The Changeling

The prestige peak of Canada's tax-shelter horror boom, and proof the cycle could turn out something with real class. George C. Scott plays a composer who loses his family and rents an enormous, near-empty mansion to grieve in, whereupon the house starts making itself known: a banging in the pipes, a wheelchair that follows him, a child's rubber ball that will not stay thrown away. Peter Medak builds the dread out of space and silence rather than gore, and the seance sequence is one of the great unnerving set pieces in ghost-film history. Scott, all wounded gravitas, treats the haunting as a mystery to be solved, which roots the supernatural in something close to grief. Quiet, patient and far scarier than the louder films that came after it.