The Child 1977

Alicianne Del Mar, Laurel Barnett, travels through the quiet, wind-swept landscapes of early-20th-century rural California to take a nanny position at the crumbling Nordon estate. After an accidental crash on her way there, she wanders the surrounding woods with a cautious confidence, certain she can find the house since she was raised nearby and knows the lay of the land. Along the way, she encounters unsettling signs—a mutilated cat in the underbrush, and a glimpse of a clawed hand gripping the edge of a tree—moments that prick at her nerves yet fail to deter her. In the woods she also stumbles upon an old cemetery that seems to whisper of secrets, and a pale figure lurking behind the trees that quickly vanishes when she turns toward it. Fear spurs her onward to the familiar protection of a home she hasn’t yet entered.

She is greeted at the door by Mr. Nordon, Frank Janson, a widower who shares the vast house with his adult son, Len, Richard Hanners, and the enigmatic Rosalie, Rosalie Cole. Len opens up about a grim history—that his mother was murdered in the woods by tramps years before—a tale that casts a long shadow over the estate. Mrs. Whitfield, Ruth Ballan, the Nordons’ nosy neighbor, is portrayed as a nuisance by the family, yet her presence is tethered to the town’s ordinary rhythms. Her fate turns sinister when she is targeted by an unseen force that breaches the quiet of her own home. In a terrifying encounter, as she tries to flee, Rosalie appears outside, taunting her and declaring that she has brought “friends.” Mrs. Whitfield flees to the basement, but the intrusions of a claw-handed figure culminate in a brutal, eye-ripping murder.

The tension thickens on Halloween, when the house seems to come alive with small, unnerving miracles. Alicianne notices a jack-o’-lantern that moves by itself in the den, a sign that something outside the family’s world is choosing to intrude. That same night, Rosalie, costumed as a witch, slips into the wooded shadows to confront a tramp who once killed her mother; the confrontation ends with the unseen assailant using a shotgun to finish the man’s violent business. Rosalie’s father rebukes her for sneaking out and probes why she lingers near the cemetery, a place she defies and questions in return, hinting at a deeper source of the family’s fear. Rosalie’s defiance fractures the fragile calm and hints at the way she commands her own dark influence.

Len begins to reveal more of the estate’s shadows when he discovers the tramp’s corpse in the shack, and Alicianne, from a distance, spots a mutated figure peering into a window. Tragedy intensifies as, while Len is outside, Alicianne discovers his father’s body on the stairs with an eerie, missing eye. The pair try to escape together, but Len’s car breaks down, leaving them vulnerable to the night’s growing threats. A mob of decayed zombies—Rosalie’s summoned “friends” from the cemetery—surges toward them, a living reminder of the family’s cursed links to the past. The two lovers of survival use the car horn to divert the onslaught and manage to barricade themselves inside an abandoned factory building.

Inside the factory, the fight for safety grows ever more dire as the zombies probe, breach, and overwhelm the defenses. Len is dragged beneath the floorboards, his head mutilated by the relentless assault, and the isolation of Alicianne sharpens into a grim resolve. Alone and exhausted, she hears a door swing open and misreads the intruder, striking with an axe until the truth hits her—the attacker is Rosalie. The moment of realization comes with a heavy, tragic silence as Rosalie dies, leaving Alicianne to stumble out into the night, haunted by what she has witnessed and left with, a survivor shadowed by the inevitable echo of the house’s dark history.