Geoffrey's friend Micah joins us to tackle a long-feared feature from his and Julia's childhoods: The Watcher in the Woods!Note: the version we uploaded on the 15th of July is the corrected version. If you downloaded this on the 14th or the morning of the 15th, you will have a version that is missing a couple of minutes of Julia's audio at about 1 hour in. Image Description: a row of reflections of a girl in a white dress wearing a white blindfold. Here's what Micah remembered:"When I was a little kid we didn't have a VCR. I don't think we got one until I was around 12. One of the only times we watched videos was when we went to my grandma's house on weekends or holidays. She had Beta for a while, but soon switched over to VHS. In any event, my grandma was really into renting Disney movies for us. Unlike all the other video cassettes, the Disney videos came in big clunky white cases, not the thin brown ones. At that time, in the mid-80s, there weren't that many animated Disney features to choose from, but there were lots of live action movies -- stuff like "Treasure Island," "Swiss Family Robinson," Davy Crockett versus Mike Fink, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," etc. Before every Disney movie started there were previews of other movies, and they alwaysincluded "Watcher in the Woods." It scared the crap out of us. (I recently asked my sister what she remembered about "Watcher in the Woods" and she replied, "Only that it was terrifying.") The scene with a girl looking into a mirror, this apparition of another girl with a blindfold gazing back at her, and the mirror shattering is what I remember being most terrifying. That preview alone was enough to give us nightmares. Whenever it came on we would run and hide or insist on fast forwarding. We weren't brave enough to watch "Watcher in the Woods" until we were in middle school. As I recall, the movie was about a blonde girl and her family, who had recently moved to England. There was a creepy old neighbor lady who said the blonde girl looked just like her own daughter, who had mysteriously disappeared during an eclipse many years before. A bunch of scary stuff happened -- including that breaking mirror scene -- involving some kind of creepy presence in the woods, but I don't recall the specifics. The blonde girl got a boyfriend and they tried to reenact some sort of occult eclipse ritual to figure out what happened to the other blonde girl who had vanished back in the day. There was some kind of energy vortex and I think everything turned out ok in the end. That's all I remember."And here's what Julia remembered:"It's a really scary story that's like in a gothic old house and maybe it's a ghost story? There's a girl in a mirror and also a girl who almost frowns and a scary old lady who, I think saves the drowning girl but it looks like she's pushing her under to trap her underwater. I have no memory of the end but I know my mother made us watch the whole thing because everything came out okay so we shouldn't be scared. I am actually still scared to watch this again..." And then in a separate email: "(Almost drowns, not almost frowns)"We were genuinely worried about watching this one, and did it live up to the remembered terror? Ummm not really. That said, we all agreed that drowning scene was really intense, as was the house of mirrors scene. We also went deep on this movie's WILD history, and even watched two alternate endings! This is the one that was on the original theatrical release in 1980 for ten days before the overwhelmingly negative audience response made Disney yank the movie and spend a million dollars coming up with a new ending and reshooting it. And that one was cut down from this original ending, which they didn't have enough time to make the special effects they wanted for. Notice that both of these endings involve Jan being swept away by the watcher, a weird demon-looking alien thing. Ultimately we think the ending that wound up in theaters in 1981 (and on all the home video releases later) with Ellie being possessed by the Watcher, who later appears as a column of light, is the best of the three available, but none of them really worked for us. We wonder what the rest of the 150 reported endings Disney commissioned from different writers looked like. To be fair, it doesn't really sound like they were working with particularly amazing source material. Here's the Kirkus review of the novel. We also talk a bunch about spooky games we remember from childhood, like Bloody Mary and Light As a Feather, Stiff As a Board. Did you play these games? Did you, like Julia, watch this movie as a kid and end up with nightmares? Were you, Like Micah, too freaked out by the trailer to watch it at all? Let us know! Did you love it so much that you personally directed a remake for the Lifetime channel starring Anjelica Huston in 2017? If yes to that last, then OMG, you are Melissa Joan Hart! WILD. If you're having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We're also on Patreon if that's your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we're @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe
