I have scars. We all do. Yeah, I have physical scars - gnarly, story-carrying ones about literally crawling over needles and broken glass (I was an unattended little Simian in my formative years), coming a cropper off bikes, even chipping a tooth on a loser's fist in high school... but no, I'm talking REAL scars, psychological ones.
A departure tonight, then, as my early scar – well, perhaps more of an intrigue, comes courtesy of that eerie, haunting tale of the weird
and uncanny, The Waltons. Yes, the most sepia-toned TV series of the 1970s, set
in the 1930s, but anchored in the Flared Decade’s fascination with all things
country and colonial. We’ll come back to that, but tonight’s episode from
Season 7 is one of only two Halloween themed stories, 'The Changeling', and it
features a poltergeist. Yes!
The Waltons, s7 ep5 'The Changeling' (26/10/78)
Poltergeists were all the rage in the Seventies for a time,
it seemed. 'The Changeling' aired only months after the Enfield Poltergeist
(though before Tobe Hooper’s movie, of course), and carries with it the
essential contemporaneous theory that this activity was usually centred around
a… highly-strung (adolescent) individual – often female. With Enfield you can
see the connection (one theory even calls this the “mischievous adolescent”
phenomenon), and of course it fits neatly into the story of Elizabeth Walton - twelve years old, just days away from the big one-three.
No longer a little girl, not yet one of the grown-ups of the household, she
struggles with her place in the homestead. Her brother Jason has a subplot
which offers a variation on the innocence/experience struggle, but there’s no
paranormal element to his, and it’s as dull as ditchwater.
Elizabeth’s is
slightly better fare as the Youngest Walton is beset by flying crockery, a
sentient piano and a creepy doll™ which is a raggedy Ann variety – which,
trivia fans may know, was the actual doll that the Annabelle doll from the
Conjuring movies was based very very loosely on. But back to 'The Changeling'.
It’s a curious story, balancing the radio efforts of gauche Jason as a would be
on-air agony cousin, and local storekeepers Ike and Cora Godsey (there’s always a snobbish
storekeeper in 1970s colonial programmes – we’ll come back to them) and of
course the supernatural troubles of our heroine. Hair gets blown back, faces
get stuck on ‘bewildered’ for most of the episode, and it’s really only the
intervention of Olivia, the Waltling matriarch that provides an explanation (probably a
ghost) and a resolution (after things peaked things… stop?) and we’re on our
way back to a very Appalachian normaldom.
Halloweenometer? The last ten minutes are probably the best, but the doll is
reliably unnerving. On the whole, though, not quite as spooky as intended. It
tries, but like our Elizabeth, is maybe stuck between worlds a bit.
Companion piece. It’s hard to find one that’s not exploitative Maybe an Arthur
C Clarke bit on Poltergeists, or just sample this snippet from the story. Yeah, that'll do.
Goodnight, John Boy. Sweet Dreaammmssss
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