ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I have returned for another 31 Nights of Halloween series!
To start things off, I watched The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), directed by Nicolas Gessner and starring a twelve year old Jodie Foster as a mysterious girl who is a bit too dedicated to preserving her latchkey kid way of life. What's great about this film is that it doesn't seem to be a work of horror at all until we are well into the second act. That's when it dawns on us-- along with the girl's new beau, a teenage magician with a limp-- that the characters have literally been sitting on a horrific scene the whole time. By the same stroke, we realize that there is something much more disturbing than we had imagined going on behind the powerfully sympathetic eyes of Foster's Rynn Jacobs. This is a clever trick, since we have seen her constantly lie through her teeth to everyone she's met from the beginning. Even as a pre-teen, Foster was able to bring a layered and restrained complexity to Rynn that lures us into trusting her and rooting for her, all while we strongly suspect that we shouldn't-- and perhaps even after our suspicions are confirmed. Notwithstanding the patient ironies and delicate autumn compositions of Gessner's directing, I doubt this could have worked as well with anyone else in the role. I love a melancholy 70's horror film with unsettling undercurrents!
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