The Watcher in the Woods

The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

Dir. John Hough

Written by Brian Clemens, Harry Spalding, and Rosemary Rosemary Anne Sisson. Based on the novel by Florence Engall Randall

Starring Lynne-Holly Johnson, Bette Davis, Kyle Richards, David McCallum

When wholesome teenager Jan (Lynne-Holly Johnson, who would the very next year graduate from “wholesome teen” to “Bond Girl” in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY) moves into a suspiciously inexpensive English country manor with her family, she almost immediately realizes that something is wrong. First, there’s the manor’s mysterious owner (Bette Davis, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE) who lives on-premise and keeps making vague insinuating comments and staring meaningfully at her. Then, there’s the fact that everywhere she goes, glass keeps cracking and she keeps seeing a vision of a blindfolded girl begging for help. Definitely some kind of red flag, there. And also sometimes she sees cheesy blue animated flashes of light. And her adorable little sister (Kyle Richards, HALLOWEEN) keeps getting possessed, like, every single fucking day, and saying cryptic things about someone named “Karen.” But the one thing she doesn’t see (but we do!) is that there is someone or something in the woods outside the house, obsessively watching her from a lazy EVIL DEAD first-person perspective. A watcher in the woods, if you will. Well, only one. The WATCHER IN THE WOODS, one might say, if one were, like the studio here, inclined to mysteriously retitle the novel A Watcher In The Woods by Florence Engall Randall by altering only a single determiner.

But where are my manners! Welcome back to yet another season of Chainsawnukah, brave reader. You haven’t heard from me in some time. Sorry about that. Things have been oscillating between depressing and catastrophic for me this year, and frankly put I simply haven’t had it in me to watch many movies, let alone write about them. Right up to October 1, I really thought they might need to make a stop-motion special about me, because it might be The Year Without a Chainsawnukah. It would have been the first since 2011. This fucking world.

But you know what, that old October magic is impossible to resist. I was a fool to think I could defy it. I may not hit the marathon with quite the self-destructive fanaticism I have in past years, but, like Pinhead, it turns out if you open the Box, I pretty much have to show up and at least give some exposition or something. October’s here. The Box is open. Time once again to explore the furthest reaches of experience, pain and pleasure indivisible. We have such sights to show you!

By which I mean, in this particular case, a PG-rated Disney-branded movie adapted from a 1976 young adult novel. Look, they can’t all be THE FACES OF DEATH, here, OK? I haven’t reviewed a damn thing since June, let me dip my toe in the water a little bit, would ya?

Anyway, THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS is a pretty odd beast. Disney does not have an extensive staple of horror movies, even by the fairly tame standards established here. But in 1973, THE EXORCIST made 443 million bucks worldwide --that’s a hair under 2 billion in 2017 dollars-- and so when producer Tom Leetch (producer of FREAKY FRIDAY) optioned the 1976 young adult horror novel by Florence Engall Randall with the pitch “this could be our EXORCIST!” studio head Ron Miller listened very attentively indeed. They hired capable journeyman director John Hough (who had previously directed the Disney’s 1975 Sci-Fi/Fantrasy ESCAPE FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN) after seeing his Richard Matheson adaptation THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. He’d also directed Hammer’s TWINS OF EVIL and would go on to INCUBUS (not the Shatner one) and THE HOWLING IV, so even if he dabbled in other genres he was a legit horror guy. At the time, it must have seemed like they were really going to try something new for the studio.

Of course, by the time WATCHER actually went into production, THE EXORCIST was nearly a decade old, the horror genre was surging head-on towards an all-slasher format, and suddenly this didn’t seem like such a sure thing anymore. Needless to say, the studio panicked, started nervously showing up on set to tell Hough to tone down scary scenes, rewrote the ending (possibly as many as 152 times, if you believe visual effects designer Harrison Ellenshaw), released it, pulled it from theaters, reshot the ending, re-released it, pulled it from theaters and reshot the ending again, and finally re-released it one last time, having done every conceivable thing possible to reshape an obvious horror movie movie into… well, not any one specific kind of thing, really, just not a horror movie.

You wouldn’t know from watching it that it had such a catastrophic production history (except maybe from the official ending, which really is a complete trainwreck), but you can’t help but feel like something is up with it. At its core, this is clearly a very lightly complicated ghost story, but man does it seem to go out of its way to be every other possible thing it can think of to distract you from that fact, up to and including excising or soft-pedaling more unsavory story elements to the point of turning the plot into head-scratching nonsense. It can’t entirely hide what it really is, and when he’s given leave to do so, Hough does mount a handful of pleasingly eerie moments, most memorably when an ill-advised trip to a house of mirrors (by someone constantly haunted by a ghost who appears in mirrors) results in a bunch of refracted images which border on the psychedelic. But way too often, the movie seems to be deliberately holding the horror at arm’s length, and none too gracefully. A scene where Jan is almost killed by an errant flying dirtbike (long story) refuses to lean into any kind of escalating tension, even as the editing insists it should with its ominous leading shots of bikes wiping out.* A scene where the “watcher” sends an equestrian Jan into a mad uncontrolled flight plays as moderately exciting rather than panic-inducing. Standard possessed-child-speaking-ominously sequences are framed in sunny golden-hour hues and end in laughter and hugs. The net result is a movie which seems bound and determined not to be the thing it obviously is.

This becomes particularly problematic when it becomes clear that the mystery revolves around some children performing an occult ceremony many years ago and ushering some kind of mysterious force into our world. So far so good, except that apparently during production, Disney got cold feet on the idea of Satanic rituals and cut every mention of them from the movie. That would have been fine if they’d replaced that plot device with something else, but instead, they basically left it in and just decided to awkwardly dance around the idea while still insisting they’re talking about something else. We see an obviously evil occult ceremony taking place, but the dialogue keeps insisting there’s nothing untowards happening here.

This reduces the plot to utter screaming madness, because we’re left to believe that apparently a group of children were performing an innocent game of ring-around-the-rosey in an abandoned church at midnight night during an eclipse (!?), and then suddenly, for absolutely no reason of any kind, a mysterious supernatural entity just showed up. And then, despite being completely innocent of any kind of occult chicanery, the kids were plagued with crippling guilt and refused to ever discuss what happened and lived stunted lives wracked with guilt, just because. I mean, it just makes no sense on its face! Either decide to make this a plot point or don’t, but for fuck’s sake don’t make it a plot point and then pretend it isn’t one!

Mostly the movie isn’t quite as ill-conceived, though. It looks pretty nice thanks to cinematographer Alan Hume (DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS, RETURN OF THE FUCKIN’ JEDI) and its central mystery unfolds at a nice steady clip, constantly brushing up against menace without quite crossing the line, but at least rarely dull. Bette Davis, reliable as ever, puts on a good glower as the menacing landlady, and frequently makes the character seem more interesting than she technically is (Johnson, as our protagonist, has only two settings, which are “concerned” and “shouting,” and consequently doesn’t fare as well as Davis, though the script doesn't demand much more from her). If it’s never close to scary, it at least flirts with being eerie.

So it’s good enough that it could have been a solid little appetizer for adventurous youngsters who need a gateway drug to the world of horror cinema. It could have, that is, if it had been able to rally for a suitable climax. The atmosphere is there, the mystery is engaging enough, the drama (having been adapted from a novel) is somewhat muted but still functional. All they had to do was offer a morsel of payoff. And Hogue, to his credit, seems to have understood that, having someone (uncredited, for reasons which will become clear shortly) build a pretty kick-ass alien/demon/interdimensional insect (or whatever the watcher ends up being, it’s not clear) puppet which materializes and manages to snatch our poor heroine into another dimension. This was cool and made sense in relation to the story which had preceded it, so of course it had to go. This is what it would have looked like:

Obviously something like that was way too much realness for the suits. What to replace it with, though? After dozens and possibly hundred of writers took a pass at it, here’s they came up with:

Yup, just a goopy light and some vague exposition which doesn’t really explain anything. And then Bette Davis shows up in what is obviously another scene shot many months later, looking a little bit surprised and disheveled, as if someone just pushed her out in front of the camera with no warning, and then she has a little bit of vague exposition which still doesn’t really explain anything, and then the credits roll and the movie slinks off into the night with its tail between its legs. Bummer.

And I mean, Jesus guys, you had it right there! They literally had an ending which would have wrapped things up with at least some vague semblance of dignity and internal logic, shot, scored, edited, and fucking released, and they still couldn’t resist going to great expense to shoot themselves in the foot and make everything lamer. Aside from the terrific (and deleted) original climax to JACOB’S LADDER, I can’t think of another case in all horror cinema where someone went this far out of their way to deliberately make a movie worse. It’s frustrating. This was probably never going to be a great movie, but it could have been a pretty sturdy one. As it is, I’m sorry to say that it’s pretty deservedly obscure, notable only for a decent Bette Davis role and the oddity of seeing what is fundamentally a horror movie for kids under the Disney label.

Fortunately, Disney wasn’t quite done with this ill-advised idea: three years later, they followed this one up with an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. To the surprise of no one who knew the history of WATCHER IN THE WOODS, that one was also plagued by disastrous infighting, reshoots, huge financial losses and related tomfoolery, but at least it turned out to have a little more oomph in the end. I kind of like it, actually. It doesn’t quite work, but it does a better job than WATCHER of making it possible to imagine why a Disney-branded children’s horror film might be interesting.

I mean, there is something there, I think. If horror is about evoking the dread of a world with boundaries which are not as fixed and stable as we comfortably imagine, a young person makes an ideal protagonist. It’s a bit of a cliche, but children are, by and large, still learning about the world, and are not as fixed in their thinking and expectations. That makes a significant strain of horror fiction not just suited for a child’s perspective, but specifically reflective of it. Stephen King certainly figured that out, with It being something of a magnum opus on that idea. But the tellers of fairy tales knew this centuries ago, as we can see in the indisputable horror of the cannibal witch in Hansel and Gretel, the murderous wolf in Red Riding Hood, or the “new mother” with “glass eyes and a wooden tail” from Lucy Clifford’s 1882 short fable The New Mother. These “fairy tales” are not just like horror stories, they are identifiably horror stories. If they were written today, there would be no doubt whatsoever about the genre they belonged in. Not every kind of horror story is applicable here, of course; the slasher genre, with its fixation on the disruption of a fixed life by the sudden intrusion of violence (often as punishment for past sins) arises from a distinctly adult mindset, for example. But something like A Watcher In The Woods or Something Wicked This Way Comes, with their timeless settings and vaguely allegorical visions of imperceptible nebulous forces secretly at work unseen, benefit enormously from a young person’s credulity and familiarity with the alien mechanics of a still-mysterious world. Their strangeness makes sense to a child, and the comparably straightforward emotional hook of curiosity and fear fits with the primary-colored psychological landscape of both children and children’s fiction. Both WATCHER and SOMETHING WICKED fall apart in the execution (mostly, it seems, as a result of being chimeras of conflicting and contradictory artistic/corporate impulses) but there’s enough in them to at least hint they could have been something really special.

Still, between the two, it’s pretty obvious that Disney’s instincts for filmmaking were directly at odds with the requirements of a real horror story, and in 1984 they stopped trying to put a square peg through a round hole, creating the nom de plum Touchstone Pictures through which to release more adult-oriented affairs. A watcher in the woods is one thing, but Disney preferred them in the theater, and two trainwreck money-losers in a row was two too many.

All these years later it really does seem like kind of a missed opportunity. After all, the 1980s was the era which truly established that horror was irresistible to kids, as the commercial appeal of Krueger et al became apparent in toys, bedsheets, lunchboxes and so forth. I doubt anyone in 1980 would have been dressing as Bette Davis for Halloween even if this one had been better, but in retrospect it’s a shame Disney got so scared of their own experiment. Like Victor Frankenstein, they actually achieved what they had been dreaming of, but then rejected it and tried to destroy what they had made. If they’d just trusted the idea that kids were sturdy enough to want (and deserve!) a good scare now and then, history might have turned out pretty differently. One can even imagine a whole subgenre of horror films aimed at kids, with younger protagonists and stories that reflected their perspective and their distinct experience of horror. Somewhere out there in the multiverse, there’s a parallel world where someone adapted Natalie Babbit’s Knee-Knock Rise and Avi’s Something Upstairs and made an anthology out of Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, and also Trump died on the toilet in 1991. Surely it would be a better world.

But oh well, if we can’t have that, at least Disney was nice enough to put the better endings that they deleted on the DVD as a special feature. Observe how much better this one obviously is, and then treat yourself to an even longer, even crazier one where she goes to another planet (seriously) and it turns into fucking 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. And hey, even if this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, at least it’s Chainsawnukah season again. Things could be a lot worse.

*It doesn’t help that one of the bikers is our arguable romantic lead (Benedict Taylor, “Fighter Pilot Bravo 2” STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE) but we’ve barely met him and he’s wearing a helmet and it hasn’t been established that he rides bikes, so this is needlessly confusing.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	A Masterpiece of Suspense! Promises the poster, a hint of desperation in its voice.
TITLE ACCURACY	100%
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yep, of the novel by Florence Engall Randall
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	Nope
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Shot mostly in England, but for Disney pictures
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghost/ possession / I dunno, sci-fi interdimensional zombie bug? Depends on what you think the "watcher" ends up being.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Bette Davis
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	John Hogue has a handful of horror films under his belt
NUDITY?	If they wouldn’t even mention witchcraft, they definitely weren’t gonna go here.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Horse goes crazy and almost tosses its rider
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yeah, definitely seems like the house is somehow haunted, except that Jan also haunted elsewhere sometimes. And when the explanation comes it sure doesn’t seem like it makes sense that this building would be haunted, but whatever.
POSSESSION?	Yep
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Of course not! These people holding hands and chanting in an abandoned church at midnight on the equinox are just having a silly game! Let’s drop the subject!
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Lots of Watching, it’s right there in the title
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you start to make a movie, and then by the time you’re done with it it’s not in the same genre as it started, it’s probably not a very good way to make a movie.