Remake THIS THREE!!

My good friend Heidi and I used to scare our selves to death with this movie. It was at a time when Disney was producing some very frightening films aimed for older kids. Many people prefer "Something Wicked This Way Comes", but for me the film that captured the chills and frights of the unseen (years before "The Blair Witch Project") was Disneys 1980's "The Watcher in the Woods". It also led to Heidi and I playing some overly imaginative and, frankly, quite frightening games.
When a normal American family moves into a beautiful old English house in a wooded area, strange, paranormal appearances befall them. Their daughter Jan sees things, and daughter Ellie hears, the voice of a young teenage girl who mysteriously disappeared during a total solar eclipse decades before. When she vanished something replaced her in the woods and now watches them.

Ohhh I have chills thinking about it. Bette Davis plays the aged Mrs. Alywood in one of her last roles. My sister recently bought me the DVD of this, and at the tender age of 23 (give or take eight years) this still made me jump and had me pulling the covers to my chin. Though tame by today's bloody standards and a flop on its original release, this handsome little gothic ghost story has become something of a cult film for its suggestive direction, impressionistic imagery, and spooky sense of the unknown.

It got me really thinking about how well it could work today.
Alejandro Amenábar proved in 2001 that he has an amazing sense of suspense and is able to handle and maintain a slow uncomfortable build, and we would be my first choice in the director’s chair.
Of course the original ending worked better than any of the deleted
ones tagged onto the DVD (aliens......really) and I will always be one who stands by the fact that leaving some plot lines unanswered adds to the mystery and thrills.
Apparently Brian Clemens wrote a version of the screenplay he was most interested in directing, but Disney decided that this version was much too dark, and hired Rosemary Anne Sisson to lighten it up. I would be curious to see Clemens version, mainly to see how dark he intended it to be.

I am sure it is lying around somewhere, so someone get it out and
re-adapt it but without the cheep thrills, gore, torture and rape that seem to be the rage with all current horror films.
The ‘Saws’ and the ‘Hostels’ of the world are such poor examples of genuine horror. If I want to watch someone get hacked up with loads of blood and gore I will watch a surgery channel. If I want to watch a teenage girl get brutally raped (‘The Hills Have Eyes’) just to be thrilled I will check myself into a mental hospital and get lots of therapy (being raped is horrific enough without it being used to up the scares and shock in a horror film – some film makers are irresponsible).
Bring back the thrills and shivers of ‘The Changeling’, ‘The Blair Witch Project’, ‘The Others’ and even the Japanese horror films of ‘Ringu’ and ‘Ju-on’ that used atmosphere and story telling to scare you. STOP THE VIOLENCE!!!