Horror movies from the Disney corporation? Now we’ve seen everything! Actually, Disney’s live-action films (and their animated ones, for that matter) used to come tinged with serious darkness back in the day, even if ’80s creepfest “The Watcher in the Woods” may have gone a step further than most. It stars Kyle Richards and Lynn-Holly Johnson as a pair of sisters who move with their parents to an English estate, where they are haunted by a mysterious entity in the nearby forest. Bette Davis also appears in one of her last film roles as the eccentric Mrs. Eylwood, who also lives on the estate, mourning the loss of her teenage daughter decades earlier.

The film was supposed to end with a special effects sequence including an alien flying one of the girls to its spaceship, but they weren’t able to put it together in time for its theatrical opening, so instead they rushed out an incomprehensible ending that probably didn’t make sense, even to the people who worked on the film. The result was disastrous — “The Watcher in the Woods” was widely panned, and was pulled from theaters just 10 days after its glitzy premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York.

However, unlike the original cut of “The Watcher in the Woods,” this story has a happy ending. Disney spent the next 18 months re-cutting the film, eventually releasing it in late 1981. Although it still wasn’t particularly well-received, it was a far cry from the complete dud they had dropped in theaters earlier.