FRIGHT MOVE

PETER MEDAK REVEALS HIS METHODS BEHIND DIRECTING THE CHANGELING, ARGUABLY ONE OF THE MOST HAUNTING MOVIES OF ALL TIME

- WORDS: OLIVER PFEIFFER

IT'S NOT MUCH DIFFERENT FROM doing a comedy movie and how you set up a joke and present the punchline," explains director Peter Medak to SFX. “It’s the same with how you create horror and scariness - it’s all in the timing of the cut and how you please the audience, how you escalate it, and then you absolutely puncture the balloon and 'Boom!'

Medak was responsible for directing the 1980 psychological supernatural horror The Changeling, considered by such cinematic luminaries as Spielberg, Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro as one of the scariest films ever made.

“I was always attracted to supernatural things because, unfortunately, I had a brother that passed away at a very early age when I was 14, and I always felt his presence throughout my entire life,” he continues. “So this added value to it to try and make a very clean, classic psychological thriller, which is kind of an investigative journey.”

BUILDING TENSION

The Changeling concerns New York composer John Russell (George C Scott), who relocates to Seattle after helplessly witnessing the tragic roadside death of his wife and daughter. Holed up alone in a massive, long-vacant rental house to concentrate on his composing, he slowly becomes embroiled in the home’s haunting history when a malevolent presence reaches out to him.

Rather than a blood-drenched jump-scare affair, The Changeling is a much more restrained, slow-building suspenseful ghost story in the shape of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents and Robert Wise’s The Haunting - where psychological suggestion brings the fright factor.