Edwige, my steadfast kangaroo companion, had once again returned to me. She held a a giant key ring in her mouth and dropped it in front me. The key had a horse skull carved at the end of it and I marveled at its craftsmanship. The Revenging Manta stirred again and slowly opened his eyes. Upon seeing Edwige, he reached for a sword that wasn’t there. 

“Ah, this is the famous Edwige you told me all about,” the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando said as he slowly rose to his feet. “Where is my weapon?” — To be continued.

Tonight’s movie is 1980’s The Changeling from director Peter Medak. This is a super scary one.

Well, not really. This makes The Amityville Horror look like The Grudge by comparison.

The movie begins with a famous composer named John Russell (George C. Scott, naturally) on vacation with his wife and young daughter. His car has conked out on a snowy road high up in the mountains. He walks over to a pay phone to call for help only to see his wife and daughter get killed in a horrible car crash. I’m talking about a closed casket funeral.

A few months go by. John gets a teaching gig at a prestigious college. He rents a fancy manor house from an agent of the neighborhood historical society, Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere). Not long after he moves in, he begins to notice some abnormalities in his new residence. Instead of a bump in the night, we get a bump during the day. A maintenance guy says it’s the furnace, but we know it’s not the furnace. The house is haunted and it’s up to John to get to the bottom of this.

John sees a downing boy in a bathtub in one of the rooms on the upper floor. That would be my cue to leave, but John keeps exploring the house, uncovering a hidden door leading to a tiny room in the attic. John hires a medium and has her hold a seance where he learns the downing boy in the bathtub’s name was Joseph Carmichael, the same name of a prominent United States senator. Turns out his dad murdered the boy because he was too sickly and adopted another boy to take his place. This was a ploy on the part of the father to get inheritance.

The ghost of the sickly boy wants revenge, but his dad is long dead so who does he want revenge on? The kid his dad adopted and became a U.S. senator? He’s an old man now. He’ll be kicking the bucket in a few years anyway. So the ghost can’t get revenge on the man who murdered him and the man who took his place wasn’t really complicit. Not in the murder anyway.

This ghost is a loser.

Yes, ghosts can be losers too.

That’s what I learned from The Changeling.

If and when you become a ghost, do better.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.