Watcher in the Woods (1980 film)

The Watcher in the Woods (1980), AKA Watcher in the Woods and A Watcher in the Woods; a remake also appeared in 2017

Summary

"The film that terrified a generation of viewers! Something is watching. Something unknown." When a family moves to a country home, the young girls experience strange happenings that have a link to an occult event years past.

Details

The Watcher from a deleted scene in the 1981 Watcher in the Woods (1980 film)...

• Release Date: 1981; 2017
• Country/Language: US, English
• Genres/Technical: Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction
• Setting: 1980s/Modern Wales
• Runtime: 1 hr 24 min; 1 hr 27 min
• Starring: Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards; Anjelica Huston, Tallulah Evans, Nicholas Galitzine
• Director: John Hough, Vincent McEveety (reshot ending and beginning); Melissa Joan Hart (2017 teleplay)
• Writer: Brian Clemens (screenplay), Florence Engel Randall (novel); Scott Abbott (2017 teleplay)
• Producer/Production Co: Walt Disney Productions; Hartbreak Films, Lifetime Television
• View Trailer: (1981), (2017)
• TVTropes: (link)
• Wikipedia: (link)
• IMDB Page: (1981), (2017)
• 1981 Alternate Endings: (Alt1), (Alt2)

Ratings

MPAA Ratings

• Rated: TV-PG (family-friendly)

The 1981 Disney original even had a few mildly occult references toned down before release to ensure the film would be family-friendly, and the remake was just as family-friendly. The original was nevertheless eerie enough to have earned a reputation as one of Disney's scariest live-action movies, and young or sensitive viewers may still find it scary today.

Tentacle Ratings

A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:

• SS___ (Two Tentacles: Barely Lovecraftian; vaguely similar in tone, could be a very loose adaptation)

The 2017 remake is a fairly conventional ghost story, but the 1981 original actually started out looking like a Gothic-style ghost tale, before evolving into a Weird sci-fi story by the end, and even more so in the alternate endings, with The Watcher taking the form of a vaguely Lovecraftian, incorporeal, bat-winged, insect-like, partly-crystal, floating alien from another dimension.

Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.

Reviews

Review Links:

• 1981:
  • Review by Timothy Brannan at The Other Side (link) - "...at age 10 this movie gave me a scare, but I was fascinated with it too. It' doesn't quite hold up to today but it was still a ton of fun to watch again. ...it is interesting to view this movie through the lenses of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Especially if you stick to the original ending of the movie the alien creature at the end ... could very easily be a Mi-Go."
  • Mark Brown at My Live Action Disney Project (27/35) (link) - "Let me just say that this is probably the scariest Disney movie I’ve ever seen! Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that this is a truly hardcore horror film, but of all the “scary” Disney films, this is the one that I find to be filled with the most scares, spooks, and frights! ... The atmosphere is just marinated in creepiness and a lot of moving camera shots and different angles add to the overall macabre feeling. This along with the acting... ...makes you so invested in the film that you can forgive the shoddy plot and unanswered questions."
  • Review by Richard Scheib at The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (2/5 Stars) (link) - "The film rises to an occasional sinisterness towards the end – Ellie’s possession, the urgency of Karen’s plight. However, this dissipates in an ending that demands that proceedings conclude in accustomed Disney tradition where all the sinister elements are passed over and the villains of the piece are shown to be good guys at heart."
• 2017:
  • Lisa Marie Bowman at Through the Shattered Lens (link) - "It’s not particularly scary but, for all the talk of witches and demons, it’s not really meant to be a horror film. Instead, it’s a coming-of-age story with paranormal elements. Jan not only learns about what’s watching in the woods but she also learns an important lesson... ... even if it’s not really a scary movie, it does have some appropriately creepy scenes."
  • T Gray at The Best Darn Girls (link) (4.5/5 Stars) - "This movie leaves no question unanswered and uses the landscape masterfully."
  • Kyle Saubert at Allusions of Grandure (link) - (1981) "For an early-’80s Disney joint, this isn’t half-bad. Though the budget certainly feels low, there’s that distinct nigh-VHS-style dark atmosphere about the film, and with some of the imagery and camerawork used, I can easily see why many were freaked out as younglings. Still, the script is kinda weak, and things don’t make as much sense as they could have... Overall, it’s a fine film, nothing special, but nothing off-putting in any real way." (2017) "It definitely feels like a (Lifetime Original Movie) LOM, what with the clearly barely-existent budget and horrid acting, and somehow the production values are even lower than the original. No atmosphere to be found here: They even digitally altered the sky in several scenes to make them appear to be set at night, despite being filmed in broad daylight... Odd to me are all the changes they unnecessarily made to both the source novel and the original film. ...everything just feels overly polished, overly whitewashed (sure, it’s Wales, but come on!), overly sanitized."

Synopsis (SPOILERS)

 Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)

• In the 1981 theatrical release of the original, a family move into a creepy rural Welsh farmhouse, where strange things begin to happen in what seems at first to be a haunting centering on the faerie-like Watcher in the Woods, and the disappearance of a child during an eclipse a generation or two before, and another eclipse is due any moment; by the end of the movie, it develops that a ritual performed by the child and her friends in a ruined church somehow resulted in the child trading places with the Watcher, an alien energy entity, through a portal opened between dimensions, and the Watcher has been trying to arrange for things to be put right at the next eclipse; the plot is quickly resolved by the protagonist's sister telling the protagonist how to save the missing girl, the girl being retrieved off-screen from a mythic portal, and the credits rolling after a quick reuniion.
• The theatrical release was the result of two modifications to the original screenplay's planned ending: in the originally-planned ending, the Watcher - in the form of a strange insect-like ethereal alien compared to a Mi-Go by some viewers - appears and takes the protagonist into a strange alien netherworld to rescue the missing girl from a representation of the alien's spacecraft engine, which the missing girl had gotten trapped within during the switch between dimensions, crashing the spaceship, and stranding its pilot, the Watcher, on earth. After the rescue, the protagonist and missing girl return through the portal, and a quick reunion of characters ends with a bit of exposition explaining what happened. The special effects could not be completed quickly enough for the film to be rushed to audiences in time for Disney to take advantage of a 50th anniversary of working with star Bette Davis, and Disney was concerned that the (mild) occult references would prove unpopular with a 1980s family audience, so this ending was abandoned. The second alternate ending was similar, but trims out a lot of the occult references, and also removes the elaborate special-effect-heavy scenes in the alternate dimension, having the insect-like alien show up in place of the energy being and sister to drag the protagonist through a portal, and then have the protagonist re-appear with the missing girl, with credits rolling after a quick reunion. This second ending was reshot by a new and uncredited director, with a new beginning created by the same new director, when test audiences found it to be too confusing and inconclusive.
• The 2017 remake drops the entire science-fiction angle, and replaces it with a ghost story about a plague doctor murdered by scared townsfolk in the 1600s, turning the original Weird story into a more conventional Gothic ghost tale of restless ghosts.

Notes

Comments, Trivia, Dedication

• Florence Engel Randall's novel had an unusual science fiction element which confounded the original filmmakers and resulted in Disney pulling the movie from release, drastically recutting it and completely reshooting the ending. To ensure their story was more cohesive, the remake's crew nixed the sci-fi component and made their version a more straightforward supernatural story.
• Actor Benedict Taylor, who plays Mike Fleming, had previously appeared in the similarly related genre piece The Turn of the Screw (1974 film) based on the novel by Henry James. Many filming locations seen in this movie had previously been utilized in Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963 film) which was based on a novel by Shirley Jackson. Director John Hough was hired to direct this picture after Disney Studios executive and the film's head producer Ron Miller had seen Hough's horror movie The Legend of Hell House (1973 film).
• The movie's source novel title "A Watcher in the Woods" (1976) by Florence Engel Randall was changed to the similarly titled name of "The Watcher in the Woods" for this filmed adaptation.
• The original version ran 100 minutes. This was with the short ending that didn't include the explanatory "Other World Sequence" (which wasn't finished at the time of the film's initial release). After the original ending didn't work, the filmmakers re-cut it, adding the special effects sequence in which the viewer sees the other world that the victim was trapped in. This ending still didn't fare well with the critics, so Vincent McEveety was brought in (director John Hough was unavailable) to tweak the film and shoot an entirely new ending and opening credits sequence.
• The Anchor Bay DVD release of the 1981 version was originally going to be a two-disc set, with both the famous original 100 minute cut that test audiences saw (Anchor Bay found the footage that was thought destroyed, and was going to re-edit it as close as possible to the preview version) and the theatrical 84 minute cut. Unfortunately Disney did not allow Anchor Bay to have the original cut, and only let them use the two "alternate endings" which now appear on the DVD. This explains why director John Hough referring to the movie as being finally edited the way he intended (the commentary was recorded before Anchor Bay had to drop the two-disc idea), when it actually isn't. The alternate endings, however, do provide the majority of the missing footage from the 1981 preview, save some small scenes/changes. Hough explains that "his" ending is a combination of the two alternate endings and the film's current ending.
• Actor Benedict Taylor played the teenage male lead (Mike/Mark) in the 1980 film. Having had a positive experience with the original, Taylor caught wind of plans for the 2017 remake and came in to audition on his own accord, and was cast as John Keller.
• One of the two houses used in the film was once inhabited by Agatha Christie, who penned many of her classic mystery novels there and then passed the home on to her family. The house had been modernized, but the sprawling attic required no set dressing because it was already littered with relics from centuries past.
• Not being a huge fan of the horror genre, the remake's director Melissa Joan Hart decided to screen a variety of ghost-story films, but she had difficulty finding modern movies that were suspenseful, rather than exploding with gore. Among the more modern titles that she cited as inspiration were The Others (2001), The Orphanage (2007), and the works of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably The Birds (1963).

Associated Mythos Elements

• fiction: A Watcher in the Woods (fiction) by Florence Engel Randall
• race: compare the alien from the 1981 original's alternate endings to a Mi-Go or Byakhee
• race: Ghost
• tome: the Plague Doctor's book in the 2017 remake