Lost Children

One night in the early fifties, two new parents were preparing for bed when they heard the cries of their young daughter from the next room. They quickly charged into the little girls room to find it seemingly empty, yet her crying continued. "Ali," they shouted her name and for a brief moment panic fell over the young couple until they moved the bed to find their daughter against the wall. She had apparently fell out of bed in her sleep and rolled against the wall and didn't know where she was.

   The father of the girl was Richard Matheson, a writer. The incident would be the inspiration for a short story entitled Little Girl Lost and would also be adapted by Matheson as an episode of the Twilight Zone.
  In the story, a young couple, Chris and Ruth, are startled to find their daughter missing in her own room. They first hear her cries coming from under the bed, but find nothing there. Soon they call a friend who just happens to be a physicist and we are introduced to Mack, who seems to have an instant opinion about what is going on here. Turns out, behind the child's bed is a portal to another dimension. The three adults yell for the girl to follow their voice (and their dog that had jumped in after her) but she is lost and cannot find her way back. Soon, her father goes in after her and we visit this strange world. Dark and fog-filled the world is indeed strange, but not as strange as some of the photographic effects used. The picture becomes warped randomly and on more than one occasion, the film is turned sideways and upside-down making it even more disorientating.
   Eventually the dad finds the girl and they are pulled out just as the portal is closing. Everyone lives happily ever after, but  no one can ever figure out what the portal was of why it appeared. The End.

   But, from this seemingly straight forward Twilight Zone episode comes our first SUBGERE sub-genre, I call it; Lost Child films. These are films where a child is lost in his or her own house. They mostly have the same structure as the Matheson story, but have become more of a break-off of the Haunted House sub-genre.
   I've picked out three films that fall into this category; Poltergeist, House and Insidious. All three involve young parents, new houses (in the case of Insidious, two new houses), and some creepy things going on. Not to mention the missing kid.
   Poltergeist and Insidious share the most resemblance to the Matheson story. Parents calling for their child to follow their voice, outside help from a professional to tell us all what's going on. The structures of the films are strikingly similar.

   In Poltergeist we meet the Freeling family. They have recently moved into their new home in a brand new suburb. The trouble starts here when a t.v. comes on by itself and the youngest daughter, Carol-Anne, stars having conversations with something she calls the teevee people. But kids are always making things up so the parents pretty much ignore her.
   Later, after the t.v. turns itself on again, a ghostly hand comes out of the screen and reaches for the little girl. Her scream wakes up her parents and now we find our selves in the same situation as Little Girl Lost. Carol-Anne's voice can be heard echoing through the house but she is nowhere to be found. Paranormal researchers are called in to investigate (two young students and an older woman). They are all subjected to the ghosts in the house and call in an even more experienced investigator, a little old woman who seems to know exactly whats going on.      We learn from the old lady that whatever is haunting this house has attached it self to the girl because they are jealous that she is so full of life while they are just dead souls. Eventually the mother goes into a portal found in the kid's closet and rescues her daughter from the other side. Everyone seems safe and the old lady declares the house clean. If you haven't seen the film, I won't spoil what happens next. The last part of the film doesn't really fall into the Lost Child genre as much as the first two-thirds, so we'll move on.
 
Insidious tells the story of another young couple who just moved in to a new house. Their troubles begin when their middle child wanders into the attic to explore. He climbs a ladder to reach a light-switch, but the rung breaks and he falls. Everything seems fine until the next morning when they find the boy in a coma. Doctors cannot find anything wrong with him other than the fact that he won't wake up. The parents adjust their lives accordingly, learning how to care for a child in a vegetative state, I assume, sucks.
   Things go from bad to worse when ghosts start freaking everyone out. The mother hears voices on the baby monitor and sees shadows of a large man outside the bedroom window. It gets so bad that the decide to move. It doesn't take long before we realize that whatever was haunting them, has followed them, so the call in some paranormal investigators (two young students and an older woman) to see whats going on.

Ms. Rubenstein

   This is where it really starts to resemble the Lost Child genre. We learn that the boy can astro-project, that is, when he sleeps, he can literally leave his own body and fly around and do basically whatever he wants. It's explained that the boy never got scared because he always assumed he was sleeping. This time, however, he wandered to far away and lost his way back. Meanwhile, all of these dead souls hover around his body, searching for an empty vessel to inhabit. Eventually the father goes into the other side (or The Further, as it's called here) and rescues the boy.
Flashbacks of both Little Girl Lost and Poltergeist occur on more than one occasion in the later half of the movie, but none more apparent than when the mother call out for the father and son on the other side to follow here voice. I almost expected it to cut to a shot of Zelda Rubenstein.
   Finally, I'd like to briefly touch on House. This was one of of my favorites when I was a kid, partly because it was the first rated R film my parents ever let me watch. It is the story of Roger Cobb, a horror writer who is struggling to write a memoir of his time in Vietnam.
   A while back (it never mentions how long), he and his wife were visiting his aunt at the old Victorian house where she lived alone. While trimming the hedges, Roger looks down to where his son had playing to find him gone. The two young parents look everywhere for the child until they hear splashing in the pool. He sees the boy struggling and jumps in to rescue him, but once in the water, he find no sign of the boy.
  We pick up with Roger attending his aunts funeral. His wife has left him and he is a shell of the man he once was. His aunt left the house to him, so he decides to try to finish his book there. This is where  all the scary stuff goes down except this movie is mostly played for laughs. The monsters look sillier than scary and George Wendt  plays the wacky neighbor and the only one Roger tells abouts the ghosts. The movie really picks up when a painting by Roger's aunt is found. The painting shows his son trapped in a bathroom mirror, so Roger finds the same mirror in the house, breaks it and finds that it leads to another world. Their he searches for his son and finds him in the grip of an old army buddy that died in the war. Roger blows up the bad guy and the house just as his wife pulls in the drive way and the family is reunited.

  Of course all of these go back to the Twilight Zone episode and the original Matheson short story, but I think the fear of a new parent losing a child is the root of these stories. I don't have children, but I can only imagine that just behind the joy of having a new child, right there next to the wonders of being a parent, watching a child grow before your eyes, is terror. Pure unadulterated terror.