Little Girl Lost
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“Little Girl Lost” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
[edit] Details
- Episode number: 91
- Season: 3
- Original air date: March 16, 1962
- Writer: Richard Matheson from his short story published in The Shores of Space (1953)
- Director: Lamont Johnson
- Music: Original score by Bernard Herrmann
[edit] Cast
- Chris Miller: Robert Sampson
- Ruth Miller: Sarah Marshall
- Tina: Tracy Stratford, Rhoda Williams (Tina's voice)
- Bill: Charles Aidman
[edit] Synopsis
The opening scene shows a couple sleeping in their bedroom. We soon hear the distant whimpering of their little girl and her parents slowly stir from their deep sleep. Like most parents of small children, this is nothing new to them and they are slow to relinquish their slumber to a more conscious state of mind. The dog in their yard begins to bark.
Dad gets out of bed and shuffles off towards her room. Arriving there, he turns on the light only to see her empty bed. He can hear her plea to help her and it is obvious from her voice that she is scared. Looking around the room, he says, “I’m here, where are you?”
Again, we hear the dog barking in the back yard.
Dad lowers himself to his hands and feet next to the bed while trying to talk her out from underneath it where she must be hiding from her nightmare. The camera follows him down from the opposite side of the bed, our view level with his head. We briefly lose sight of him as the mattress comes between us. Then we see him again from underneath the bed, our view unobstructed by the child that should be between him and us. Her voice is in the room, but she is not. He can hear her and she can hear him, but neither can see each other.
The torpor from his sleep has completely left him as he explains to his entering wife that even though they can hear her, their little girl is no longer with them.
The dog is now barking incessantly. Dad calls a neighbor for help and opens the door to let the dog in as he waits for the neighbor to join them. The dog runs into the girl’s room as Mom, still in the room, watches it go under the bed. She bends over calling it back, but becomes quiet when she sees that it has disappeared. We hear the dog barking and the little girl’s voice from somewhere, but where are they?
Dad calls their physicist friend over, who taps the wall and finds a portal to another dimension. The friend explains it by saying sometimes lines in our 3 dimensions end parallel, rather than perpendicular to, the 4th dimension.
They try to call to the dog to guide their daughter back, but that doesn't work. Finally Dad, despite the warnings of the physicist friend, leans in and falls completely into the other dimension. It's a trippy hazy place, where things are upside down and sideways. He finally sees his daughter and the dog and tries to call them towards him, since he is standing right near the portal. On the other side, he hears his friend telling him to hurry up. Finally he grabs the girl and the dog and is pulled back into the bedroom. Mom takes the girl to another room.
The physicist friend explains that Dad was actually only halfway in, despite Dad thinking he was standing up in the new dimension. Friend was holding on to Dad's legs the entire time. Friend was telling Dad to hurry because the portal was actually closing, and had it been any longer than a few more seconds, Dad would have been cut in two as the portal closed with half his body in the other dimension.
[edit] Trivia
- Matheson wrote the short story based on a real-life incident involving his young daughter, who fell off her bed while asleep and rolled against a wall. Despite hearing her daughter’s cries for help, Matheson’s wife was initially unable to locate her daughter.
- This episode is parodied in a Treehouse of Horror VI episode of The Simpsons, Homer3, where Homer Simpson disappears into what Professor Frink dubs "The Third Dimension," eventually making his way to our world as a three dimensional rendering of his cartoon self. (Homer even describes the portal as "something outta that twilight-y show about that zone.")
- Physicist Lawrence Krauss opens Hiding in the Mirror, his 2005 history of speculation about extra dimensions, with a reminiscence of the impact the episode had on him when he first watched it as a young boy.
- Disney's Twilight Zone Tower of Terror has a wall in the basement area of the tower in which you can hear crying and a little girl calling for help along with the sound of wind and the feeling of air being blown at you from the wall.
