Here’s the plan for Friday nights: a film that’s a bit odd, a bit wrong, and costs nothing to watch. No subscription, no rental, no free trial you forget to cancel. Tonight it’s The Changeling, a 1980 ghost story with George C. Scott, on ordinary telly.
Tonight on Talking Pictures
Talking Pictures TV, Freeview 82, tonight (Friday 9 October). Caroline Munro opens the Cellar Club at 9pm and The Changeling starts at 9:05pm. The channel is also on Freesat 306, Sky 324, Virgin 445, Freely 36 and YouView 82.
What it’s about
John Russell (George C. Scott) is a New York composer whose wife and daughter are killed in an accident on a snowy roadside. Trying to start again, he takes a teaching job in Seattle and rents an enormous old house from the local historical society, whose Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) tells him it has stood empty for twelve years. Then the banging starts, every morning. That’s all you need going in.
Why it’s worth staying in for
By reputation it isn’t a shocker. It’s a slow, grown-up, rather sad ghost story, carried by Scott playing a man in mourning rather than a man screaming at shadows. Martin Scorsese put it on his list of the scariest films ever made and called it “filled with sadness and dread”, which is about the best sales pitch a haunted house can get. Entertainment Weekly ranked it number one among haunted house films.
The best-known scenes are wonderfully simple: a child’s red ball bouncing down the stairs, a séance, an empty wheelchair. Things that shouldn’t move, moving.
It’s also a Canadian film pretending to be American, shot mostly in Vancouver and Victoria standing in for Seattle. The house never existed: nobody could find a real one gothic enough, so they built a front on a Vancouver plot and shot the interiors in a studio. Peter Medak was the third director hired, and later said: “I read the script and it petrified me.” Scott and Van Devere were married in real life. It won eight awards at the very first Genie Awards, Canada’s national film prizes, including Best Motion Picture.
If you like numbers, it’s 7.1 on IMDb and 3.6 on Letterboxd.
The true story behind it (or so he said)
The film is based on what composer and playwright Russell Hunter said happened to him in the late 1960s, renting an old house near Cheesman Park in Denver. In his telling there was banging at six every morning, taps turning themselves on, a hidden staircase to a room with a child’s journal, a red rubber ball dropping down the stairs, and a séance. Take it with a pinch of salt. Denver’s Westword points out that the Denver Public Library has no record of Hunter living there, and a local historian found no Colorado family of the era with the fortune the story needs. The house was demolished long ago.
Stay up for: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972)
Straight after, at 11:25pm, Talking Pictures has something scruffier. An obnoxious theatre director (co-writer Alan Ormsby) takes his troupe to a small island cemetery off Miami for a night of games, including a mock ritual to raise the dead. Made for about $50,000, it’s a comedy-horror that turns properly grim, and the Encyclopedia of Horror reckoned its effects “surprisingly effective”. It’s credited to Benjamin Clark, who as Bob Clark went on to make Black Christmas, Porky’s and, of all things, A Christmas Story. Ratings are mixed (2.8 on Letterboxd), so think late-night curio rather than lost classic. Content note: zombie gore, and a corpse treated very badly for laughs.
Where to watch free
- The Changeling: tonight on Talking Pictures TV at 9:05pm. I couldn’t confirm another free English-language version in the UK; the one on Tubi is listed as a Spanish dub.
- Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things: tonight at 11:25pm, or any time free on Plex
If you like this, try…
- Carnival of Souls (1962, dir. Herk Harvey). The sole survivor of a car crash becomes a church organist in a new town, keeps seeing a ghoulish man, and feels drawn to a deserted carnival. Watch free on YouTube
- Night Tide (1961, dir. Curtis Harrington). A young Dennis Hopper falls for a woman playing a mermaid on the pier, and starts to wonder if she’s the real thing. Watch free on YouTube
- Messiah of Evil (1974, dir. Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz). A young woman looking for her missing artist father ends up in a very strange seaside town. Watch free on Tubi
Content note
The Changeling opens with the deaths of a wife and young daughter in a road accident. Later there’s a child’s murder in flashback, and some drowning imagery.
Over to you
I haven’t seen it yet. I’m watching tonight like everyone else and will add my own thoughts in the comments afterwards. If you’ve already seen The Changeling, tell me what got under your skin: the ball, the séance or that wheelchair? And if you’re watching tonight because of this post, come back and tell me how it went, and whether you stayed up for the zombies too.
This is the first Free Friday Fright, a new Friday strand of free-to-watch films: odd, a bit wrong, very watchable, and nothing to pay. See you next Friday.
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