The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s a fascinating intersection of two separate micro-trends at play in the low-budget Canadian thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, plus two celebrities to headline the cast. The first of those trends was a steady descent into ever-more-shocking horror throughout the mean 1970s – gone was classic Hollywood, and the movies were getting increasingly bloodthirsty even when featuring nice protagonists. The second micro-trend was a brief flash of interest for Quebexploitation genre films produced for the American market by Quebec-based producers. (In this case, Astral Films, early adopters of the Canadian federal tax breaks that led to a brief “Tax Shelter films” period.)  That second micro-trend is largely forgotten today in the rest of the world – Scanners and other Cronenberg films may endure as the subgenre’s most celebrated achievement, but Canadian TV channels wanting to show “classic” films often dip into the 1970s Quebexsploitation corpus to meet CanCon requirements. So that explains how The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is still shown fifty-five years later… although –let’s not fool ourselves—the presence of a very young Jodie Foster (famously body-doubled by her sister in a late-film nude scene, eek) and none other than Martin Sheen (as a hamster-killing antagonist) in the cast does ensure that the film is still interesting today. It features a 13-year-old girl (Foster) living alone despite increasingly pointed questions from neighbours, and uncomfortable sexual advances from the film’s villain. She’s not the most likable character, but the film does force a certain sympathy for the situation by pitting her against an even worse antagonist. Clearly the kind of dark and depressing 1970s film meant to make you want a cleansing shower after watching, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane does leave an impression, Quebexploitation or not.