This is a movie I'll always remember as one of the ones that sparked my interest for the horror genre, and yet, I only saw it just now from start to finish for the very first time. There's a nice (albeit totally irrelevant) story behind that. Back in my grade school years, it was tradition for the entire class to watch a movie on the Fridays before each major school holiday. After enduring multiple gentle Disney movies, like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", "Robin Hood" and "Mary freaking Poppins", our second grade teacher suggested to watch a slightly more mature and serious film, this being "The Watcher in the Woods". Personally I was very enthusiast, but several of my wimpy classmates got too scared during the opening credits already and the teacher decided it would be better to turn it off. Darn soft kids! The atmospheric and unsettling opening sequences (showing images of a forest guided by remotely eerie music) were exactly what fascinated me, and I'm sure these brief images contributed a lot to my current obsession with everything that involves horror. For some reason I never saw it again until now, nearly 20 years later, and that's quite a shame because "The Watcher in the Woods" is a movie you're supposed to see at young age. It's primarily a fantasy film, and those are far more appropriate for child-audiences because their imagination is far more vivid and the substantial defects are easier to overlook.
These are two fundamentally required characteristics when watching the movie, by the way. You need to have a vivid imagination and complete the story in your own mind (because the script is full of holes and suffered from drastic re-writes) and you definitely need to look past a lot of shortcomings. It's basically an ordinary supernaturally themed mystery, but obviously without shocking death sequences and complex undertones because it's a Disney film. The model Curtis family moves into an ancient English countryside mansion bordering on an immense forest. The owner, the peculiarly behaving Mrs. Aylwood, is very strict regarding her tenants, but she welcomes the Curtis family because the teenage daughter Jan reminds her of her own daughter Karen, who inexplicably disappeared nearly 30 years ago. Almost promptly, the youngest girl Ellie starts hearing silent voices and Jan notices a frightening presence as if someone's constantly watching her from within the woods. Jan develops the impression that Mrs. Aylwood daughter might still be around and that her spirits is trapped in the woods.
The finished product clearly suffers under the massive amount of re-edits, re-shoots and re-writes of the script. It looks as if the creators realized at a certain point that the movie was too sentimental and/or not suspenseful enough, so the quickly added improperly elaborated hints towards alternate dimensions, solar eclipses and bizarre initiation rites. The last 15-20 minutes are a messy hodgepodge of ideas and, eventually, you're left to your own devices to copy and paste the conclusion together. "The Watcher in the Woods" is at its most effective when talented director John Hough uncannily trolleys his camera through the thick and sinister woods, or when Bette Davis gives a one-woman-show as the intriguing Mrs. Aylwood. The music is excellent and the special effects showcased during the finale are guaranteed to astound young viewers with a healthy interest in the macabre.
