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The Changeling: Standard Edition
[Blu-ray 4K]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Second Sight Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (17th May 2023). |
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The Film
 After his wife (Frenzy's Jean Marsh) and daughter Kathy (Michelle Martin) are killed in a road accident, composer John Russell (Patton's George C. Scott) quits New York for Seattle to teach music at his alma mater. In need of a remote place where he can compose at all hours, John is shown the long-uninhabited Chessman House by local historical society representative Claire Norman (Scott's wife Trish Van Devere of The Last Run). It soon becomes apparent, however, that he is not alone. Doors open on their own, a barrage of clanging sounds wake him up at the same time every night, and his keepsake of Kathy's toy ball bounces down the stairs and reappears no matter how many times he tries to get rid of it. At first he believes that his daughter's ghost is trying to contact him; however, he is nudged from the beyond to discover a hidden attic room in which he discovers a music box – the tune of which he has been composing – and a child-sized wheelchair. John and Claire dig into the past of the house – which old-timer Miss Huxley (Sunday in the Country's Ruth Springford) informs them should never have been rented as it "doesn't want people" – and discovers the accidental death of a little girl; however, a séance conducted in the house reveals another presence desperate to contact John and able to visit violence upon anyone who attempts to interfere, among them venerated Senator Joseph Carmichael (The Old Dark House's Melvyn Douglas) who would prefer that the distant past remain buried. The subtle and genuinely creepy polar opposite to the likes of Poltergeist, The Changeling succeeds not only as a technical exercise in suspense and scares but as one of the most moving takes on since-overused ghost story trope of a protagonist who has suffered tragic loss becoming vulnerable to the spirit world since Don't Look Now with which it shares recurring motives of water and shattered glass (although THE CHANGELING shares some similar imagery and plot devices with the relentlessly grim television adaptation of The Woman in Black, the more recent Hammer adaptation imposes loss upon its protagonist to lesser effect). Director Peter Medak (The Ruling Class) deftly manipulates a checklist of ghost story moments and manages to wring as many chills out of moments the audience can see coming (the camera tracking away from departing characters to objects which suddenly move on their own) to jumps in which the viewer is shown the character's reaction before the sight. The film's main set-pieces are the film's séance in which the spirit communicates with a medium (stage actress Helen Burns) through automatic writing, and John discovery of another participant in the séance while listening to a tape recording afterward. The mere sight of the child's cobweb-covered wheelchair has seared itself into the memories of many a viewer (particularly one low angle shot at the top of the stairs). The gruff Scott surprises with his nuanced portrayal of a shattered man who at first is driven to resolve the mystery simply because he "can't go through all this again" and then to expose the truth out of fear of whom the spirit might harm next. Even the film's villain is more of a proxy target of retribution and is genuinely pained when forced to face a truth he does not want to believe is true. Scott is well-supported by a roster of Canadian and British talent – a few exteriors were shot in Seattle but several exterior and interior locations were shot around Vancouver – including The Fugitive's Barry Morse as a dotty parapsychologist, Battlestar Galactica's John Colicos as a police captain sent by Carmichael to intimidate John, The Flying Nun's Mother Superior Madeleine Sherwood as Claire's mother, Frances Hyland (Happy Birthday to Me) as a woman whose daughter has a terrifying encounter with ghost miles from the house, and Eric Christmas (Harold and Maude) as the medium's husband. Van Devere would be showcased in her own battle with the supernatural the same year in The Hearse. The striking Chessman House was actually a distressed façade erected in front of a smaller house on the property while the interiors were a sprawling, continuous three-story set meticulously designed by Trevor Williams (Night of Dark Shadows) through which the camera of Johnny Coquillon (Witchfinder General) glides handheld like the physical embodiment of the restless ghost. Although Rick Wilkins is credited with composing the score, much of the score was actually ghost-written by credited arranger Kenneth Wannberg (The Philadelphia Experiment) while the music box tune was the work of Howard Blake (Flash Gordon).
Video
Released theatrically in the UK by Brent Walker Film Distributors and then on videotape by VTC, The Changeling first received a barebones American DVD from HBO which was nevertheless a nice upgrade in terms of an anamorphic transfer and Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround track. In Europe, rights owner Studio Canal licensed the title to several territories including the UK and Germany, and their DVD edition was identical with menus in multiple languages and multiple audio/subtitle options. While that disc featured an audio commentary by director Peter Medak, the anamorphic transfer was over-sharpened and green-tinged. In 2018, Second Sight in the U.K. and Severin Films in the U.S. announced Blu-ray editions from a new 4K restoration with the former releasing two-disc limited and single-disc standard editions in June followed by Severin's limited and regular editions in August of the same year. Both utilized the same 4K restoration and looked virtually identical (at least in Severin's first pressing which had audio sync issues while their replacement disc inadvertently used a master that had not undergone final clean-up and was followed up by a second replacement edition). Severin upgraded the title to 4K UHD last year in a standard edition while Second Sight has replicated the contents of their earlier limited edition in a new limited edition three-disc set – 4K UHD, standard Blu-ray, soundtrack CD, and paper extras – along with the concurrent standard edition UHD reviewed here (as well as a standard edition Blu-ray updated with the new video extras). The 4K restoration in 1080p SDR was already thankfully stripped of the greenish tinge of the European DVD transfers but the upgrades in the 4K HDR10 2160p24 HEVC 1.85:1 widescreen presentation are more modest yet appreciable for owners of the earlier Blu-ray. We have not been able to compare the Second Sight edition to the Severin but the overall grainier seventies film stock image was more evident but here the entire opening sequence through the credits and the location captions is even more so – there may also be some diffusion in the snowy opening as well – and yet, the eye is drawn to the frost on the faux-wood paneling of the family station wagon or the slightly fogged glass of the telephone booth. From that point on, the image is slightly less saturated than the earlier Blu-ray presentation without any of the color seeming unnatural from the location greenery, occasional reds, and a touch of blue in a couple overcast exterior sequences. The greater resolution draws the eye to just how impressive the house facade and the woodwork of Trevor Williams' impressive sets holds up, looking like a realistic location rather than a soundstage set. The eye is drawn into formerly solid blacks of the Blu-ray to reveal incremental detail in the shadows including set décor that probably went completely unnoticed in SD. A few shots may distract preceding and following opticals also call attention to themselves with skin tones becoming momentarily pinker or the contrasts slightly elevated, but this is a mark of the period of the film's production.
Audio
Audio options are carried over from the earlier edition including an LPCM 2.0 encode of the original Dolby Stereo mix in which underlying hiss is evident in the many long silences, as well as a cleaner DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track in which voices sometimes seem recessed by positions of the actors in the frame while giving depth to the film's surround whispers and offscreen noises (although nowhere near what one would expect of a similar film actually mixed in 5.1). Optional English HoH subtitles are included.
Extras
As with the Second Sight Blu-ray edition, the Medak commentary recorded for the DVDs was been dropped in favor of a new track featuring Medak and producer Joel B. Michaels (Black Moon Rising). Michaels reveals that the pitch came to him as a three hour tape recording in first person by composer Russell Hunter who claimed that it was a true story. He bought the rights for a million dollars and hired two writers to adapt it – Canadian William Grey (Humongous) and British Diana Maddox (The Amateur) – only to replace them and rewrite it when their adaptation moved away from the spirit of the Hunter source. He also mentions that Donald Cammell (Performance) and Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) were approached before Medak. Medak wanted to do the project because it scared him as much as the script for The Haunting – on which he is uncredited but was presumably second assistant director as he was on some Hammer films like The Phantom of the Opera from that period – but nearly did not take it because he felt that the intended location was all wrong until Michaels promised to raise more funds to build sets (including the aforementioned façade). They discuss Scott's performance, highlight the work of the supporting cast members, the subtle scares, and the sound design while lamenting the decision to let Lord Grade's new Associated Film Distributors handle American distribution rather than MGM. Exclusive to the disc are two separate interviews with Medak. First up is an interview with Peter Medak by filmmaker Adrian Garcia Bogliano (74:01) from 2018 at Mexico's Morbido Fest in which focuses less on The Changeling than on Medak's overall career starting with his childhood infatuation with English-language movies just before they were banned by the Hungarian Communist government, arriving in England and starting from the bottom sweeping the cutting room floor, making his first filmmaking friend in then camera operator Nicolas Roeg, working as clapper boy then second and first assistant director including some sixties Hammer Films productions, getting his first opportunity to direct with Negatives (after turning down a contract at Paramount through his friendship with actor Michael Caine on whose Funeral in Berlin he directed second unit), and going to Hollywood where he learned to work in television before coming back to England. While the talk is rather scant on discussion of the main feature, Bogliano asks some stimulating questions about his involvement with Pink Floyd and the loose trilogy of Let Him Have It, The Krays – a film he was reticent about taking because he knew the Krays personally when shooting on location on their home turf – and Romeo is Bleeding (as well as the similarities between the climax of that film and the music video he directed for Roger Waters' "Three Wishes" during that production). Of The Changeling, we learn here that the original director was Donald Cammell but he wanted to shoot the film in black and white and quit over creative differences, that Richard Lester and Jack Clayton had been asked to direct before himself, and that Don't Look Now screenwriters Allan Scott and Chris Byrant did uncredited work on the script. Also new is "Exile on Curzon St.: Peter Medak on His Early Years in Swinging London" (19:46) from the Severin disc in which he covers some of the same material about his early years, with his opera singer aunt trying to smuggle him out of Hungary more than once as a child, arriving in London and making his way up through the ranks including his assistant director job on Sparrows Can't Sing where he first met the Krays in a tense confrontation over protection money that evolved into a friendship, and his later attempts to capture London as he remembered it from that period in The Krays. "The House on Cheesman Park: The Haunting True Story of The Changeling" (17:30) is a featurette in which Phil Goldstein (author of "The Ghosts of Denver: Capitol Hill") sheds light on the local legends and "true story" behind the film, starting with Cheesman Park's beginnings as a scenic city cemetery soon overloaded by a high infant mortality rate and the poor health of prospectors, paupers funerals in which bodies were dumped into nearby vacant lots (and excavated during public works projects in the seventies), the shortcut taken by the undertaker hired to move the roughly twenty-thousand bodies when the area was to be developed into a public park at the turn of the century, and the bodies that remained when the city gave loved ones ninety days to claim the remains themselves. Goldstein then discusses Russell Hunter who moved into a house across from the park and claimed to have been haunted by a ghost leading to his discovery of a secret attic room and the belongings of a child, Hunter's investigation, as well as Goldstein's own research into the families that inhabited the house before Hunter. "The Music of The Changeling" (8:58) is an interview with music arranger Wannberg who discusses the theme he composed, his dissatisfaction with the music box tune that was composed before his involvement, temp tracking the film, and his reactions to the initial mix done in Canada. The featurette does not touch upon Wilkins' contributions or that of Blake. "Building The House of Horror" (10:54) is an interview with art director Reuben Freed (Killer Party) who came to work at the CBC as an art director and met Williams on the Canada-lensed TV movie Who'll Save Our Children?. He discusses the building of the film's sets and Williams' artistry, as well as scenic painter James T. Woods (Blade Runner) who was responsible for the distressed look of the exterior façade. In "Master of Horror: Mick Garris on The Changeling" (5:30), Garris (Sleepwalkers) expresses his admiration not only for The Changeling but also the rest of Medak's oeuvre – contrasting the formalism of the ghost story with the likes of The Ruling Class (or even Species II) – and recalling his desire to recruit Medak as one of the Masters of Horror for which he directed The Washingtonians. In "The Psychotronic Tourist: The Changeling" (16:06, critic Kier-La Janisse hosts a visit to the film's locations with Fangoria's Michael Gingold and We Are Still Here's Ted Geoghegan visiting Lincoln Center in New York, Seattle International Film Festival programmer Clinton McClung at the Seattle locations including the cemetery, and effects artist/director Ryan Nicholson (Collar) in Vancouver (including a visit to the modern house on the redeveloped land where the mansion façade once stood). The disc also includes the film's theatrical trailer (2:17) and a TV spot (0:26), the latter showing AFD's miserable marketing of the film ("Don't go in the attic!").
Packaging
Like the previous 2018 Blu-ray standard edition, this standard edition is packaged in a black keep case. The 2023 limited edition comes in a similar packages as the 2018 one with Blu-ray copy and CD soundtrack, but the earlier 40-page booklet has been expanded into a 108-page book with new essays by Martyn Conterio, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Rich Johnson, Mikel J Koven, Meagan Navarro, Rachel Reeves, Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Heather Wixson plus archive interview with Peter Medak, and five collectors' art cards.
Overall
The scariest ghost story of the eighties, The Changeling, comes to Blu-ray from a 4K restoration courtesy of Second Sight's limited edition package.
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