The Child (1977)

 

Director: Robert Voskanian

Screenplay: Ralph Lucas

Cast: Laurel Barnett as Alicianne Del Mar; Rosalie Cole as Rosalie Nordon; Frank Janson as Nordon; Richard Hanners as Len Nordon; Ruth Ballan as Mrs. WhitfieldChris Tieken as Jefferson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

In my idealised view, the girl at the start of The Child is not sacrificing a cat to the dead at the graveyard, but that the undead merely want a kitten to pet. Kidding aside, as it is clear later on animals are being eaten by the occupants of this cemetery, the scene is an appropriately odd introduction for a film I underrated in quality and in terms of oddness. There is something compelling from the get-go, and already established from the first scene, very suspicious things are transpiring at Osbourne, California, the birth place of our lead Alicianne Del Mar (Laurel Barnett) she returns to as part of a job as a nanny for a young girl named Rosalie (Rosalie Cole), the same one to be seen in the first sequence with the cat. Alicianne finds herself introduced having driven off the road and briefly ending up at a boarding house where it is claimed Rosalie was the cause for all the boarders being scared away, a warning bell never heard as everything in the nearby woods is apparently haunted and is at least populated by sinister figures with sharp nails.

The initial set up are tropes of the horror genre, but all entice, as the Rosalie family is male barring her, the mother deceased and thus leaving the father and older brother. Rosalie herself fits the sinister child mould even without clear psychic powers, capricious and vindictive, out for revenge for those who slighted her mother, and liable to set off on anyone else including her family is desired. Considering she and her father will gleefully laugh at the dinner table about boy scouts accidentally poisoning themselves, the tale is already twisted before it becomes clear Alicianne is in peril.

The Child is a curiosity which I came to as being more conventional than I had realised among a set of regional North American horror films I was binging; returning to it, it turned out with hindsight to be far more unconventional than remembered. With a curious (and great) set of piano pieces with electronic samples by Rob Wallace to match, who would go on to score educational games based on Nintendo's Mario video game mascot of all things like Mario Is Missing! (1992), The Child is slow burn pulp. It is still lurid, violence and meant as scary, but the film becomes moody instead as a result. It guts a lot of unnecessary exposition as well which, whilst there is not too much to say about The Child without spoiling it, proves to be its virtue in not feeling bogged down, focusing on taking well worn troupes and making them unconventional in context. Even when it becomes more conventional by the ending, when you are following characters fleeing ghouls, there is both the surprisingly transgressive conclusion for one character, but also that for the time before The Child has the mood of a dream too. There is a lot of eye catching imagery here for what is many tropes from this genre - be it the sinister Jack-o'-lantern moving by itself, or a scarecrow helping with revenge with a rifle or a bloody teddy bear - which goes to show with hindsight I had underappreciated this film greatly when it had more to offer.