Metacritic reviews

This so-called “children’s film” selects a variety of phobias and stitches them into a patchwork of shimmering terrorscapes and half-baked ideas about secret societies, the occult, and, of course, dirt-bike-racing in rural England. In other words, it’s perfect.

The Watcher In The Woods is an eerie, gothic horror movie and while it's suitable for older children, it feels utterly unlike anything else Disney has ever made.

Parents are frequently looking for transitory horror films to help bridge the gap between certifiable children's films to hard-R horror, and The Watcher in the Woods is a perfect addition.

The Watcher in the Woods is a great movie for seventy minutes, but the subpar ending really does stain an otherwise solid watch.

It does slow down a bit too much for endless walking hither and thither scenes in the woods, as we ebb toward the grand reveal, but the mystery proves strong enough to hold you.

The acting and writing are barely professional but the art direction, especially Alan Hume’s stunning camerawork, gives the pic a gloss.

A peculiar sort of Disney movie in that it's likely to scare the daylights out of the very young while reducing their usually sober-sided elders to unfortunate giggles. The audience in-between may well enjoy the standard spook-movie effects, but I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end.

When it became obvious that the film's mix of cutesy sentiment and vague scariness wasn't working, the company ordered whole sequences to be rewritten, re-shot or re-edited, then imposed a stupid ending that explains precisely nothing.

Watcher in the Woods represents a botched effort by the Disney studio to locate a suitable opening somewhere within the flourishing genres of supernatural and horror fantasy.

This tepid ghost story fails to focus on either its story or its target audience.