The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

It was just an innocent game until a young girl vanished...for thirty years.

After an American family moves to an old country manor in rural England, one of the daughters is tormented by the spirit of the owner's long lost daughter, who mysteriously disappeared 30 years ago during a solar eclipse.

Fantasy Horror Thriller countryside country house supernatural solar eclipse halloween haunted house past based on young adult novel

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Character

Grave, earnest, intimate and unpretentious.

gravecomic
earnestironic
intimateepic
unpretentiousprestige
contemplativerelentless

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“Is Bette Davis the best thing in The Watcher in the Woods?”
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“Is the slow pace a feature rather than a flaw?”
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Across media

If you loved this film, the television, the book, the album, the game.

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Reviews on TMDB

Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Tastebuds's numbers.

Wuchakon TMDB · Feb 20227/10
_**This ain’t no conventional Disney flick; it’s genuinely eerie**_ An American family moves into an English country manor for the summer while the mysterious owner, Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis), lives in the guest house. The teen daughter, Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson), discerns something weird is going on, which is linked to Mrs. Aylwood's missing daughter, Karen (Katharine Levy), from decades earlier. Jan investigates the mystery with the aid of a neighbor (Benedict Taylor) and her younger sister (Kyle Richards). Carroll Baker & David McCallum play the girls' parents. "The Watcher in the Woods" (1980-81) is a mystery thick with haunting ambiance, augmented by an unnerving score. DON'T expect typical Disney kiddie fare. Despite inexplicable criticism, winsome Lynn-Holly Johnson shines as the protagonist and carries the film with Davis superlative as the curmudgeonly crone. Baker is still attractive as the mother. The original ending of the movie wasn't finished in time so important expositional scenes were cut, which left the story nonsensical. Negative critical response to a test run in spring, 1980, resulted in the movie being pulled from theaters and, after reshoots, a more subdued e
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r96skon TMDB · Sep 20205/10
Oh so very boring. <em>'The Watcher in the Woods'</em> isn't necessarily a terrible film, but wow did I feel completely uninterested from (almost) start-to-finish. Dully told plot with a plain cast list. I couldn't, unfortunately, tell you anything I actually found good about this. Lynn-Holly Johnson (Jan), a year prior to her appearance in James Bond, is the standout, but that's only down to a process of elimination to be honest; I found the rest yawnful. They aren't helped by the writing which fails to captivate how supposedly heavy the premise is, it's all basically as it seems - obvious. I should've cared for Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis) but I simply didn't feel attached one bit. It is a weird one due to it not, as noted, doing anything massively negative, it's just the fact that the (short) run time is such a chore to get through. Not one I'd recommend.
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