Tales from the Darkside: The Movie1990
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psychological
The Changeling
1980 · R · 1h 47m
Whatever you do… Don't go into the attic.
A composer retreats to a century-old mansion to mourn his dead family. The house has its own dead — and they've been waiting far longer.
Devastated by the sudden deaths of his wife and daughter, composer John Russell takes a fellowship in Seattle and moves into a sprawling Victorian estate. What begins as unexplained sounds and minor disturbances gradually reveals something deliberate — a murdered child demanding to be found, and a secret powerful enough to have been buried for decades.
mysteryhorrorthriller
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atmosphericslow-burnpsychological
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LanguageEnglish
RatingR
Running time1h 47m
SpoilersSynopsis — contains plot detailsSynopsis↓
Composer John Russell is on a winter vacation upstate with his wife and young daughter when their car breaks down on a snowy road. He walks to a nearby phone booth to call for help. Looking back through the glass, he watches helplessly as a truck skids on ice and kills them both. Months later, unable to work in New York, he accepts a teaching post in Seattle and rents a sprawling Victorian mansion through the local Historical Preservation Society and its administrator, Claire Norman.
Shortly after moving in, strange phenomena begin accumulating. Every morning at the same time, loud rhythmic banging reverberates through the house. Faucets turn on by themselves; one night John finds every tap running and glimpses the apparition of a drowned boy in the upstairs bathtub. When a stained-glass window in an unexplored section of the house shatters without cause, John investigates and finds a locked door hidden in an upstairs closet, opening onto a sealed attic bedroom: a small iron bed, a child's wheelchair, old toys, and a music box. When wound, the music box plays the exact melody John had been improvising at the piano — a detail that stops him cold.
Consulting a parapsychology professor at the university, John arranges a séance at the mansion. A trance medium named Leah Harmon makes contact with a presence identifying itself as Joseph — a child, age six, who died in 1906. Playing back the audio recording afterward, John hears Joseph's voice layered beneath the medium's halting words, answering questions she never fully captured. A vision follows: a sickly boy confined to that attic room, his father Richard Carmichael forcing him into the bathtub and drowning him.
Research confirms the worst. Joseph was the only son of the wealthy Richard Carmichael, heir to a fortune contingent on surviving to age twenty-one. Disabled and chronically ill, Joseph was feared a liability. In 1906, during a snowstorm with the family supposedly abroad seeking treatment, Richard drowned his own son, buried the body, and replaced him with a healthy orphan from a local orphanage — a changeling, raised as the miraculously recovered Joseph. That impostor grew up to become Senator Joseph Carmichael, a powerful and respected figure still living in a grand estate on Mercer Island.
