The Changeling

A widower, an enormous empty Seattle mansion, and a wheelchair coming down the stairs.

George C. Scott plays a composer whose wife and daughter are killed in the first five minutes in an accident he watches from a phone box. He takes a house. The house has an attic, and in it a child's wheelchair, and the film proceeds with almost no violence at all.

The séance sequence is the best thing in it: a medium takes automatic writing while a tape recorder runs, and the horror arrives in playback rather than in the room.

Peter Medak made it in Canada and it swept the first Genie Awards. It is routinely named by directors as an influence, Scorsese has it on his list of the scariest films ever made, and it remains far less known than it should be.

Bangs on a pipe. That is the whole effect and it works.