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THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS 1980

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Directed by John Hough, Vincent McEveety (uncredited)

Written by Harry Spalding, Brian Clemens, Rosemary Anne Sisson

Starring Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Carroll Baker, Kyle Richards

Synopsis

A family moves into a creaky manor house in the English countryside, where almost immediately the eldest daughter is haunted by visions of a girl about her age who went missing many years before.

Why We Love It

Disney has the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and Pixar as the jewels in its crown today, so it’s hard to imagine there was a time when the Mouse House hit a bumpy patch. But such was the case in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In a bid to shed its squeaky clean image, the studio tested the waters with such diverse fare as special effects-laden sci-fi flicks like The Black Hole and Tron and the touching coming-of-age drama Tex. Hopes were high for The Watcher in the Woods—one exec reportedly said it could be the company’s very own Exorcist—but after a disastrous early screening, the studio pulled the film from theaters for tinkering. Still, even a new ending failed to answer the question posed in the title: who (or what) is the watcher in the woods?

The answer they came up with was, to paraphrase History Channel host Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, basically “I don’t know, therefore aliens”—or more specifically, what looks like a cut-rate version of the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien, which materializes with absolutely no warning and dissipates in a flash of mediocre special effects. Given this utterly bonkers conclusion, it’s not hard to see why critics were less than enthusiastic.

But like an urban legend or a half-remembered ghost story, The Watcher in the Woods flickered in the memories of many a child of the 1980s. If you happened to be in that cohort, there’s a decent chance that The Watcher in the Woods was the first horror movie you ever saw—and the first one that scared the dickens out of you.

Anecdotally, parents rented the film because the Disney logo was on the VHS box, and then unintentionally subjected their children to a tale rife with anguished spirits, possessed little sisters, and adults who are either absent, dismissive, or broken. The kids who stuck with it got a crash course in the language of horror movies, from credible jump scares and ominous POV shots à la Friday the 13th, to the eerie sound of a music box and the disquiet of things looming half-seen just beyond your line of vision. (Or right in front of you: the scenes in which the long-lost Karen tries to communicate through mirrors are downright terrifying.)

See it again in adulthood, and you might find that The Watcher in the Woods isn’t bad at all, save for the botched ending(s); at the very least, it’s a solid haunted house movie from director John Hough (who helmed Escape to Witch Mountain, another supernatural kid pic from Disney), and Bette Davis lends gravitas to the whole thing. But ultimately, the appeal of the movie might come down to its setting: every adventurous kid would love to root around in big old houses, dense forests, or abandoned buildings, and The Watcher in the Woods provides all three.