The 1980 horror movie that Guillermo Del Toro called a “masterpiece”
Peter Medak’s 1980 film The Changeling has terrified audiences for decades and earned admiration from some of cinema’s biggest names.
The great Martin Scorsese, in fact, has cited the feature as both one of the greatest horror films ever made and one of his personal favourites. Guillermo del Toro is also a longtime admirer, not only of The Changeling but of Medak’s work more broadly.
The Canadian psychological thriller starring George C Scott, Melvyn Douglas and Trish Van Devere has since become a cult classic. The film follows a New York composer who moves into a mansion in Seattle, only to discover it may be haunted by the spirit of a child. Loosely based on the experiences of Russell Hunter, who claimed to have encountered similar phenomena in the 1960s, the film has earned a devoted following thanks to its masterful use of atmosphere, psychological dread and the unsettling possibilities of space itself.
What makes The Changeling particularly remarkable is that it arrived at a moment when horror cinema was increasingly leaning towards spectacle. The late 1970s had seen audiences flock to films built around shocking imagery and supernatural set-pieces, but Medak went in the opposite direction. Much like the finest British ghost stories broadcast by the BBC at Christmas, the film relies on suggestion, silence and creeping dread, allowing the audience’s imagination to do much of the heavy lifting. The result is a picture that feels unnervingly timeless rather than tied to a specific era of horror filmmaking.
Medak, who was influenced by the 1963 horror film The Haunting, admitted that he wanted to avoid the stereotypical blood and gore typical in gruesome horror films as much as he wanted to do away with typical jump scares. His motive was to make the movie “very psychological, so it didn’t have any cheap shocks in it”.
Medak even expressed his gratitude at Steven Spielberg’s kind reception of the film when the latter screened The Changeling on the sets of his 1982 zeitgeist horror classic Poltergeist. He revealed that Spielberg had apparently asked the crew to view the film carefully as it was, according to him, everything a horror film should be like. Medak said that both Scorsese and Spielberg had 35mm copies of the film and expressed his joy at being able to “be on their lists of the greatest ghost stories of all times”.
Medak’s 1980 classic is a work of sheer brilliance, and very few horror films have managed to achieve a feat of that sort. The atmospheric horror adds to the general eerie and unsettling nature of the film, and various iconic sequences, including the small red ball or a tiny wheelchair, have been later used in various other films as a tribute to Medak’s ingenious creation, namely in Guillermo Del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak where the references to multiple sequences reflect the latter’s admiration and respect for Medak’s work.
Its influence can still be felt across contemporary horror. Long before audiences became accustomed to haunted-house films centred on grief and personal trauma, The Changeling was exploring those ideas with remarkable restraint. Elements that would later become staples of the genre — lonely protagonists, vast empty homes and supernatural mysteries rooted in family tragedy — can be traced back to Medak’s film. It is one reason why directors continue to champion it decades later; not because it reinvented horror through excess, but because it demonstrated how frightening atmosphere can be when handled with confidence and patience.
Medak revealed how Del Toro had gushed over him at the BAFTA Awards in 2018. Del Toro was allegedly screaming, “You’re my mentor! You’re my mentor!” which baffled the filmmaker. Del Toro went up to Medak and said: “Your movie The Changeling is just a masterpiece”.
Medak affirmed that the appreciation and reception from “fellow directors whose work [I] love and respect” filled his heart with warmth and gratitude.
