, and a particularly cool "seance" sequence. But overall, it's really only about a C+.