A mother is puttering in the kitchen, waiting for her daughter to come home from school. We see the clock on the wall. We see her expression grow from cheer to terror. And somewhere in the streets below, we see a man buy a little girl a balloon.
If your pulse is racing already, thank Fritz Lang, director of M, the 1931 picture that taught filmmakers everywhere to hook audiences with the primal emotion of heart-stopping fear for our kids.
The latest iteration of this formula is Kidnap, wherein loving, gorgeous Halle Berry takes her loving, gorgeous son to the park, where they decide to play hide-and-seek. “Marco!” calls the beatific mother. “Polo!” replies her cherub, peeking around a post. “Marco!” calls Berry. “Polo,” comes the child’s reply. “Marco!…Marco?…MARCO!“
“The majority of child abduction movies suggest that a child can disappear if you look away for a moment,” says Pat Gill, professor emeritus of communications at the University of Illinois. It’s a lesson audiences have so taken to heart that I once heard from a mom who’d been reading a book on her lawn while her children frolicked around her. A woman passing by screamed, “Put down that book! Don’t you realize your kids could be snatched at any moment?”
That is society’s mantra, repeated by cops and child protection officials as they arrest parents for letting their kids wait briefly in the car. And a small handful of movies may be responsible for it, writes Lenore Skenazy.
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