Lisa Gardner’s Hide: Into the Pit

Next up on TNT’s Mystery Movie Night schedule is Lisa Gardner’s Hide. Unlike the first two movies, for this one, the producers significantly changed the plot changes from that of the original story. How significantly? Well, for fans of the books, the film version of Hide introduces Alex Wilson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), who doesn’t show up in the books until Live to Tell. The rest you’ll just have to watch to find out.

If you’re a fan of the serial killer story, this is the TNT mystery movie for you. D.D. Warren (Carla Gugino) and her partner Bobby Dodge (Kevin Alejandro) are called to a grisly scene. Six young girls have been murdered and “wet mummified,” kept in garbage bags in a pit on the grounds of an abandoned mental institution.

Naturally, when it came time to talk to Lisa Gardner, we had to ask her about that. TV audiences, after all, aren’t used to seeing the long-dead bodies of children. She explained that in the script, they’re now young women’s bodies and disguised somewhat by the bags they’re in, but that director John Gray (of Ghost Whisperer) has such a “sense of the creepy,” that even without showing gore, the set was incredibly eerie and amazingly detailed as the killer’s lair.

[This area backstage was so loud!  Sorry for the noise, but we wanted you to hear the author’s own excitement about seeing her story brought to life, because it got us excited to see it, too.]

Sounds spooky, no? Of course, the whole plot doesn’t take place in the pit and, indeed, the whole plot isn’t even just D.D. and Alex…or Bobby. One of the bodies in the pit is wearing a locket, but the moment they broadcast the name on it, a woman (Bridget Regan) comes forward claiming to be the long-lost Annabelle Granger.

On the TNT Mystery Movie Night panel, Lisa Gardner talked about how despite the fact that D.D. is the lead detective in her series, each of the novels has another woman at its center. In Hide—the book, at least—that woman is Annabelle.

But, of course, in any serial killer thriller, the real star is the killer.  And no, we won’t tell you anything about that, except to say it’s perfectly twisted and convoluted. But then, any guy who could create something like the pit would have to be twisted, right? And any time that kind of guy gets loose in the world, things go bad in complex and convulted ways.

We’ll be watching, if for nothing else to see the pit. What about you?