Disney's Creepy '80s Horror Movie You Have To See To Believe
Disney has become synonymous with family-friendly films, seldom crossing the line into anything that may be perceived as "scary" or "upsetting." Disney Channel Original Movies are notorious for their Halloween fare, but with the exception of the criminally underrated "Don't Look Under The Bed," even their spookiest films are rated-G for general audiences. When Disney+ was first announced, I was thrilled to revisit the weird and forgotten Disney movies of my youth, but unfortunately, there are still some films that Disney has decided to keep in the vault after all these years. One of those films is the 1980s anti-fairy tale, "The Watcher in the Woods."
Growing up, I was fortunate to live just three blocks down from my local Mom & Pop video store, and I had standing approval from my parents with the owners to rent whatever my little monster kid heart desired. As luck would have it, the shop had a VHS copy of "The Watcher in the Woods," the story of an American family who moves into a British country house plagued by malevolent spirits, namely, the ghost of the longtime owner's daughter who torments the new family's young daughter. Before you get too excited and think the House of Mouse made a bonafide slasher or something, know that the film was definitely creepy but in a similar vein as something like "The Changeling" or "The Lady in White."
Disney told children not to see the film
It's hard to remember a time when Disney wasn't the most dominant force in entertainment, but until the Disney Renaissance from 1989 to 1999, the studio was definitely riding the struggle bus. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was doing their best to attract older audiences, as their family-friendly offerings weren't performing as well as they'd liked. This is how we ended up with films like "Escape to Witch Mountain," "The Island at the Top of the World," "The Black Hole," and "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," all films that people frequently forget are Disney-made due to their content. In 1980, Disney tried their hand at horror and the result was the film adaptation of Florence Engel Randall's 1976 young adult Gothic sci-fi novel, "A Watcher in the Woods." Knowing their reputation for kid's movies, Disney actively told small children not to see the film, which only added to the film's allure.
The former home owner is Mrs. Aylwood, played by Bette Davis who has at this point proven herself in "hagsploitation" horror films. The youngest American girl, Ellie, was played by Kyle Richards, just two years after her role in John Carpenter's "Halloween." What starts out as a pretty standard haunted house movie slowly turns even creepier, as Ellie's sister Jan discovers the town locals were screwing with dark magic during a solar eclipse. Thinking she's solved the case, Jan decides to recreate the ceremony during another solar eclipse in the hopes it will bring Mrs. Aylwood's daughter back. Dancing with the dark arts is a bit much for Disney, but in 1980, they were hoping the film would be popular enough to help save their failing company.
The film became a cult favorite
"The Watcher in the Woods" received terrible reviews and only ran for a short time in theaters because of it, but critics have often hated horror movies, so take that with a grain of salt. The film was shot in the same house used by Robert Wise in 1963's "The Haunting," which adds an extra oomph of spookiness to those that know their haunted house movies. Sure, some of the special effects have aged like a glass of milk in the sun, but the storytelling and atmosphere are still surprisingly effective. In one particular moment, Jan slips into the pond and looks as if she's going to drown, and the scene elicits a similar anxiety as watching Artax the horse struggle to escape the Swamp of Sadness in "The Neverending Story." We see Jan under the water, staring at Mrs. Aylwood above her and trying to get out. It's genuinely terrifying because Jan really does look like she's about to drown in front of our eyes.
Despite the film's negative reviews, "The Watcher in the Woods" developed a cult following and was even given the made-for-TV remake treatment in 2017 featuring Melissa Joan Hart and Anjelica Huston. Parents are frequently looking for transitory horror films to help bridge the gap between certifiable children's films to hard-R horror, and "The Watcher in the Woods" is a perfect addition, if only Disney+ would release this beast from the vault.
The alternate scenes were even weirder
While reshoots don't immediately mean a film's production is in trouble, "The Watcher in the Woods" had multiple scenes completely changed. In the original cut, the opening sequence that starts the film takes place after a different scene, where a young girl playing in the woods comes face-to-face with the Watcher. This would have been a spooky cold opening similar to how many horror films open, as the Watcher was supposed to strike down the little girl's doll with a blue beam of light, completely destroying the doll before the child's eyes.
But it's the ending that had the biggest change, mostly due to audience backlash. According to an interview with Sam Nicholson, the film's visual effects supervisor, The Watcher, presented like an insectoid alien, was to scoop up Jan in the chapel and fly across an alien landscape to the Watcher's spacecraft, with Karen inside and trapped in a prism. Jan reached out to Karen and once the two made contact, they were teleported back to the chapel before heading to the manor where Mrs. Aylwood and her daughter reunite. The visual effects for the Watcher's world weren't finished in time for the film to coincide with Bette Davis' 50th anniversary as a film actor, so Disney scrapped that ending and cobbled together a rushed conclusion.
Unfortunately, audiences who saw the movie during a sneak preview run in New York hated the ending — or rather, the lack of one. Disney pulled the film and shot a third, official ending, with Davis' footage shot in California because they couldn't get her to England in time. All of the home video releases of the film (excluding Blu-ray) contain this official ending.
Other creepy '80s Disney films
It's important to recognize that "The Watcher in the Woods" wasn't an outlier in Disney's live-action output in the 1980s, but just the start of a series of creepy films. In 1983, Disney produced "Something Wicked This Way Comes" from a screenplay by the legendary author Ray Bradbury, based on his 1962 novel of the same name. The film was a notoriously rocky production, spending millions on reshoots, reedits, and rescores, almost guaranteeing it would be a box office flop (which it was). It's a shame because it's definitely creepy and one of the most autumnal movies ever made, but it has been mostly forgotten about save for those with nostalgic love singing its praises every spooky season.
More memorable is the 1985 terror show "Return to Oz" starring a young Fairuza Balk, where Dorothy Gale returns to the wonderful land of Oz only to be faced with nightmare creations like the Wheelers, a headless princess with a room of heads, and the real-life plot of Dorothy being committed to a psychiatric hospital and set up for electro-shock treatment. We were certainly not in Kansas anymore with that traumatizing scare-fest.
And then there's "Mr. Boogedy," a 1986 episode of The Disney Sunday Movie. The TV movie itself is more of a horror comedy/parody than an outright horror movie, but the creepy designs were enough to scare some younger viewers. The story follows a family who moves to a New England city called Lucifer Falls and discovers colonial hauntings. As a made-for-TV movie, "Mr. Boogedy" was hard to track down for many years, but thanks to Disney+, a generation of scarred Gen-Xers commiserating over their shared childhood scarring have helped make this a new Halloween must-watch for families everywhere.