Disney unleashes "our Exorcist" on October 9, 1980


They tried to bury it. Oh, yes. The Mouse House, with its white gloves and perfect teeth, tried to send it down to the cold, wet dark, like so many bad dreams. But some things just won't stay buried, will they? No, sir. They crawl back to the surface, scratching at the door, demanding to be let in. So it was on October 9th, 1980, when The Watcher in the Woods shambled back into theaters, its stitches still fresh, a Frankenstein's monster of a movie hoping for a second chance.

It was a second bite at the apple, see? The first one, a few months back in New York City, in a balmy April, had gone down like a lead balloon. A ten-day, POOF!, disappearing act, and the word on the street was the real clunker of an ending, a final fifteen minutes that left audiences more befuddled than petrified.  So Disney hauled it back into the operating theater, gave it a new brain, and trotted it out again for Halloween 1980.

This was the phase when Walt's old studio was making a new push in live action pictures. An era that blessed a certain young audience with The Black Hole, TRON, and Condorman - films that slice of cinephiles still remembers and cherishes today. But these films appeared to simply go over the head of the mass moviegoing audience, and the elitist film critics. The Watcher in the Woods was very much in that same vein, a vein that - when struck - bled very little box office gold.

You can't blame Disney for trying to mash up The Exorcist and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, especially when it could top the bill with the one, the only, the indomitable Bette Davis. Yes, that Bette Davis, radiating an aura of Hollywood royalty that few could ever hope to mimic. She was the anchor, the grand dame, the gravitas in this spectral tale.

The film, based on Florence Engel Randall's novel, had all the makings of a classic creeping dread. A family, the Curtises, move into an old English manor, the kind of place where the very stones seem to hum with forgotten secrets. And almost immediately, their teenage daughter, Jan, starts seeing things. Reflections in mirrors that aren't quite hers, whispers carried on the wind, and a sense of being…observed. But by whom?

Jan just happens to resemble new neighbor Mrs. Aylwood's (Davis) daughter, who vanished in a chapel in the title's namesake woods thirty years ago. And that is the plot structure the rest of this supernatural/sci-fi horror tale is built around. Old English manors, foggy woods, a missing girl, and a family with its own buried secrets. All the right ingredients for a nice, long simmer of unease, with a shellacking of 80s Disney gloss.

But there were problems, my friends. The foremost being this: Disney couldn't commit to the bit, when it came to the occult and extraterrestrial - or should we say, extradimensional? - elements of the tale. So it dulled the very edges of a daring flick that might have cut a sharper figure at the movie house. Even as Davis carries the film, her face is all sharp angles and sorrow, like she knows the story’s darker than the shooting script lets on.

Neither version ended up being what The Watcher could have been with a few script tweaks, and lot more bravery by the studio. But what's there has earned cult status for good reason.

The woods are alive. There's a séance gone wrong. There's a sense that whatever’s out there isn’t just haunting—it’s hunting.   The ones who get it—they’re the ones whispering about parallel dimensions, about strange occult rituals, about the watcher’s glowing eyes, about the way the film makes you feel like you’re falling through a crack in reality. The ones who don’t? They’re the film snobs, or the lazyminded who only want stories that do all the thinking for them.

If you watch The Watcher now, maybe on some streaming service, imagine it’s October 9, 1980. The theater’s dim, the air smells of popcorn and autumn, and out there, in the dark, something’s watching. Something that never stopped.So, light a candle, lock the doors, and give it a spin. Just don’t look too long into the woods. They might look back. The watcher’s still out there, and it’s got its eyes on you.

Location: Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more