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“The walk back to the surface took a long time. Rich did his best to remain calm, not let the student’s hysteria affect him, but there was a stretch of tunnel, about halfway to the exit, in which he was suddenly certain he and the kid were not alone. The hair on the back of his neck lifted, and his mouth went dry. For fear of spooking the student, he didn’t want to stop, but the echo of their feet on the walls made it difficult to decide if the sound he thought he was hearing, a whispering noise, like fabric swishing over rock, was more than his imagination. He didn’t want to put his hand on his gun, either, though the spot between his shoulders itched, as if something was stalking him and the kid, just a handful of footsteps behind them in the dark. The kid picked up on it, too, and asked him if there was someone else there with them, if she had found them. Rich heard the panic rising in the student’s voice and said no, it was only the two of them. If the kid suspected him of lying, he didn’t say anything.

“At last—at long last, Rich walked the student out of the mine and into the waiting arms of his friends, who were overjoyed at their reappearance. It was all he could do, Rich said, not to look back into the mine. He was afraid he’d see a woman standing inside it, something terribly wrong with her face.”

There’s a moment of silence, during which both Kristi and Ben fidget. Finally, Edie says, “That’s… incredible.”

“Isabelle thought so,” Sarah says. “A couple of years after that, the stories about the woman in the mine gained a new detaiclass="underline" the left side of her face was scarred. Whether the student Rich had retrieved told his story, or other kids ventured into the mine and discovered the drawing he’d seen, that became part of the description. It didn’t hurt that the first Nightmare on Elm Street was released around then, with its disfigured villain. The point is, there was something interesting going on, and Isabelle already had enough information to justify further research and analysis. She told me she was planning to make the woman in the mine the center of her dissertation, an instance of the way traditional folk story was affected by the presence and pressure of newer narrative forms. The professor overseeing the project disagreed. She more than disagreed, she told Isabelle her idea was a non-starter. Instead, she wanted Isabelle to go south, to Kentucky, where there were reports of a lizard monster that had been spotted during a local disturbance at the end of the sixties. It wasn’t that Isabelle wasn’t interested in the lizard monster, but she had done a lot of work on the other topic, and she didn’t want to drop it. Her professor’s attitude left her unsure what to do, scrap what she had and start over, or look for another director who would be more agreeable to her plans. Either way, she was watching the completion of her dissertation recede into the future. Which happens, but is still a bummer.

“Enter me. Through five years of busting my ass, I had convinced Larry that I could and should be trusted with a camera and a small crew. We were searching for the right project. I read a lot of scripts; nothing clicked. I tried writing a couple of screenplays, myself, but they weren’t any better. Then one night, I’m talking to Isabelle on the phone. We spoke every couple of weeks, caught up on what each of us was doing. She’d been telling me about the woman in the mine forever, since undergrad. I must have heard the story a thousand times. This particular night, the thousand and first time, things fell into place, and I realized I had my movie right in front of me. I would take Isabelle’s research project, and I would put it onscreen. I would make a documentary about the woman from the mine, about the whole weird thing. Isabelle had assembled a huge archive. There were audio interviews with twenty people. There were hundreds of photographs. There were maps. There were police reports, train schedules, articles about mining. Before I even started, I figured I had a good portion of what I needed for my movie. Production costs would be relatively low, which is never a bad thing for a beginning filmmaker. Sure, a documentary wasn’t exactly the most exciting debut, but I planned to jazz it up by filming an excursion to the mine. We’d take a look around inside, see if we couldn’t find the drawing Isabelle’s uncle had described. If we did—or better, if we located the straightjacket—it would give the film an added umph.

“Isabelle didn’t need much convincing. She saw the documentary as a middle finger to her professor, a way of demonstrating exactly how wrong the woman was. I doubted it would matter to her; her head sounded as if it was pretty tightly wedged up her own ass. But the idea led Isabelle to sign on with me, so I didn’t argue.”

“Hold on,” Edie says, “hold on. Did you make this? Are you telling me Lost in the Dark is a documentary?”

“No,” Sarah says, “no, it’s—it’s more complicated than that.” For the first time in the interview, she is flustered. Both Kristi and Ben appear to be barely containing the impulse to bolt. “We went to the mine—this was after Isabelle and I had put together a rough introduction, twenty minutes laying out the story of the mysterious woman. Her Uncle Rich was retired in Tampa, but we interviewed him via phone and he repeated everything he’d told Isabelle. I had arranged for a professor from SUNY Huguenot who specialized in folklore to sit down for a conversation with Isabelle about the woman.

“First, though, I wanted to shoot our trip. I planned it for Halloween, because how could I not? That was when everything had started, when kids built their bonfires outside the entrance, when Rich had ventured into its tunnels. I had my crew: Kristi on camera, George Maltmore on sound, a couple of film students who’d agreed to do whatever we needed them to. The barest of bones. And Isabelle, who was our guide. I gave George and Isabelle handheld cameras and Priya and Chad a camera to split between them. I wasn’t expecting anyone to catch anything remarkable; I liked the idea of having shots from other perspectives.

“At dusk on Halloween, we entered the mine. I was certain we’d run into kids partying there. In fact, I was counting on it. I wanted it as an illustration of an annual event, a local ritual. But there was no one there. As far as setbacks go, it wasn’t bad. After filming the mine’s exterior, we walked into it.”

Edie waits a beat, then says, “And…?”

“And we came out again,” Sarah says. “Eventually.”

II

A synopsis of Lost in the Dark is simple enough: an academic leads a film crew into an abandoned mine in search of a mysterious woman who disappeared there decades ago. While in the mine, the crew is plagued by strange and frightening incidents, culminating in a confrontation with the missing woman, who is revealed to be a supernatural creature. After she brutally murders most of the crew, the others flee deeper into the mine. The movie ends with the survivors proceeding into the dark, pursued by the woman.

The devil lives in the details, though, doesn’t he? After all, you could make a terrible film from such a plot. There are three scenes, I think, on which the movie’s success depends. It seems to me a good idea to pause here a moment and consider them. The IMDb listing for Lost in the Dark features what has to be one of the most thorough descriptions of any film listed on the site. At twenty-three thousand words, it’s clearly a labor of love. In the interest of not re-inventing the wheel, I’d like to quote its summaries of the scenes I’m interested in. This is how the movie begins:

Synopsis of Lost in the Dark (2006)

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