Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door (2007)

This is one of those traumatizing movies that you wish you had never seen because you can't get the images out of your head, but at the same time, couldn't tear your eyes away from the horror as it was happening. Warning, not for youth or the easily disturbed.

This majority of this film is told via a flashback of one summer a man named David had in his childhood. David lived in a normal, suburban neighbourhood in the 50's. He was an only child, but got along well with and spent a lot of time with the other boys in his neighbourhood, especially his next door neighbours, a group of boys living with their single mother, Ruth. David's life changed forever the summer that two girls moved into the house next door. Their parents were both killed in a car crash (the younger sister was crippled and required leg braces) and Ruth was their next of kin. The girl's name is Meg and David is taken with her from the moment he lays eyes on her.

David tries to get inconspicuously closer to Meg, but as he spends more time at his neighbour's house, he sees more and more tension between Meg and her Aunt Ruth. At first it's small things like making snide comments about her 'delicate womanhood' or implying that she's a slut. David can tell there is tension, but it just seems uncomfortably out of place, they're just words after all. Things change when one day David comes over and sees Meg's cousins tickling her and one of them touches her breast. The tickling was unwanted, but after the touch Meg shoved the boy to the floor, who then went to tell his mother. Here Ruth starts being physical, but not to Meg. She instead beats Meg's younger sister, who is crippled, as a punishment to Meg. Subtle but severe power struggles such as this continue between Ruth and Meg, Meg having no choice but to succumb to Ruth in order to save her sister. A few days later at an outing, Ruth's boys spot Meg speaking with a police officer who stops by the house to check up on the situation, and here is where it gets a bit uncomfortable. Ruth feels that for her own safety, she must now be much more severe with Meg, which means ordering that Meg be tied up in the basement, hanging from the ceiling. At first, she is just left there, not given enough food, bruises and rope-burns covering her body, but it of course escalates. David watches, horrified, while all of this is going on. He feels that he can't do anything to stop it, that no one would believe him if he were to tell, and yet he doesn't want to abandon Meg. At one point, when she's half destroyed, he sneaks down into the basement and releases her, but instead of running to her freedom, she is caught once again by trying to take her sister away with her. This is where the other half of her gets worked on. Will Meg ever escape? Will David be able to save her? Do you want to know badly enough to risk seeing these images that may never leave you... in the worst sense possible?

I have mixed feelings about this film. It was definitely well done, lets start with that. The acting, cinematography, storytelling; all good. The subject matter however, is really uncomfortable. Throughout the film, the neighbourhood boys are all portrayed as either having these mean tendencies, or not caring enough about another human being to go against the crowd. In fact, excluding David, the boys are all quite taken with the idea of having Meg tied up in the basement, and practically jump over each other to carry out their mother's twisted orders. The other kids from the neighbourhood are no better. There's one scene, the worst one, where a whole bunch of kids come and watch/ help carry out the atrocities done to Meg. Boys and girls come to watch. Ruth is also a really twisted person, which is revealed ever more so as the film progresses. We aren't given much of a back story on her, but it's almost as if she's dead inside and tries kill what light she can see in others. There is physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse in this film. Every so often, I look for psychologically disturbing films. It's something that just morbidly fascinates me, the idea of insanity, or the lengths someone will go to harm someone else, or the motivation behind such actions, or how someone could actually endure something like that. Well on that front this film delivers... too well.

The most disturbing thing about this film is that it's based on a true story. There was a real girl named Silvia Likens who endured some of the same atrocities as were displayed in the film, worse in fact. An American Crime, with Ellen Page, is another film dealing with this case and it retells the story in a way that is closer to the actual events. It is a little more tame in comparison with this, and maybe the go to film if you still want to hear the story without the potential psychological scarring.

If you're in that mood, I recommend this film, but if not... then you probably won't enjoy it, and that might be an understatement.

A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer

This a the true story of a boy growing up in an abusive household. The story begins with a series of interactions between an 11-year-old David an his school nurse and teachers, the latter of the two contact the police and have David taken away from his abusive single mother, to a children's home.

The beginning of the book, as if to contrast the introduction, paints the picture of a happy family. He tells the reader how wonderful his mother was (specifically mother because she was the one who later abused him) and how close knit and loving the family had been. His mother, though a little bit of a clean freak, was the glue that held the family together. She was very knowledgeable and was an active sort of person, taking her sons out on field trips, family vacations, was a wonderful cook, and so on. As the years go on however, she begins to change. David's father was a fireman and because of that was sometimes away from home doing a 24 hour shift. In this time David's mother started to act a little bit differently when his father wasn't home. She would sit in front of the tv all day drinking alcohol and would more and more often refer to David as being a 'bad boy' and give him a punishment, seemingly for no reason. As the years progress these 'punishments' get worse and worse. David is starved for most of this book by his mother. She will go to great lengths to see that he does not eat, and if he does she punishes him. She made him drink cleaning liquids, made him stand or sit in one place for long periods of time until she said he could move. She accidentally stabs him at one point, and beats him almost every day. She would also play these games with him, like if he could finish his assigned chores within the allotted time slot, he could eat. He lives a life of unimaginable pain and torture, and no one in his family does anything to help him.

This book isn't in the biography section of the books store, but can actually be found under psychology. Though child abuse does deserve psychological treatment, recounting the experience of such is more of a biographical account than it is a psychological one, and indeed, you can find many other stories like this one in the biography section of your local book store. I think this book is classified as psychology not so much because of David's experience or his mother's (though both are worthy subjects) but more because of his father and his brothers and the neighbours and extended family. The people who knew what was happening to him and either stayed silent, or joined in. The mother was the head of the household. She was a very strong- willed individual and what she said was pretty much happened, and when she started picking on David, his father just sort of stood back and let it happen. From the book's account, the father was a timid man and couldn't really hold his own in an argument, a pushover in the bad sense. While he didn't agree with what was happening to David, instead of changing it he just snuck David food scraps or helped him with the dishes. The father may not have known the extent to which the mother abused David, as she seemed to act nicer when he was home, but at one point in the book he sat and watched as his son ate a half digested hot dog his mother had forced him to throw up earlier. The brothers also behaved disgustingly. David had several brothers, and despite his treatment, they apparently lived the life of normal boys. The first half of the book they merely ignored what their mother was doing to him and welcomed him if he was allowed to play that day, if not they didn't look at him as they weren't allowed to. Closer to the end of the book they start to bully him as their mother did. They would hit him, step on him, make fun of him, etc. It's really disgusting to think that those boys are somewhere in the world right now. The neighbours couldn't have known the details of the situation, but just his appearance or his behaviour would have been cause for concern. It's like that case with Kitty Genovese, the girl who was stabbed to death outside of her apartment with something like 38 witnesses who did nothing to help her.

Despite this very rough beginning however, Dave says at the end of the book that he has moved past all of this and has come to enjoy life very much. He is obviously doing very well for himself, and who else could deserve a worldwide best-seller more than this man. He has two other books documenting the chapters of his life after the events in this book.