Fair-Haired Child

Fair Haired Child is the ninth episode of the first season of Masters of Horror. It originally aired in North America on January 6, 2006. A 15 year-old outcast named Tara is kidnapped by a strange couple and locked in a basement with their son who has a dark secret.

Plot

Tara (Lindsay Pulsipher), though a pretty and talented teenage girl, is not liked at her school and has no friends. Upon returning home one day on her bicycle, she is struck down by a van and promptly kidnapped and drugged. She seemingly awakens in a hospital bed with a nurse (Lori Petty) informing her that she is far from home and was found in Vermont. After some odd personal questions, Tara finds out, to her shock, that she is not, in fact, where she thinks she is, and attempts to scream for help and run, which grants her nothing. The kidnapper (William Samples) apprehends her as she tries to escape, and with the help of the "nurse", throws her into the basement.

Tara explores the basement, finding only a young boy (Jesse Hadock) hanging from a noose, close to death. She saves him, and the two begin to form a bond. The boy, named Johnny is sweet and kind but cannot talk; he has to communicate by writing in the dust. With Johnny's assistance, Tara uncovers cryptic warnings on the walls, such as "Beware the Fair-Haired Child!" and "Get out before it wakes up!" As if that wasn't enough, the two discover a room with numerous backpacks and a bathtub stained with blood, showing that they are not the first victims in this basement. Shortly after this, Johnny begins to breathe hard as a great gust of wind shakes everything in the basement. Tara attempts to comfort him by talking to him about the picture drawn in her book: A comic she made up of a princess befriending some seemingly evil creatures who help her out, and become the greatest friends she's ever had.

Angered with the kidnapping couple, she yells at them for the mistreatment of her and Johnny. It is then we witness his transformation from a normal boy into the hideous demon dubbed the "Fair-Haired Child" (Walter Phelan). Scared out of her wits, Tara hides from the creature successfully until it reverts into the boy she befriended. It is then he reveals his shameful secret: the couple are his parents. Twelve years ago, Johnny died by drowning on his fifteenth birthday while trying out a small rowboat that his parents had given him as a birthday present. Desperate over the loss of their son, Johnny's parent's gain hope from a ritual book they receive from an old student who seemingly practiced occultism. By performing a ritual following the book's instructions, the parents make a deal with some entity, which involves them providing a sacrifice of one child per year until the quota of twelve is reached. Tara is the last before Johnny can become human again.

Johnny begins to cry and pound the wall, writing that he does not want to hurt her, and to forgive him. She embraces him as he begins to change. In a horrifying and graphic scene, the demon re-emerges and performs his final kill by disemboweling Tara. Soon afterward, Johnny's parents descend into the basement to find Tara's corpse covered with a piece of old newspaper, with the words "I forgive you, Johnny," written on it in her blood (which she apparently wrote before dying).

The couple then happily performs the final stage of the ritual, leading Johnny through an arch in their garden, transforming him into the beautiful, blond boy he was before his death. The next scene shows his parents calmly playing their instruments as Johnny sits quietly, looking over Tara's drawing. Upon their questioning of his silence, Johnny (speaking for the first time) responds about his jealousy of their talent and his wish for something that he himself is good at. Smiling, he informs his mother that he found it. His talent is bargaining. It is then that the lights begin to flicker and a strong wind travels through the house as his mother hysterically screams, asking Johnny what he did. He replied that it took them twelve kids to resurrect somebody. He narrowed it down to two, and they didn't have to be children. Johnny smiles sadistically as Tara bursts through the window as a female version of the demon, and gruesomely kills his parents.

Flash forward to the alive-and-well Tara waking up, curiously observing the Band-Aid on her arm (which indicates Johnny injected her with something to make her temporarily forget what had happened). She meets him in another room, and the two introduce themselves again as he takes her for a stroll to the lake. As they pass, the camera pans to the graves of Johnny's parents in the garden.

External links

• Fair-Haired Child at the Internet Movie Database
• Review for Fair-Haired Child at Dread Central