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The Appropriate Tune: 'Somebody's Watching Me' by Rockwell
The 1980’s are often romanticized, chiefly by weirdos, as a time that was great for business, but that wasn’t exactly the case for Disney. In fact most of the decade was sort of a crapshoot for them, exemplified by a string of middling attempts to move the needle at the box office. Tron, The Great Mouse Detective, The Black Cauldron, while some of these films over the years have gained a level of cult notoriety they certainly impress audiences at the time, especially when you had Don Bluth kicking around giving people films that had some metaphorical teeth without sacrificing the animation quality. It wasn’t until the tail end of the decade that The Mouse was able to right the ship, first with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and then a year later with The Little Mermaid, but it’s strange to consider a world where Disney is most associated with failures and missteps than with anything good. Well actually it’s not, but I’m sure at the time Joe Public were like ‘wowee, good thing these guys don’t own my favorite film franchise and never will.’
As I said though, several of these films that proved to be a bomb for Disney at the time have in recent years been looked upon with different eyes. Tron, for example, went from the poster child of Disney turds and ended up becoming a full-fledged franchise, albeit a minor one. So in the spirit of bringing things to light that Disney would rather forget I decided to grab a film from the peak of the Dark Ages and see how it plays. Live action too, so you know it’s going to go well.
Released in 1980, The Watcher in the Woods was written by Brian Clemens, Harry Spalding and Rosemary Anne Sisson, directed by John Hough and Vincent McEveety and produced by Ron Miller through Walt Disney Productions, based on the novel “A Watcher in the Woods” by Florence Engel Randall. Lynn-Holly Johnson stars as Jan Curtis, who along with little sister Ellie (Kyle Richards), mother Helen (Carroll Baker) and father Paul (David McCallum) managed to snag themselves a secluded manor in the English countryside on the cheap from its owner and their neighbor Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis). There’s always gotta be a catch though, which Jan begins to experience immediately after entering the house. Strange lights, bizarre hallucinations, Ellie getting possessed, your typical crazy ghost shit. The common thread throughout these incidents however is Karen Aylwood, Mrs. Aylwood’s teenage daughter who disappeared thirty years ago under mysterious circumstances. What happened to Karen, and how does it tie into these supernatural events? The answers to those questions and some prime voyeurism await in The Watcher in the Woods.
If the phrase ‘Disney made a horror film’ doesn’t fill you with confidence, I can hardly blame you. Disney has built their empire off of a dedication to family-friendly, culturally appropriated content, so attempting something different and interesting is bound to make them stumble. If you were to give them some credit however, it is that they found something that could conceivably fit within their wheelhouse. There are no monsters in The Watcher in the Woods, no psychopathic killers, simply some spooky happenings ala Amityville Horror and a POV tracking shot (reminiscent of Friday the 13th and Evil Dead) that implies some sort of malicious intelligence. Not enough to stir the loins of any serious gorehound out there, in fact the entire film is quite tame on the violence front, but the film does manage an eerie, alien atmosphere that a more direct film might not have kept up with in favor of explosive thrills. You’re not sure what the Watcher in the Woods is, and at the end of the film you’re still not sure, and that sort of faux-Lovecraftian ‘things beyond our mortal understanding’ comes off as fairly unique.
As far as casting goes, it’s serviceable. It speaks to the state of Disney’s attempts at live action at this point that the film's biggest names, David McCallum, Carroll Baker and Bette Davis would have been good catches two decades before this movie was released, and naturally they’re barely in the thing. The rest of the cast do their job, and that’s about as much as I can say. I’ve definitely seen worse child acting in my day, and it’s a small cast so they likely had an easier time getting the performance the director wanted.
If you’ve ever seen an episode of Rod Serling’s second show, Night Gallery, The Watcher in the Woods. Entertaining surely, but when comparing it to the stuff that came before there’s an aura of ‘cheapness’ that radiates from the thing. Like they found a mansion in the woods, great but they do 99 percent of the filming during the day so that it is as unscary as possible, and they don’t even bother making the forest seem scary outside of one scene that we never return to again. That, combined with the simplistic effects (hope you think blue flashes of light are scary), the loss of tension through lack of violence, the acting, the music (even thirty plus years ago slowed down children’s music feels cliche), it all combines into something that didn’t need to be a theatrical film, and indeed doesn’t even last the 90 minutes like its peers. Were this made 20 years later it would fit right in with the best of the Disney Channel Original Movies, but as is it sticks out, and not in the good way.
Based on that description however, I’m going to give The Watcher in the Woods a mild recommendation. Sometimes you want to watch a horror movie but maybe you’ve got a kid in the house, or a partner who’s not good with the genre, or maybe you yourself aren’t the best with it but you want to get into it. That’s where The Watcher in the Woods comes in, as it’s the most mild of mild salsa type horror films that still has enough going for it to make it interesting. Outside of those circumstances however I don’t know if there’s much to entice a moviegoer beyond the novelty of a Disney horror, and the moviegoers of the time would seem to agree with me. There have definitely been worse movies to come out Disney’s mouse hole though, so if you’re interested go for it.
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