The Child

• Robert Voskanian and producer Robert Dadashian were film students at Columbia College Hollywood when they scraped this together on a shoestring budget of around $30,000 -- funding dried up more than once, stretching a shoot that started in 1973 into a finished film by 1976.
• Shot guerrilla-style around Los Angeles: Boyle Heights stood in for the neighborhood exteriors, the oil fields near Montebello gave it that desolate countryside look, and a condemned convent doubled as the crumbling Nordon estate.
• Got recycled under a pile of different names over the years -- Children of the Night, then Kill and Go Hide when a new distributor picked it up, and later Zombie Child on VHS -- a standard survival move for a threadbare indie horror flick trying to find an audience twice.
• The zombie makeup was done dirt cheap -- more grime and paint than expensive latex appliances -- and reviewers still single it out as surprisingly effective for a movie this broke, with a couple of genuinely gross face-ripping moments.
• Came out a full year before Dawn of the Dead reset the zombie genre, and instead of a shambling horde, this one's got a single, almost ghost-like reanimated corpse running errands for one little girl -- closer to a boogeyman than a zombie outbreak.

Rosalie isn't raising the dead for fun -- she's working through grief. Her mother's already gone by the time the movie starts, and every corpse she drags up plays like the family she doesn't have anymore. The zombies mostly go after adults who fail her or get in her way, which tracks with a kid acting out control she doesn't have anywhere else.

Mr. Nordon isn't as oblivious as he plays it. He knows exactly what his daughter can do and keeps hiring nannies anyway, then stands back while they become the next casualty. Read the whole estate as bait and the father as the one setting the trap.

The 'friends' Rosalie keeps picking out of that cemetery aren't random -- there's a reading where they're townsfolk who crossed her family at some point, meaning the graveyard's basically stocked with payback waiting on a trigger, not just whichever corpse happens to be handy.

A young nanny named Alicianne takes a live-in job out at the crumbling, isolated Nordon estate, hired to watch over a strange, withdrawn little girl named Rosalie — whose mother's already dead, leaving just her, her cranky widower father, and her grown brother rattling around the place. Rosalie doesn't play with normal toys. She slips off to the cemetery down the road at night to visit her "friends," and it turns out she's got a telekinetic gift for coaxing rotted corpses right up out of the dirt. Cross her, and she sics her shambling dead pals on you. By the time Alicianne figures out what she's actually dealing with, the bodies are already piling up.