Once you see The Girl Next Door, you won’t soon forget it. The film is loosely based on the tragic story of Sylvia Likens, a young girl that was tortured and eventually murdered by her own mother, Gertrude Baniszewski, in Indiana in the late 1960’s. The Girl Next Door is also a sort of coming of age story of David, as well as a horror movie. David and Meg meet after Meg had just moved to town with her younger sister. After their parents perish in a car accident, the girls are taken in by their evil Aunt Ruth.
Ruth for some reason takes her two sons and his friends under her wing, so to speak, and teaches them the art of being cruel and sadistic, with Meg and sister, Susan, as their victims. The torture begins against mostly Meg, who is subjected to daily beatings with brooms and ropes. Ruth eventually works her way up to total humiliation, as she ties Meg up naked in the basement and permits the boys rape her.
Ruth manipulates each boy, almost brainwashing them into thinking she is just an STD- ridden whore and needs to be punished. Eventually the torture climaxes, as Ruth uses a blow torch to destroy Meg’s womanhood. They don’t show the actual act, but the scene itself is what Hostel 2’s “penis-severing scene” was to men for us ladies.
The story is actually very sad. David is Meg’s only ally, however, feels the peer pressure to join in. Does he help, or does he face the wrath that he knows Ruth and the other boys are capable of??
