The Child Soundtrack (1977)

Synopsis

The Child

Alicianne is a pretty young girl who is hired to be a full time caretaker and companion for young Rosalie Nordon, whose mother has recently passed away. Rosalie's household also consists of her father and brother, and the family lives in a large house, located in a heavily wooded area.

On her way to the Nordon house for the first time, Alicianne suffers car trouble when she accidentally drives it into a ditch. Instead of choosing to walk along the road, Alicianne decides to walk through the woods, as she is somewhat familiar with the area because she grew up nearby. She meets an elderly neighbor, the somewhat daffy Mrs. Whitfield, who warns Alicianne about the strange ways of the Nordon clan, and when Alicianne finally arrives at the house, she finds out why the Nordons have a shady reputation.

Mr. Nordon is a somewhat unfriendly old man. Len, the older brother, is mostly silent and awkward. Rosalie herself seems aloof and withdrawn. When Alicianne first meets her, the jack-in-the-box next to Rosalie's bed suddenly ejects itself without warning, startling Alicianne. Other strange things happen in the house, and Rosalie's father seems to possess a bizarre, morbid attitude; at the dinner table, he tells a story about a group of boy scouts who died of food poisoning, laughing at how the young boys accidentally added a poisonous ingredient to their dinner and died agonizing deaths. Rosalie laughs at the story, too. Len seems disturbed and embarrassed by his family.

Soon after Alicianne's arrival, she begins to notice that whenever Rosalie gets angry or upset, things seem to move and take on a life of their own--like the jack-in-the-box. Rosalie spends a lot of time at the grave of her mother, which is in a nearby cemetery in the woods. Alicianne finds some of Rosalie's drawings, which reveal sinister figures. Unbeknownst to the others, Rosalie has telekinetic abilities, which she uses to reanimate corpses from the local cemetery. She sends the zombies to do her bidding, and as a reward, she feeds them things like small animals.

Rosalie steps up her revenge a notch when she confronts the nosy Mrs. Whitfield. First the zombies make off with Mrs. Whitfield's dog, then the next night they come for her, terrorizing her before mutilating her in her basement. Rosalie has a sketch book full of drawings, one of which is a list of people she blames for her mother's death, and as her victims die, she crosses them off the list.

Rosalie begins to sour on Alicianne, particularly when Alicianne starts to spend time with Len, and Alicianne's sense of terror starts to rise. In a dreamlike moment, Alicianne follows Rosalie to the misty cemetery one night and questions her about who she is meeting there, to no avail. During a Halloween party, a jack-o-lantern seems to levitate and follows Alicianne around the darkened living room, and Rosalie also causes a scarecrow to animate and come after Alicianne.

Alicianne finds Mr. Nordon's mutilated body in the house. Len and Alicianne decide to flee in Alicianne's car, but a rock shatters the windshield and Len crashes. While he is trying to start the car again, zombies close in on them and try to drag them out of the car. They escape and run to a nearby wooden mill, where the zombies surround the structure and try to break in. Len attempts to hold them off by boarding the doors and windows, and he manages to kill one after finding a shotgun. Eventually the zombies attack from underneath the mill, and Len is pulled through the floorboards and presumably killed after his face is ripped off.

Finally, the attack seems to stop, and Rosalie comes through the door of the mill. Alicianne manages to land a death blow with an axe to her head, killing her. When she emerges from the mill, the zombies are all gone.

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