‘The past catches up to you, whether you like it or not…’
As a horror aficionado (self styled), I’ve seen a bunch of truly disturbing and violent movies. Some of them are grotesque but cartoonish (The Sadness, The Human Centipede), some of them are deprived torture porn dressed up as art-house films (Martys, Inside) and some of them are flat out designed to make the viewer squirm (Saw, Hostel), but not one of those films, not a damn one of them, came close to making me feel as uncomfortable as this one did…
Meg Loughlin (Blythe Auffarth) is a sweet, good-natured teenager who is doted on by the boys in the neighbourhood and bullied by her sadistic career Ruth (Blanche Baker). Over the course of a seemingly never-ending summer, Ruth’s abuse of Meg escalates despite the attempted interventions of Davey (Daniel Manche) – Meg’s friend and confidante.
Children being abused on screen is not a new concept. The difference here is that The Girl Next Door is based on a hideous true story. And we’re not talking about some abstract distant past here. This happened in 1965. Sylvia Likens, the girl whose tragic story this film is based on, would be 73-years-old now had she lived. Some of the other children involved in the case (as perpetrators – not victims) are assumed to be still alive (having changed their identity). This crime rocked the state of Indiana to the extent that nobody would ever live in the house in which Sylvia was murdered again (it was eventually knocked down in 2009). So, all of this begs the question, how can this case possibly be turned into entertainment? Because that’s what this film is. It has no wider message.
Director Gregory Wilson, working from a script penned by Daniel Farrands and Philip Nutman, makes no attempt to understand why this crime took place. ‘Auntie’ Ruth’s character motivations (jealousy, bitterness) are hinted at, but never properly explored. There is a suggestion of a Lord of the Flies style mob mentality fuelled by a coercive and manipulative caregiver, but again, this is only examined on a surface level. Instead, the long scenes of torture and abuse serve only to add to the creation of a gnarly horror film. Sylvia Likens deserves better.
To be clear, this is not a badly made film. It’s well acted, with Auffarth every inch the tragic heroine and Baker channelling her inner Nurse Ratched, it’s powerful, and it is undoubtedly unsettling. Stephen King described it as ‘…the dark-side-of-the-moon version of Stand by Me‘, and he isn’t far wrong. The simple truth is that this film should never have been made. This crime is just too devastating to be recreated in a tawdry horror film. I sincerely wish I had never seen it.