Director Gregory Wilson, producer Andrew van den Houten and actor Grant Show in person!

In the placid suburban summer of 1958, 12 year old David pals around with the three boys next door, enjoying typical prepubescent activities like catching crawfish, playing hide and seek and teasing the local girls. That is, until the boys’ beautiful teenage cousin and her younger invalid sister come to live with them after being recently orphaned in a horrible car crash. As David befriends the older of the two girls and starts to feel the pangs of first love, he begins to notice that the girls’ presence in the house next door seems to elicit inexplicable jealousy and resentment on the part of the boys’ mother Ruth, a crass single woman that all the kids in the neighbourhood look up to. As Ruth’s hostility towards her two charges escalates into open verbal and physical abuse, she finds willing accomplices in the local children, who are eager participants in the girls’ humiliation in exchange for peer approval and the clandestine privilege of drinking the beer Ruth routinely plies them with. As the situation gets more sordid and evolves into a gruesome routine of group torture, David is forced to join in or find himself the next target for this sexually-fuelled aggression.

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR was a project that has been picked up and abandoned by a myriad of producers over the years – while easily one of Jack Ketchum’s most engaging books, it was long considered his most ‘unfilmable’. Based on a true story, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is one of the most tortuous viewing experiences to emerge from the true crime genre - especially considering its candy-coated context of an ‘innocent’ 1950s suburban America and its initial promise of a poignant coming of age story gone awry. The performances are incredible all around – most notably from the young lead Daniel Manche, whose first love and lost innocence are so effectively conveyed, to its central villain Ruth, played by Blanche Baker (best known as the spoiled older sister in SIXTEEN CANDLES and daughter to 50s pinup Caroll Baker) – who masterfully balances comedic, cynical likeability with horrifying misanthropy taken to atrocious extremes. It’s these performances that save the film from just being an exercise in sadism and elevate it to shattering emotional drama about personal ethics and the ugliness often buried beneath a squeaky clean veneer.

But be warned: THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is not recommended viewing for everyone – one needs a strong constitution and an even stronger stomach to endure its emotional terrorism and protracted scenes of abuse. This is a difficult film in every sense of the word – difficult to watch, but even more difficult to ignore. (Kier-La Janisse)