Little Girl Lost (The Twilight Zone)

"Little Girl Lost"
The Twilight Zone episode
Scene from "Little Girl Lost" when they find the opening to another dimension
Episode no.	Season 3 Episode 91
Directed by	Paul Stewart
Written by	Richard Matheson from his short story published in The Shores of Space (1953)
Featured music	Original score by Bernard Herrmann
Production code	4828
Original air date	March 16, 1962
Guest stars
Robert Sampson: Chris Miller Sarah Marshall: Ruth Miller Tracy Stratford: Tina Miller Rhoda Williams: Tina's voice Charles Aidman: Bill
Episode chronology
← Previous "The Fugitive" Next → "Person or Persons Unknown"
List of Twilight Zone episodes

"Little Girl Lost" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

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 into 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.

”

Plot

A couple, Chris and Ruth, are awoken by the distant whimpering of their little girl, Tina. Chris slowly gets up to see what the trouble is. Their dog, Mack, begins to bark from their back yard. Chris finds Tina's bed empty, though he can hear Tina's plea for help. Looking around the room, he says, "I'm here, where are you?" Mack barks again in the back yard.

Chris crouches next to the bed while trying to talk Tina out from underneath it, where he thinks she is hiding. He looks under the bed only to find that nothing is there. Chris can hear Tina (with a strange echo effect) and she can hear him, but neither can see each other. He explains to Ruth that even though they can hear her, their little girl is no longer with them.

Mack is now barking incessantly. Chris calls his physicist friend, Bill, for help and opens the door to let Mack into the house. The dog runs into Tina's room as Ruth, 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. She can still hear the dog's barking (also with the echo now) and Tina's voice.

Bill comes over and examines the wall behind the bed. He taps the wall and finds an invisible portal to another dimension. He explains it by saying sometimes lines in our three dimensions end parallel with, rather than perpendicular to, the fourth dimension.

The adults try to call to Mack to guide Tina back, but their attempts fail. Finally Chris, despite Bill's warnings, leans into the portal and falls into the other dimension. Chris lands in a hazy, foggy, abstract place, where space and shapes are distorted, turning upside down and sideways. When Chris calls to Bill, his voice also echoes. Chris sees Tina and Mack and tries to call them towards him, since he is standing right near the portal. On the other side, he hears Bill's voice telling him to hurry up. Finally as Tina and Mack close in on him, Bill grabs them and is pulled back into the bedroom. Ruth takes the girl to another room.

Bill explains that Chris was actually only halfway in, despite Chris thinking he was standing up in the new dimension. Bill was in fact holding on to Chris the entire time. He was telling Chris to hurry because the portal was actually closing, and had Chris remained there for any longer than a few more seconds, he would have been cut in two as the portal closed with half his body in the other dimension. As Bill puts it to Chris, "Another few seconds, and half of you would've 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.

”

Preview for next week's story

“

Next week we again borrow from the considerable talents of Charles Beaumont, and we take a fast trot on the wild side. Picture if you will a man who wakes up in a strange world, knows everyone, knows every place, feels very much at home. The strangeness comes from the fact that no one knows him. Try this one for size on the next Twilight Zone. It's called "Person or Persons Unknown".

”

[At this point, Serling, cigarette between his fingers, originally slipped in a plug for "tonight's sponsor", Liggett & Myers' "Chesterfield":]

Habit is something you do when pleasure is gone, and certainly this is not the way to smoke. I prefer to smoke Chesterfields, and get the rich taste of '21 great tobaccos'- blended mild, not filtered mild. Smoke for pleasure...smoke Chesterfields.

Production notes

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.

The voice of Tina Miller, the "little girl" in question, was played by voice actor Rhoda Williams, who was then 32 years old.

References in other media

"Little Girl Lost" was parodied in Homer³, a segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI", an episode from the seventh season of The Simpsons. Instead of recovering Tina from the fourth dimension, the two-dimensionally-drawn characters attempt to retrieve Homer (and later, Bart) from the mysterious "third dimension". The episode ends with Homer destroying the 3D world and getting jettisoned into the real world, where he is initially frightened, but forgets his troubles when he finds an erotic cake store. The episode was famous at the time for mixing 3D computer animation and live-action with the show's two-dimensional cel animation. The Twilight Zone was even referenced in the episode when Homer describes the series as "that twilighty show about that zone."

An only slightly similar event occurs at the end of the first episode of the second season of Primeval: Stephen Hart tries to return to the present through an anomaly in time (from the Cretaceous, after returning two rogue raptor dinosaurs there) but is being pulled back by one of the raptors. The other characters manage to pull Stephen entirely through the anomaly and it closes on the attacking raptor's neck, decapitating it, similar to what Bill had warned would happen to Chris had the portal closed on him.

Many elements of this episode were later echoed in the Steven Spielberg-produced Poltergeist. Spielberg was keenly familiar with The Twilight Zone, having produced Twilight Zone: The Movie and also directed a segment. Spielberg's first film, Duel, was written by frequent Twilight Zone contributor Richard Matheson, who wrote this episode. The main elements of "Little Girl Lost" that were repeated in Poltergeist include a little girl falling into another dimension where she and her parents cannot see each other but can talk to and hear one another; the marking off of the dimension "hole"; the father going into the other dimension to rescue his daughter and then being pulled back out by people on the outside; and even the girl's voice coming through the television set.

In addition, an area of the exit path for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror theme park attractions uses subtle effects to simulate air currents coming out of a solid wall, as well as playing a subtle recording of the little girl's dialogue at intervals.

Theoretical basis

The hole into the other dimension is an example of a "Riemannian cut", which is a type of wormhole formed by two spaces being joined at the same set of points. The uncertainty of whether the other dimension was the fourth or fifth would point to a question of the dimensionality of the space our three dimensional universe is connected to or embedded in.

Music

Bernard Herrmann's score for the episode is written for an unusual chamber ensemble of four flutes (doubling on piccolos, and alto and bass flutes), four harps, percussion (one player, utilizing tambourine, tam-tams, and vibraphone), and viola d'amore. It has been performed as a concert suite by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.

References

• DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1593931360
• Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0970331090

This was also the inspiration for The Doors song Your Lost Little Girl, which appeared on the album Strange Days

External links

• TV.com episode page