In Praise of 1977’s THE CHILD

Obscure zombie film THE CHILD needs more love.

In 1977, as STAR WARS blazed its way across the planet, re-writing the rules of cinema exhibition and defining its generation, a greasy little slip of shocker was quietly brightening regional screens and briefly providing a glowing ambience for winos and weirdos on New York’s 42^nd Street.

Said film was indeed a horror movie, humble, cheap and unpretentious. It came, it went. It came back again on home video, vanished once more. Was “rescued” and re-distributed by the fine freaks at Something Weird Video, then once more slipped into obscurity.

Indeed, THE CHILD probably deserves to stay in obscurity, hiding in limbo waiting for the odd set of eyeballs to find it, dig it and then forget it. It’s not a great movie. But there’s something…some sort of lazy, lurid appeal…a morbid atmosphere, a rusty-swing eeriness that gets under your skin, if you let it.  The movie’s charms perhaps only speak to a select few of extreme fringe film lovers.

I am one of these people.

I am a fan of THE CHILD.

It’s a lonely, lonely life…

THE CHILD was directed by LA based director Robert Voskanian, who never directed another feature film after it, but really should have. After graduating film school in 1975, the young Voskanian started his own company, Panorama Films, an imprint that aimed to make educational and industrial pictures and commercials, much like George A. Romero’s The Latent Image set out to do in the 1960s.

We all know how that turned out.

In fact, Voskanian and his partners were so smitten by Romero’s first feature NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, that they figured they would follow in his sizeable footsteps and make their own horror picture. Getting their mitts on a scrappy screenplay by a one Ralph Lucas called KILL AND GO HIDE, the company raised an impressive $100,000 USD and set out to make their maiden movie.

Shot in the Los Angeles area on a 35mm Arriflex camera, KILL AND GO HIDE, later renamed THE CHILD by its distributor, exploitation movie fat cat Harry Novak, plays like an eerie amalgam of THE BAD SEED meets CARRIE meets NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, built on the foundations of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”. In it, a governess named Alicianne (Laurel Barnett) drifts into a rural town to take the position of caregiver to a troubled girl named Rosalie (Rosalie Cole), a motherless child with a chip on her shoulder a mile wide, not to mention a very unique gift.

As Alicianne soon finds out, Rosalie is a telepath and not a very nice one. Her happiest hobby is to drag the desiccated corpses from the nearby cemetery out of their graves and play with them. Of course, when people cross her, she sends her monstrous friends out to tear them to shreds, something her nanny finds out during the film’s nightmarish climax.

The first thing one notices when watching THE CHILD is the first rate score, a haunting piano based melody by future video game composer Rob Wallace that bumps up against weird electronics to set a Gothic, dramatic mood. The second thing of significance is that Voskanian wastes little time getting to the atmospherics; as Alicianne wanders through the woods, fog machines work overtime and wind howls like mad on the soundtrack. And then there’s the ghouls. Blackened, white eyed horrors, we barely see them, save for a taloned hand uncoiling here, a tooth or two and a quick dash of a charred body there. It was Voskanian’s belief that the zombies should only be seen in the peripheral, not just to hide any budgetary limitations evident in their costumes, but to keep the audience guessing as to what exactly these things are.

It works. And it’s scary.

THE CHILD was shot without sound, it’s dialogue dubbed in later and not terribly convincingly. The film feels like a European horror picture at times, with actors speaking louder than they obviously should be and voices not matching the faces of the people speaking them. And though this is a flaw that might isolate many viewers, this dissonance simply adds another layer of dream-like weirdness to the entire production.

I’m not sure if Voskanian and his producer Robert Dadashian ever saw any profit from THE CHILD. Knowing Novak, it’s unlikely that they ever did. But the film did see play-dates all over the world, with 1100 screens in the US alone, an impressive number for a low-budget horror movie with no stars. And yet, to this day, so few remember the movie. So few reference books have ever seriously discussed the picture. Even the web offers a dearth of discussion on this flawed, fascinating little film.

Bloody, sloppy, strange, serious, sometimes too somber but always more than a little bit spooky, THE CHILD is out there, waiting for the handful of horror fans who will no doubt embrace its charms.

Maybe you’ll be among them?