Filming the Unfilmable: Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door

If I were a quote-whore film critic, I’d undoubtedly start talking about the cinematic adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s novel The Girl Next Door as the “feel bad movie of the year”. Not since Gaspar Noe’s soul-crushing Irreversible have I seen a film that left me so despondent once it ended. This is not a condemnation of the work of Ketchum, director Gregory Wilson, and screenwriters Daniel Farrands and Phil Nutman—in fact, it’s the exact opposite. For many years, Ketchum’s book had been deemed all but unfilmable. So intense and bleak, his novel length meditation on the banalities of evil and the amorality of childhood was simply something mainstream America would never accept in the form he’d envisioned it. Forget the fact that it was based on the real life case of Sylvia Likens (which took place in Indiana in 1965)—events like these are best swept under the rug, written off as an aberration even when the news reports of similar crimes indicate it’s far more the norm than we’d care to admit. It’s only now, after languishing in various stages of development for what seems like an eternity, that Ketchum’s unrelentingly dark portrait of the American underbelly finally comes to the big screen—with all its horror intact.

For those who haven’t read the book (and if you haven’t, you should), The Girl Next Door is sort of like a Norman Rockwell painting crafted by the Marquis de Sade. It’s the 1950s and David (Daniel Manche) is a 12-year-old boy. His life isn’t perfect (his parents appear to be on the brink of divorce), but he’s got his friends the Chandler boys next door. The Chandler kids live with their mother Ruth (Blanche Baker), who’s that one woman every neighborhood seems to have—she’s a single mom who appears to enjoy spending more time with the kids than other grown-ups. Ruth’s house is where you go to hang out—she’ll give you a beer or two, and you can swear and talk about adult stuff without worrying about getting in trouble. Things start to spiral out of control with the arrival of Meg (Blythe Auffarth) and her sister Susan (Madeline Taylor). The girls’ parents have died in a car crash and they’ve been entrusted to the care of “Auntie Ruth”.

For reasons unknown, the addition of two new girls to the Chandler dynamic sends Ruth tail spinning into insanity. Maybe it’s resentment over the fact that Meg is pretty and girlish or perhaps its Ruth’s own self-loathing, but for whatever reason, she soon begins making life hell for the two young girls. Things border on simple physical and emotional abuse early on, but when Meg eventually speaks to a local police officer, it moves to a whole other level. Tied up in a basement bunker, Meg spends the second half of the film enduring one degradation after another. The really horrifying part is that it’s not Ruth who inflicts all the torture—it’s her kids and other children from the neighborhood who’ve been goaded into action by the wicked aunt.

Many people will be put off by the atrocities inflicted upon this innocent girl in the second half of the film—and rightly so. The Girl Next Door isn’t as gory as Hostel but that hasn’t stopped people from already lumping it into the “torture porn” cinematic canon. Despite the ideological similarities and the torture, The Girl Next Door and Eli Roth’s two Hostel films couldn’t be more different. Hostel is fairly glib in its examination of suffering and murder, which is a diametric opposite to what Wilson and crew have crafted in The Girl Next Door. The gore and murder of Hostel is like a funhouse ride at the carnival. The Girl Next Door is as somber and serious as a state funeral. Stephen King once commented that he thought Stanley Kubrick “wanted to hurt people” with his version of The Shining. The same assessment is probably even truer for Ketchum’s novel and the cinematic adaptation of it. There are no laughs here, no gore moments to cheer over—just an ever-present sense of dread and sorrow as we see firsthand just what mankind is capable of at its worst.

Certainly much of the film’s success is attributable to the excellent screenplay of Daniel Farrands and Phil Nutman (who managed to match the tone of the book perfectly and not compromise the story for mainstream acceptance), and the direction of Gregory Wilson (who takes the time to establish the 1950s we all look back and remember before plunging us into the darkness that lurks just beneath the surface of that placid facade), but without a solid cast, it would all have been for naught. Fortunately, the casting of The Girl Next Door is as good as everything else.

Daniel Manche makes for an interesting lead. It’s hard to watch him wrestle with what’s happening right before his eyes—you want to jump through the screen and spur him into action—but it’s the right call. It’s easy to forget that these are kids—and that kids don’t see the world in the same way as adults. His conflict over what to do is genuine and his actions (albeit very late in the game) are ultimately heroic. There’s a framing story with David as well—with William Atherton playing the older character. Atherton is great in his small role.

However, what really makes The Girl Next Door work are the performances of Blythe Auffarth and Blanche Baker. Auffarth (who was actually over 18) is fantastic as Meg. She portrays the girl with an innocence and vulnerability that makes what happens to her later in the film all that much more painful. Blanche Baker, meanwhile, makes Ruth one of the most awful characters to grace a cinema screen in quite a few years. With her frumpy house dress, sallow skin, and cigarette, she’s the poster child for the reality of evil. Ruth’s descent into insanity is fascinating to watch—it’s a slow burn from slightly eccentric to flat out terrifying. These two performances are the most important of the film, and each actress is so good that it all works. The dynamic here is all the more terrifying because we know similar things have happened, will happen again, and are probably happening as I type this.

The Girl Next Door certainly isn’t for everyone. While much of the worst stuff Meg suffers through is kept offscreen (which actually makes it worse since viewers wind up imagining what’s happening), the implication of what’s happening is enough to make even the most hardened viewers flinch. Nevertheless, it’s a great film—not so much because it’s entertaining (and it’s certainly not uplifting)—because it stares right into the heart of darkness and never blinks. It’s a film once seen that can never be forgotten, and given the gravity of what happens (and the fact that it was inspired by a real life crime), that’s high praise. I’m delighted to see that Ketchum’s vision made it to the screen intact, written and directed by men who obviously felt as passionately about the subject matter as he did. Hands down, this is the best horror film of 2007.