Jack Ketchums The Girl Next Door Review

Jack Ketchums The Girl Next Door is a book and movie, loosely based on the true story of Indiana teenager Sylvia Likens. She was tortured to death by Gertrude Baniszewski the woman placed in charge of her care, by Gertrude's children and various kids in their neighborhood, in 1965.

It has been described as the most vicious and terrible murder of a child in that states history. Throughout the court case horrifying details of starvation, humiliation, bashings by local kids, having to eat her own excrement, and finally having 'I am a prostitute and proud of it' branded onto her skin with a heated sewing needle.

The Girl Next Door is classified as a horror film, it is, but not for the usual horror genre blood and spatter. This is a truly horrific story, and though out the film it is never far from you mind that this is based on the complete degradation and ultimate death of a real young teen.

In Jack Ketchums The Girl Next Door, Meg and her younger sister Annie are placed in the care of Ruth, their psychotic aunt after the death of their parents. Ruth rules over her three boys and their friends in a frighteningly manipulative and highly sexualized way. Her sons are already showing disturbing signs of following closely in their Mothers footsteps.

What happens when Meg who is on the cusp of womanhood is introduced into the disturbed world of Ruth and her boys?

It culminates in the mental demise of Ruth who over one summer lets go of what little control she has over her dark psychotic desires. It results in the highly disturbing journey of her three young boys who finally, fully and inescapably are absorbed into their Mothers terrible world. It is the sad and lonely journey of young neighbor Davie who tries to find solid moral boundaries within what he is witnessing, and his guilt of remaining silent, so becoming an accomplice. And finally of Meg and Annie whose lives are completely destroyed, in a depraved game of torture and degradation over the bucolic American Summer of 1958.

Jack Ketchums, The Girl Next Door, is not for the squeamish, it is a horror film in the true meaning of the word.