Peter Medak, the director of The Changeling, has died at the age of 88. His family announced the news; TheWrap reported it on 28 October, without giving a date, place or cause of death.
Medak was born in Hungary and left Budapest after the 1956 uprising, settling in England, where he trained in the British film industry. He made his feature debut with Negatives in 1968, and followed it in 1972 with The Ruling Class, the savage and very funny aristocratic satire in which Peter O’Toole plays a man who believes he is God, and then, when cured, becomes something worse. It remains a cult favourite and a reminder that British horror has always had a sideline in the House of Lords.
His genre masterpiece, though, is The Changeling (1980). George C. Scott plays a composer who loses his family and moves into a big, empty house in which something is still waiting. It is a ghost story told in silence and suggestion: a wheelchair, a bouncing ball, a séance that does not go the way anybody wants. Steven Spielberg reportedly screened it for the crew of Poltergeist, which is the sort of recommendation that money cannot buy. The scene with the rubber ball on the staircase, in a film that otherwise wins by never shouting, remains one of the most unnerving things in the genre.
The rest of his career was wide and slightly unruly. He directed The Krays (1990) and Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), and the sequel Species II (1998), which is the sort of credit that keeps a working director humble. Television was never far away: episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone revival, including “Button, Button”, and of Faerie Tale Theatre, and later of Masters of Horror, Carnivàle, Breaking Bad and House. He directed episodes of the first two seasons of Hannibal, where Bryan Fuller remembered him as “such a gentle teddy bear of a Hungarian”. His last credit was the 2018 documentary The Ghost of Peter Sellers, about the disastrous making of his film Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a rare case of a director turning a catastrophe into a good story.
For a genre that so often mistakes volume for fear, Medak knew that an empty room and a patient camera do the work. If you have never seen The Changeling, tonight is a decent time to put it on. Just keep an eye on the stairs.
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