Imagine my surprise when the movie starts a lot like a mild mid-century nostalgia movie. You know, something kind of in the mold of The Wonder Years, where an adult narrator looks back on formative childhood experiences that overwhelmed his blossoming mind but were really quite tame all told.
That girl blindfolded on the poster? It could be explained by a harmless game the kids play at the beginning, when one of them is blindfolded and she tries to find the others and throw apples at them. It doesn't totally make sense but it seemed innocent enough, and seemed to enforce the sort of dopey innocence of this movie.
I didn't know how I, or this poster, could have gotten this movie so wrong.
As it turns out, nope.
Spoilers for The Girl Next Door to follow.
The story, inspired by a true story, is based on two sisters who lose their parents in a tragic accident (in the real story the parents were alive, but indisposed). They go to live with their aunt (the real foster family had no reltaion to them), a single chain-smoking mother who already has a gaggle of her own children, mostly boys. This story takes place in 1958, but the actual events were in 1965. The mother keeps up appearances in the idyllic little town where they all live, but behind closes doors, things get ugly.
It was fascinating, and terrifying, to watch as this movie -- constructed a bit like The Wonder Years, you will recall -- starts to morph into something truly disturbing. Stephen King is a bit of a specialist in the abuses heaped on children in small towns, as evidenced by such works as It and The Body (made into the movie Stand by Me). But King's horrors are telegraphed well in advance, and he never made anything like this. In fact, on the film's Wikipedia page, he's quoted as follows:
"The first authentically shocking American film I've seen since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer over 20 years ago. If you are easily disturbed, you should not watch this movie. If, on the other hand, you are prepared for a long look into hell, suburban style, The Girl Next Door will not disappoint. This is the dark-side-of-the-moon version of Stand by Me."
Wait wait ... how do we get from The Wonder Years to this?
This foster mother Ruth -- played memorably by Blanche Barker -- appears to be jealous of the older child, 16-year-old Meg (Blythe Auffarth), who is attractive and who triggers the sexual curiosity of Ruth's children. She starts to give lectures about promiscuity, and to punish Meg and her younger sister Susan (whose movements are restricted by polio) for her perceptions of their promiscuity, or for any small act of rebellion, like Meg hitting one of her cousins who touches her inappropriately. Spankings with paddles and other household implements become commonplace, as does starvation. When Meg tries to get the police involved, it gets a LOT worse.
I don't think I'll tell you about everything that goes on in that dungeon of a basement in Ruth's house. But let's just say it's awful. Pain, humiliation, torture ... it's all there. A blowtorch gets involved at one point.
I think what makes this as shocking as it is, though, is the way the film starts out following the rhythms of an entirely different and far more tame film. Through the first 15 minutes of this movie, I asked myself how the poster had so utterly failed to capture what this film was about. It wouldn't be the first case of false advertising I'd ever seen, but it might be the most egregious.
And then ...
Since I've already given you a spoiler warning, I might as well say it: Meg eventually dies of her injuries. It isn't one ungodly thing but the collection of all of them that causes her body to ultimately shut down.
I was so horrified that of course I went to Wikipedia and read every last bit of the page on the murder of Sylvia Likens, the real-life person on whom this was movie was based. That's not usually something I do. With Wikipedia, they tend to go into so much depth that I usually just get what I need and get out. But in this case, I sat there scrolling on my phone for 15 minutes after the movie ended, gaping in horror.
The real case might actually have been worse. Because a movie just has to give us something to hang on to, we get the satisfaction of our narrator, David, trying to help Meg escape, and acting as a real (though ultimately ineffectual) advocate for her interests. He didn't do enough, obviously, probably because he didn't understand the way these events were escalating and spiraling. I mean, grown-ups know what's right, right? We also get the satisfaction, as it were, of watching David bludgeon Ruth to death with one Susan's crutches.
In the real incident, it's not clear Sylvia Likens had any advocates -- she just had children (including neighbors) who tortured her with greater and lesser relish. Actually, it was girls in the real family who did more torturing than the boys, though I can certainly understand why they would change that for the movie. And the real Ruth, Gertrude Baniszewski, was not bludgeoned with a crutch. In fact, she served only 14 years in prison for this, and was ultimately paroled as a born-again Christian. It's way too good of a fate for her, though she did die (of lung cancer, well deserved) only five years after leaving prison. (And as the death penalty was sought for a number of those involved in the case, she could have easily had worse.)
I don't know exactly how I feel about The Girl Next Door as a movie. On the one hand, being shocked the way I was in this movie is a rare thing. I echo Stephen King there. I'm sure I've been shocked by plenty of other things since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and in fact, I can think of a few right off the top of my head. But the way this movie shocks you is so profound because of the way it creeps up on you. It puts you in David's shoes. He couldn't have imagined things escalating the way they did, and neither can we, given how the movie starts with the catching of crawdads by the river, the playing of innocent childhood games and the riding of ferris wheels.
On the other hand, there's something that beggars belief about the whole thing. Although David makes gestures of trying to help Meg throughout, it seems impossible that he couldn't have told his own parents (his one attempt is incredibly lame) or brought it to the police. Sure the Ruth character threatens all sorts of awful retribution, both to him and to her captives, but how can characters we are supposed to support let such obvious evil go so far?
But perhaps that's why this case was so horrible, frequently referred to as the most heinous that's ever been tried in a court of law in the state of Indiana. You can't believe this happened because even movie characters would never act this way. But movie characters have to be better than real people, I suppose, because above all, director Gregory Wilson wants to preserve our faith in humanity. He tells the story the way he does because he wants it to be possible for us to still see good in the world ... even when certain cases make us doubt it to our core.
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