"The Girl Next Door"

Jack Ketchum is one sick man. "The Girl Next Door," based on Ketchum's book but ultimately inspired by the brutal torture of a 16-year old Sylvia Linken by the woman she had been staying with in Indiana. This is considered to be one of the worst crimes ever committed in Indiana.

As far as the film...

It focuses on "Meg," also a 16-year old whose parents had just passed away in a car accident which also severely injured her little sister in the process. Now they are forced to stay with their Aunt Ruth who is clearly psychotic and gets all the neighbor boys (and girls, even) to turn against Meg by means of just blatant and horrible, horrible torture.

For the record, this is one of the sickest movies I've seen, much worse than "Megan Is Missing," which I have blogged about a few posts pre-dating this one.
As a side note, I don't think anyone really enjoys (while I do think it interests people such as myself)movies like this, so I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea about me or anyone who watches movies by Jack Ketchum (which are all extremely disturbing and gorey). It's just having the realization that while things like this might haunt some people to their very core, things like this happen and it's real and we shouldn't blindfold ourselves to tragedies in this world just because we're afraid.
David Foster Wallace once said, "...good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." While Wallace said that in relation to his writing and others' writing, it applies to all forms of storytelling, as well as film-creating.
Back to the movie, it's all told from the point of view of a local neighborhood boy who witnesses what's happening to Meg, but is scared (understandabley) to stand up for her or to get help, until it is too late and Meg succumbs to all the torture she has endured and dies of blunt force trauma as well as malnutrition.
Very reminiscent of "The Woman" (the movie in which my first blog focuses on, check it out below!) also by Ketchum, and of the book "A Child Called It" by Dave Pelzer which I read in secret, because my mother despises stuff like that and movies like this too, when I was about thirteen. This film gives a disgusting peak into the world of extreme child abuse and also even adolescence as a whole.

 I would so tell any of my horror-loving gore-devouring friends to check this movie out, but hey it's not for everyone and that's okay too. It's sick, sad and wrong...but whoever said the world was right, huh?