Cinema’s murderous children are legion, but Jodie Foster’s Rynn Jacobs in 1976’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane often falls among the forgotten. It was understandable given the especially prolific year she was having: memorable performances in Bugsy Malone, Freaky Friday, Echoes of a Summer and, of course, the behemoth of child star breakthroughs Taxi Driver. In fact, Rynn, more than any other character, emerges in the shadow of the child prostitute Iris Steensma (the role that landed Foster her first Oscar nomination) and becomes as much a casualty as a rather complicated double, no less worth seeking out.
While there had already been Mervyn Leroy’s supremely successful The Bad Seed, The Innocents obviously, and even Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby … Kill! in the decades before, the 70s gave way to a fount of diabolical youngsters on screen. From The Exorcist to The Omen, the marked fascination with corrupted and, what’s more, grotesque innocents seemed to announce certain other prevailing anxieties about the future of the family as we then knew it. Already the Vietnam war had begun to haunt and transform a generation, and the sudden, prominent coverage of serial murders upended the presumed safety of the middle-class home.
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, directed by Nicholas Gessner, at once belongs and yet feels alien to this spate of films, preoccupied with all manner of sinister threats to the nuclear family, none more treacherous than their own children, who so doggedly resist authority. Even now, after the film has grasped something of cult status, its genre – for all the pointed giallo influence – remains considerably knotty to define: part horror, part psychological thriller, part exploitation, part teen romance.
Based on the 1974 novel by Laird Koenig, who then wrote the screenplay, the film follows the mysterious Rynn, a 13-year-old orphan living alone in a small Maine town. She is continually beleaguered by a revolving door of meddlesome neighbors: the cop Ron Miglioriti (Mort Shuman), with whom Rynn later becomes chummy; her overbearing landlady Mrs Hallet (Alexis Smith); and, most troubling of all, Hallet’s son Frank (Martin Sheen), a known pedophile who has managed to elude jail thanks to his powerful mother and hounds Rynn with his relentless attentions. They are all naturally curious about the whereabouts of her father, always conveniently locked away in his study or sleeping upstairs. Hers is a poorly veiled ruse, delivered with such persuasiveness that she often manages to convince them, against their own better judgment. But her peace is ever endangered by their hovering presence; no matter how inept or unwitting, they perpetually imperil her safety.
She does finally meet a peer in the form of Miglioriti’s charming teenage nephew Mario (Scott Jacoby), an aspiring magician whose earnestness melts the otherwise remote, steely Rynn. Although she is alone, she never quite seems lonely until Mario arrives. But her precarious situation promises to be their undoing.
The film originally opened to middling reviews and some – it turns out, revealing – controversy. Foster clashed with a producer during filming over the late inclusion of a nude scene, eventually performed by her then 21-year-old sister. It’s a jarring moment in a film where much of the tension, and indeed horror, is bound up in her one glaring vulnerability: her startling youth. For her part, Foster gives a remarkably (if unsurprisingly) sophisticated performance, preserving a childlike candor amid a cold and obstinate willfulness. She commands every frame, betraying traces of the formidable actor she would yet become. There are few, if any, echoes of Iris in her portrayal, but Rynn (wealth, class and thus, worlds apart) ends up parroting her condition anyway – the ever preyed upon girl child – though the nude scene both undermines and personifies (as do some leering contemporary reviews) the film’s otherwise cogent missive: few things pose more harm to children than those tasked to protect them.
Doubly chilling then is how feckless these adults often are, for all the damage they threaten to wreak. Sheen embodies this most determinedly as Frank, all the more frightening for his artless menace: a blundering ghoul merely seeking opportunity. Interestingly enough, at this point Sheen was best known for Terrence Malick’s Badlands, where he himself played a killer teen, albeit under different circumstances.
Here, the children are less calculated than they are resourceful. The act of “playing” becomes their only defense against pestering grownups, constantly intruding upon the home. And so in some ways The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane deserves this environment, where its dynamic suspense truly thrives.
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is available on Amazon Prime in the US and UK
