The Other

• Twins Chris and Martin Udvarnoky, who had no prior acting experience, were cast after a nationwide talent search — a schoolteacher in Westfield, New Jersey submitted their photo. Director Robert Mulligan let each boy choose for himself which twin, Niles or Holland, he wanted to play.
• Though the story is set on a Connecticut farm, the film was actually shot in Murphys and Angels Camp, California. Mulligan had wanted Connecticut, but production started in autumn and the fall foliage wouldn't match the story's summer setting, so the crew moved west; the farmhouse was picked by an assistant director who remembered it from 1947's The Red House.
• Legendary Broadway acting teacher Uta Hagen, who plays grandmother Ada, made her film debut in The Other at age 53 — one of only a handful of screen credits in a career centered almost entirely on the stage.
• John Ritter, in one of his earliest film roles, appears briefly as the family's brother-in-law, Rider Gannon.
• The film lost money in its initial theatrical run but found a cult following through repeated prime-time television broadcasts, including a run on CBS starting in 1973.

Niles's 'game' of becoming other people isn't just imagination — it's genuine possession. The grandmother's ritual actually works, and Niles uses it to suppress his own guilt by becoming Holland after Holland's death. The final shot of Niles smiling isn't a child who's gotten away with murder; it's a child who's been hollowed out and is now wearing his dead brother like a mask.

The Perry family's grief isn't backdrop — it's the supernatural engine. Ada's teaching of 'the Game' to Niles is what opens the door. Every death after that is the house or the land or the grief itself feeding on a child who was given a tool he couldn't control. Holland is less a villain than a symptom of a family that refused to process loss.

The entire film operates as a metaphor for childhood dissociation undiagnosed in 1935. Niles's hallucinations, his 'becoming' other people, and his inability to distinguish himself from Holland map onto clinical dissociative identity disorder. The horror isn't supernatural at all — it's the recognition that a child's mind, under sufficient trauma, will build a second self and let it kill.

Summer 1935. Twin brothers Niles and Holland Perry play barefoot through Connecticut farm country while grief rots the family from inside. Niles carries a secret taught by his Russian grandmother, Ada — a psychic trick she calls "the Game," letting him project his mind into other living things and see through their eyes. But Holland's pranks turn lethal, and the bodies stack up around the farm: a cousin impaled after jumping into a haystack hiding a pitchfork, an infant niece drowned in a wine cask, a ring cut from a dead boy's own finger. The film's reveal isn't just a twist — it's an infection that rewrites every scene you've already watched, turning a sunlit coming-of-age story into a portrait of a child who learned to host the dead.