Beautiful Frauds

Criticwire Survey: Horror Movie Double Feature

The task this week at Criticwire was to pretend we were asked by a theater to program a pre-Halloween horror double feature. Here’s what I had to say:

As a horror addict, this one is about as tough to answer as that standard, ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ question one gets whenever a new acquaintance finds out that you’re a film critic. Do you want to go classic or obscure? Populist favorites, or something you’d like to introduce people to? A well-matched pair, or a diverse dichotomy? With too many choices at hand, I’m going to go with the sort of thing that’s been appealing to me lately, and go with two eerie thrillers with exceedingly creepy atmosphere. I’ll also link them by picking two that use the horror as a backdrop to serious dramas about individuals dealing with personal family loss, and both of which feature séances. So we’ll start with the 1964 British film Séance on a Wet Afternoon, which stars Kim Stanley as a medium haunted by the memory of her stillborn son, and Richard Attenborough as her meek husband, convinced to assist her in a kidnapping plot meant to establish her credentials as a psychic, but with questionable underlying motives. That’ll be followed with Peter Medak’s 1980 The Changeling, with George C. Scott as a composer who has lost his wife and child in a car accident, and who moves into a house occupied by the spirit of a long dead child.