The Changeling

The heart-stopping tale of terror focuses on a music composer and lecturer who moves to Seattle and settles in an old Victorian mansion, a house that harbours a deep, dark secret. Compelled by a strange force within the mansion to unravel its mystery and reveal the solution, the musician’s quest results in one of the most dramatic and electrifying motion pictures of the decade., A composer’s family is killed in a car crash and he retreats to a remote mansion to start a new life. Instead he finds the ghost of a crippled boy murdered years before who wants revenge on the living., A man whose family is killed in a road accident retires to a lonely mansion where he experiences supernatural occurrences linked to the house’s mysterious past., After the death of his family, a grieving composer rents out a secluded turn-of-the-century mansion and discovers the spirit of a dead child remains within its walls., Peter Medak’s The Changeling is among a handful of films, including The Haunting (1963), Ghost Story (1981), and Lady in White (1988), that have successfully recreated the intimate, drawing-room atmosphere of supernatural horror fiction. After his wife and daughter are killed in a snowbound car accident, classical composer John Russell (George C. Scott) relocates from New York to Seattle to teach at his alma mater. Looking for a quiet place to rest and continue writing music, he is referred Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) at the Seattle Historical Preservation Society. Claire shows John a large, sparsely furnished estate in the outlying countryside. He takes the house, appreciating its remoteness and the solitude it might afford, and diverts himself by renovating and settling in. He even starts to compose, putting aside his older work in favor of a new, sentimental piece for the piano. It is not long, however, before he begins having nightmares about the accident that killed his wife and daughter. Possibly because of this trauma, he is open to communications from the house’s ghostly occupants. Pursuing a loud, repetitive pounding noise in an upper room, he stumbles on the apparition of a young boy drowning in a tub. Working together with Claire, John discovers frightening parallels between this vision and buried events from the house’s past. Horror writer M.R. James once said that his goal as a writer was to make the reader feel “pleasantly uncomfortable.” Those looking for a similar experience in movies will appreciate The Changeling as a gem in the horror genre., Chilling ghost story about a widowed music professor who moves into a grand mansion only to find it haunted by the ghost of a young boy murdered years before. The professor’s discovery about the past soon leads him into danger in the present.