Twilight Zone Review & Trivia: Little Girl Lost (Aired March 16, 1962)

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By William Kozy

And coming in 27th place in my ongoing survey of Facebook fans and writers, “LITTLE GIRL LOST” is found to sitting pretty with 60 votes. Thank you to all who participated!

This episode unnerved the Hell out of me when I was a little kid. It’s one of the first ones that I can recall seeing as a child, and maybe I recall it because of its disquietingly heady and horrific concept.

OPENING NARRATION:

“Missing: one frightened little girl. Name: Bettina Miller. Description: six years of age, average height and build, light brown hair, quite pretty. Last seen being tucked in bed by her mother a few hours ago. Last heard aye, there’s the rub, as Hamlet put it. For Bettina Miller can be heard quite clearly, despite the rather curious fact that she can’t be seen at all. Present location? Let’s say for the moment…in the Twilight Zone.”

The PLOT:

Chris and Ruth Miller are awakened from bed when they hear their little daughter Tina crying out from her bedroom. Their dog Mack is barking in the backyard. He knows something. This episode features another of those plot elements in which an intrepid dog plays hero; that’s always moving to me. The parents look for Tina everywhere, under the bed, all around and under the house, but her cries are definitely coming from that bedroom. The father calls his neighbor Bill who is a physicist (some responders to the poll scoffed at that convenience) and Bill comes to the house. Mack the dog has been let in and he runs under the bed and disappears also. Bill feels the wall behind the bed and finds a portal to another dimension when is hand goes through the solid wall. He makes marks on the wall, outlining the hole. Chris calls out to the dog, pleading with him to find Tina and lead her back. Chris is played by Robert Sampson, a Roy Thinnes look-alike; and Roy Thinnes made his mark as the lead character in a sci-fi show called “The Invaders” which is also the name of a “Twilight Zone episode.” “The Invaders” was a show with a compelling premise: an entire series based on the only man on Earth who knows about aliens from another world who are scheming to take over our little blue marble. It’s a paranoia-thriller concept that “The Twilight Zone” dealt quite niftily in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

SPOILER ALERT…

if you don’t want to read the ending of “Little Girl Lost” and would prefer to watch it (see link below) then you can skip ahead to the Closing Narration.

So, things are getting frantic. The family keeps calling to Mack to find Tina.

In rewatching the episode, I liked the following moment: The camera is against the wall for a POV of the family and physicist debating in frustration. Father and mother desperately want to go in, exclaiming “My daughter’s in there!” and “For crying out loud, she’s right here, all we have to do is reach in and pull her out!” to which Bill answers gravely, “If it were that simple, then why hasn’t Mack found her yet.” And he glances from them ominously back to us, the wall. It’s a chilling realization. As a viewer it stuns you a bit as you think, “Oh god that’s right.” We’re used to seeing dogs depicted with a keen instinct of where to go. So now we’re faced with the daunting power of this confusing dimension-bender; it’s so baffling that even a hero dog’s instinct is no match for it. And THAT is frightening.

Bill warns Chris and Ruth that if they entered the portal they might become lost as well. Eventually, they can hear that Mack has found Tina, but their voices seem to be coming from different parts of the house now. Chris can’t take it anymore and as he reaches his arm in to maybe grab Tina or at least show her his arm– he falls forward and is now in the other dimension. Chris then spots Tina and Mack but things are very distorted and bizarre. Bill had cautioned him that the dimension would be hard to navigate since it’s not laid out like ours. Bill tells Chris to stay still and call to them. So Chris calls to Mack who eventually brings Tina to him. He grabs the two of them, and then pulls them, falling back into the bedroom. We learn that despite Chris feeling like he was entirely in the other dimension (we even see him depicted as standing up by himself in there) the truth as Bill explains it, is that he was holding onto Chris the whole time. Bill could tell the hole was closing, and he was able to pull them back just in time. Bill knocks on the wall showing that it is entirely solid again. He says, “Another few seconds and half of you would have been here and the other half…”

CLOSING NARRATION:

“The other half where? The fourth dimension? The fifth? Perhaps. They never found the answer. Despite a battery of research physicists equipped with every device known to man, electronic and otherwise, no result was ever achieved, except perhaps a little more respect for and uncertainty about the mechanisms of the Twilight Zone.”

TRIVIA TIDBITS:

The great Richard Matheson wrote this episode, and he based it on an incident from his own life when he and his wife heard their daughter crying one night but couldn’t find her since she had fallen off the bed and rolled against a wall. He felt under the bed but couldn’t find her and that’s how the idea sprang to his mind. Extrapolating further, the Spielberg-produced film “Poltergeist” is largely a plot built around the same concept as this episode. Let’s note that Richard Matheson also wrote “Duel” the TV movie about Mack trucks that propelled Spielberg to fame (Hey! Mack trucks…the dog is named Mack!). Spielberg also produced “The Twilight Zone” movie in 1983 in which the best segment (gremlin on the airplane wing) was one that was written by Matheson. Hmmmm, the math seems to indicate they must have agreed to borrow this plot element for “Poltergeist.”

They had apparently filmed a scene where we see the little girl enter the wall, but in the final edit they didn’t include that and of course that was a good editorial decision. The voice of the little girl was supplied by an adult actress named Rhoda Williams, 32-years-old. As one voter said in responding to the poll, he thought it sounded silly–too obviously like an adult imitating a child. Can’t argue with that complaint. (Or hey, maybe the fourth dimension aged her voice! Yeah, I’ll buy that!)

To create a unique and disorienting look for the fourth dimension, the cinematographer George T. Clemens used the simple old trick of oiling up a sheet of glass and moving it around in front of the camera lens. They also used an optical printer, and some double exposure involving a mirrored ball hanging above the scene, rotating the camera on its axis, wide-angle lenses for close-ups, and a fog machine. Matheson said, “The fourth dimension could have been a little stranger, but it wasn’t bad at all; I was very pleased with it.”

The music score also helped convey the eerie feeling extremely well. In fact, it is the only Twilight Zone episode in which the composer received billing before the director, who was Paul Stewart. Fun fact: Paul Stewart played the butler who burns Rosebud in “Citizen Kane”. Anyway, the composer used four flutes, four harps, a percussionist playing tambourine (I couldn’t hear a tambourine, but okay), tam-tams, vibraphone, and viola d’amore. And that composer? None other than Bernard Herrmann, the great composer of so many Hitchcock films such as Psycho, Vertigo, and North by Northwest.

This is one of my favorite episodes of the series, so I have to rate it a 10 out of 10. Odd girl’s voice or not.

Watch it here for free.

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