There were a lot of movies in the 70s featuring veteran actors in horror roles. Think of Joan Crawford in Trog, Veronica Lake in Flesh Feast, Joseph Cotten in a ton of things. A year before this movie came out, Rod Steiger was a priest in The Amityville Horror, so maybe George C. Scott thought that if Steiger could do it, so could he, and here he is as a composer who, reeling from a terrible family tragedy, leases an old mansion so he can work in private. Of course, he's not alone, as the house won't shut up. What does it want? Well, as these things usually go, it wants revenge of some kind. It takes Scott's John Russell the entire movie to figure it out, but it all has to do with a different family's tragedy some 70 years before, a tragedy that somehow involves a sitting US Senator (Melvyn Douglas). Can Russell and his friend Claire (Trish Van Devere) give the house the peace it needs so he can get the peace he needs? Although there are some logical faults with the plot, and although the movie itself could have withstood some tighter editing (too much exposition crammed into quick scenes), Scott brings equal amounts of panache and vulnerability as the troubled music man. Some of the effects may seem dated to current audiences, but I found them chilling nonetheless. The house itself is pretty cool, too, but don't bother looking for it in real life - it was all a set.
Review of The Changeling
