Movies: There goes the neighborhood.

In extra features of the new-ish DVD release Jack Ketchum's Girl Next Door (the attribution added presumably to prevent folks from mistaking this brutal horror flick with the zany semi-raunchy comedy Girl Next Door), one of the screenwriters mentions that it took nine years to get the project to the screen and mentions that, at one point, he assumed the film would simply never get made. It isn't had to imagine why. Though I've never pitched a script before, I can see how this would be a hard sell.

Screenwriter: "Its about a girl who gets sent to live with her aunt after her parents die."
Producer: "Oh, a tragic angle."
Screenwriter: "Yeah. And her sister – she's got a little sister – who is in leg braces. Like polio kids had, you know?"
Producer: "Hmmm."
Screenwriter: "It's set in the '50s. It's all town carnivals and cars with fins and bikes with cards in the spokes. That sort of stuff."
Producer: "Like Wonder Years."
Screenwriter: "Sorta, but even earlier. The years leading up to the Wonder Years."
Producers: "Like Grease."
Screenwriter: "Right, but with younger kids. Think of the little bothers and sisters of the kids in Grease."
Producer: "Alight. I'm with you."
Screenwriter: "So the new girl comes to town and this young kid, our narrator . . ."
Producer: "Our what? You didn't say this was a religious picture!"
Screenwriter: "No. Narrator. The dude the voice over is coming from . . ."
Producer: "Oh, right. I thought you said something else."
Screenwriter: "What did you think I said?"
Producer: "Nothing. Never mind. So this so-called narrator boy . . ."
Screenwriter: "Yeah, so the narra . . . guy who talks to the audience, he falls for the beautiful new girl I town."
Producer: "A love story."
Screenwriter: "Kinda. They catch crayfish together and go to the county fair together."
Producer: "Very sweet. So what happens next?"
Screenwriter: "Next? Oh, the aunt who is taking care of the girl flips out and ties her up in the basement. She and her sons take turns physically abusing her. Eventually other neighborhood children are invited to join in. They cut her and burn her and rape her and stuff."
Producer: "Oh."
Screenwriter: "And she dies."
Pause.
Screenwriter: "Um. The end."

Based on Jack Ketchum's novel of the same name, The Girl Next Door has, joking aside, pretty much the plot I outlined above. After losing their parents in a car accident, tow young girls – Meg and Susan – end up in the care of Aunt Ruth, an embittered widower whose tenuous grasp on sanity in no way improve through the course of the film. Because Ruth's a crazy, her dislike of Meg and Susan quickly devolves into psychological and physical abuse, with then launches off a cliff into Hostel grade tortures. The central character is this drama isn't Meg or Susan, but David, the young neighbor who falls for Meg and ends up becoming a reluctant witness to her slow destruction.

In order to defend themselves from charges of exploitation, the filmmakers repeat, mantra-like, that their film is "based on a true story." The phrase appears in front of the film and is recited again and again in the extra DVD material. Whether being or not being loosely based on a historical crime automatically proofs one against exploitative tendencies is debatable, though one does need to go into that debate here: the film is, in fact, based on a novel that was itself a fictionalization of a true crime. This is a true story in the same way that the movie Psycho was the story of Ed Gein – in as much as it was an adaptation of a fictional work inspired by said murderers real crimes. I don't bring this up because I think it was wrong for artists to fictionalize real-life situations. In fact, the value in Ketchum's original work is that it brings what no documentary, non-fictional treatment can bring to such a subject: it allows the reader to get inside the head of a witness and possible collaborator in order to explore fully the dynamic of authority and its abuses, of leaders and their followers. And it did this so successfully that the quality of the work became its own defense. Ketchum doesn't need to obsessive remind people he's not exploitative because a reading of the book dispels the notion. The film, with its defensive mantra of "this isn't exploitation, it really happened," underscores how little the movie can rely on the same self-evident claim for seriousness.

The movie itself is well made. For a straight to DVD production, the flick is high-gloss. Gregory Wilson directs with a solid confidence that only occasionally strains to add intrusive POV shots that seem to exist solely to remind you a director is around. The plot is an efficient condensation of the novel which leaves most of the major plot points intact and earnestly attempts to get at the moral core of Ketchum's grim book. (Though the character of Aunt Ruth sometimes slips and mentions details that seem to be not from the book, but from the truly life crime on which the book is based. For example, in real-life, the girls' parents were alive and sending money to the women abusing their daughters. Ruth mentions how she's not getting paid enough to watch the girls – a flashpoint in the real case as she started to starve the girls at that point. In the context of the film, however, she's not getting paid anything at all to watch the girls.) Those deviations from the source are almost always smart moves that add value to the story in some way.

The problem with the film is that it ultimately fails to communicate what made the book more than a semi-serious exercise in shock aesthetics. By film uses a narrator as a framing device, but once the viewer is transported to the 1950s, the film becomes takes the sort of third-person objectivity most common to film as part of the nature of the medium. The book told us rather than showed us because the telling was the story. The film can only show us. A cast of stellar performers might have been able to communicate the shades of internal conflict we get in the book, but that's on the abilities of the cast here. No to say that they do a bad job. Meg's got a thankless role, spending most of the film being tortured really restricts what an actress can show, but TV regular Blythe Auffarth does as much as one can with such a role. Soap opera regular Daniel Manche does a praiseworthy job too. But, ultimately, this plot requires A-grade chops to elevate it beyond becoming a numbing endurance test and these kids just aren't that good. I must admit that I'm not sure anybody could have pulled it off. Still, the lack of that interior thought process, the inability to get in the skin of David, makes it too obvious. We see evil and recognize and suffer through it to the end. There's no evolution, no awakening to our understanding. The condensed plot exacerbates this thinness: David realizes almost immediately that this is all crazy and spends very little time wondering what his role in the crisis is. His journey to full morality is shortened to irrelevance for the sake of narrative compactness.

Despite the nastiness of some of the elements in the film, I believe the filmmakers when that claim they didn't set out to make an exploitative horror flick. If Girl Next Door falls into the loose pseudo-genre of torture porn, then it serves as a sort of boundary marker indicating the limit of moral serious one can bring to the mode. If Passolini's Salo is the genre's most stylistically accomplished example, then GND is the genre's most earnest entry. But, just as Salo's technical virtuosity couldn't save it from leveling off into a sort of spectacle of horror, the earnest intentions of the filmmakers get somewhat buried by GND's more hideous excesses.

Books: Reheated leftovers.

"Well, I'll tell you, the reason I think we've got another go-round, George, is what's not here. All the meaty bits, if you catch my drift. Familiar?"
- From Jack Ketchum's Offspring

Horror-blogging icon, tastemaker, wit, humanitarian, Charles Nelson Reilly fan, philosopher, and all around swell human Stacie Ponder of "Final Girl" fame once opined that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise suffered greatly from the odd tendency of that particular product to produce sequels that were more remakes than sequels. Instead of extending the storyline, each sequel would be the first flick with more or less gore as the filmmaker's tastes determined. Perhaps family members would be added or dropped, but you could expect to see teens stumble across the old homestead. Several would get quickly processed and one of them, the final girl, would end up at a surreal feast with the family. To be fair, I'm not certain that TCM's sequels are any more derivative than the sequels of other franchises (barring Jason's recent space adventures, which possibly show how being utterly non-derivative is no guarantor of success). I think TCM sticks out because no matter how the story template shifts, something like the dinner scene always seems to pop up as a sort of showpiece scene. Since the dinner scene was one of the most memorable scenes in the original, its constant reappearance strikes us as especially glaring. Take the second TCM: with its bizarre carnival setting, almost slapsticky humor, and neon color scheme it is about as far from the original as you can get and still get away with calling it a TCM flick. But, despite all this, when the overly long and too familiar dinner scene pops up, a dragging and weary sense that we've seen it all before takes over.

My point is not to argue with Final Girl or defend the TCM franchise as it is to suggest that sequels are hard to pull off. People want more of the same, only different. Give us too much of the same and we horror fans will bitch that we got nothing but a re-shoot of the original; change too much and we'll bitch that you lost the spirit of the original. I almost feel bad for the suckers that end up helming sequels. Almost – they've made too many utterly disastrous sequels to excuse them completely, right?

Unfortunately, Offspring, Jack Ketchum's sequel to his cannibals of Maine thriller Off Season, is on of those sequels that tries to give fans more of the same, only different, and somehow misses the mark.

The plot is remarkably similar to the original: the residents of a Maine shore house will be attacked by a tribe of feral children tuned cannibals. Jack adds a joker to the deck in the form of an ex-husband psycho who may turn out to be more dangerous than the cannibals and ups the ante by putting a couple of children in harm's way. Aside from that, we've got pretty much the same book. After a few chapters of character development and some ominous foreshadowing, the house is attacked. Some of the cast dies. Some are dragged to the tribe's cave. Some give chase. We've seen it.

Not that Jack doesn't try. I might be splitting some very fine hairs here, but this outing seems a little less gory than the first book and the extra inches freed up by the dialed down splatter are given over to developing the characters in the tribe. In the first book, the cannibals were basically monsters or animals – not so much characters as crisis that must be dealt with. In the sequel, Ketchum sketches out a sort of Search for Fire-esque social structure. The cannibals have also developed language use, something I don't believe they had in the first book.

Offspring is a perfectly serviceable thriller. It lacks the gravity of Ketchum's Girl Next Door and the ruthless simplicity and exhilarating bloodthirstiness of the original. After all, we're talking about a book about a bunch of cannibals chewing their way through coastal Maine. If you're looking for Proustian introspection or the psychological rigor of Henry James, you should probably stay away from mass-market paperbacks featuring a meat cleaver and a human skull hanging above a soup pot on the cover. The book delivers what you'd expect. The only complaint is that Ketchum often delivers more than what you'd expect and, this time, readers don't get the A-game.

Just-shy-of-fine young cannibals.

Cannibals, in the confines of horror cinema and literature, are some of my favorite people. There's something refreshingly reductive about them. They reduce everything down to what is perhaps the most basic dramatic motivation: hunger. They want food and you're it. There's also something powerful about the reduction of people to food. Beyond the horrific potential of being slaughtered, the violation is so much more total than that of your basic, murdering, slasher-type. Doctor, engineer, filmmaker, anthropologist, male, female, black, white – it doesn't matter to the cannibal. To them, everybody is just meat. That's about as close to genuine nihilism as Western fiction gets.

Given my cannibal thing, I was excited to read Off Season, the famed first novel of Jack Ketchum, author of the truly brilliant and truly horrifying The Girl Next Door. The plot of Off Season is wonderfully simple: vacationing New Yorkers in Maine cabin come under siege by a tribe of atavistic cannibals. Original? Not even when it was written. But still, why screw around with a successful template?

Unfortunately, Off Season is a bit of a disappointment. I expect partly because, coming on the heels of my reading of the superlative GND, it can't help but seem a bit thin. Unlike that better book, Off Season is a thrill machine. Its action takes place over three blood soaked days and nights, and Ketchum propels his story forward, rolling past characterization points, meditative moments, and tangles of illogic. The star of the book is the violent struggle for survival and that, rather than any particular character, takes center stage. On this surface level, Ketchum delivers big time. The book takes an almost sadistic glee in putting its main characters through the wringer. One almost feels like our protagonists' main enemy in not the cannibal tribe (itself a bit of a knock-off from the original The Hills Have Eyes - even down to the presence of a large, extremely strong, bald and muscle-bound caveman), but the author who seems to have it out for them. The pacing is swift, the action engrossing, and the violence extreme.

What it doesn't have is the human connection. The Girl Next Door was one off those rare books that linked you directly to genuine human evil and did so not by scaring you, but my making you extend your sympathies. Off Season is, by comparison, a sort of gory burlesque of evil played for the relatively low stakes of shock-entertainment. It is well done, but it is what it is.

For the curious, the edition I read was the new "un-expurgated" edition. The edition features Ketchum on how Off Season came to be published. He tells of how, after picking up what they thought was a hot and daring new property, his publisher began making cut after cut to the text. Eager to please and hungry to see his novel in print, Ketchum gave on nearly every demand. His story of what got cut and what stayed (as well as what he cut and lost the manuscript for – so it is gone for good) makes for an entertaining look at one author's frustrating experiences in the pop lit biz.

Movies: Are other countries so enamored of their own names that they think sticking it in front of any noun makes for a good film title?

Seriously, do they have United Kingdom Psycho and French Graffiti? Brazilian Pie?

I bring this up because trailers for An American Crime, the film based on the Baniszewski "Torture Mother" murder case (itself the inspiration for Ketchum's horrific The Girl Next Door) can be seen on YouTube. Here it is:



I've expressed my doubts about just how filmable the story of poor Sylvia Likens is, but I reckon the question will be settled in the court of public opinion later this year.

Book: Second to the last house on the left.

With is combination of retro-50s setting, first person narration, and horrific torture scenes, Jack Ketchum's justly infamous novel The Girl Next Door seems like some nightmare version of The Wonder Years as re-imagined by the creators of Hostel.

The novel is one extended flashback, told in the bitter and brittle voice of a guilt crushed man looking back at a horrific incident from his childhood. When he was a boy, the dead-end suburban street where he lived was just the sort of American Eden that Hollywood sells, historians dismiss, and cultural conservatives morn. Kids catch crayfish in tin cans, boys sneak peaks at their fathers' hidden Playboy stashes, and the arrival of the carnival – hosted by the Kiwanis Club, natch – is the highlight of the summer season.

Into the Mom-and-apple-pie world of the narrator's youth came Meg, the proverbial girl next door. Smart, beautiful, a bit of tomboy, the narrator immediately develops a crush on Meg. Which is unfortunate as she's the chief victim of this story.

Meg and her polio stricken sister, Susan, are orphans who lost their parents in a car wreck. They've been placed in the care of Ruth, a divorced mother of three boys, known in the neighborhood for her sailor's mouth and her negligent parenting style.

At first, Meg fits easily in this Leave It To Beaver world. The carnival comes and goes. The boys debate rock and roll lyrics, read Plastic Man comics, and wonder if they'll ever actually see a real, live breast.

But, slowly, things start to sour. Ruth's carefree persona begins to rot and warp. She starts to become vicious and brutal. Meg goes from her boarder to her prisoner. Standard juvenile punishments become more intense, more sexual, more perverse. Soon, Ruth is keeping Meg bound in her basement, naked and dangling from ropes tied to the crossbeams in the roof. And Ruth's influence extends to her children and their friends. Given permission to indulge in their baser desires, the children of neighborhood become willing accomplices in the brutal tortures Ruth inflicts on Meg. As the narrator fitfully tries to develop some moral sense in a world were the adults are vouchsafing even the most horrific acts of rape and abuse, we watch as Ruth and her brood heap outrage upon outrage on their powerless teen captive. Eventually, the story reaches its climax as the narrator, alternately repelled by what he witnesses and fascinated by the spectacle of power, is forced into a moral reckoning.

The Girl Next Door is a thoroughly unpleasant book. The sustained intensity and duration of its violence is mind-numbing and, in that department alone, outdoes many more-famous "transgressive" works: next to Ketchum's novel, the excesses of American Psycho seem absurd and melodramatic. The long dark tale of what becomes of poor Meg is relentless, grisly, and unleavened by humor, redemption, or hope. This is, I think, the darkest horror novel I've ever read.

But, for all its disturbing imagery and stomach-churning violence, Ketchum's novel is still essential. Despite the detail Ketchum brings to his scenes of rape and torture, what Ketchum's really focused on, what he is really chronicling, is the terrible moral flexibility of humans. Fear, authority, desire, power, and vulnerability all clash in the voice of the narrator. Even when the narrator refuses to describe the worst that happens (in a brilliant move, Ketchum leaves many of the worst acts "off-screen"), we know that these events are keenly felt by the narrator. When the parental voice, the lawgiver of a young boy's world, goes mad, we see the narrator struggle to create his own moral sense. We see him wrestle with the better and worse angels of his nature, forging a genuine morality out of the wreckage of Meg's degradation. Ketchum's narrator is a real achievement, one of the most finely drawn characters in genre.

Ketchum's other characters, while not so well built, help bring his story to chilling life. The neighborhood children devolve from Normal Rockwell-esque icons of American youth to exemplars of banal evil. Like hardened concentration camp guards, they crack jokes while inflicting heinous tortures. When they grow bored of branding Meg or cutting her, they open bottles of Coke and watch game shows upstairs. The mad Ruth, pack leader and subversive symbol of parental authority run amok, is rendered as a sort of force of nature. Though it means she often seems a bit thin, more symbol than human, it does resonate with how one imagines the narrator would have seen her as a young boy.

Meg and Susan are perhaps the most important weak points in the Ketchum's characterization. Besides being thinly built characters, Ketchum's inability to fully humanize them becomes the book's sole moral misstep. For all attention given to the narrator's inner being, Meg and Susan never come to life. As soon as the action begins to pile up, Susan drifts into the background to never fully resurface. Meg, on the other hand, is blandly "good." She's smart, funny, kind, caring, trustworthy, dignified, strong, etc. etc. She's tiresomely one note. I presume Ketchum wanted to make her unquestionably good to emphasize how undeserved her fate was, but this in a mistake. First, she seems less human, and therefore her fate less important, for her lack of characterization. Second, isn't the real point here that nobody, no matter who they were, would ever deserve what happens to Meg? Finally, and most importantly, the dehumanizing lack of characterization and the dehumanizing psychological aspect of torture dove-tails uncomfortably. For all of Ketchum's compassion for the narrator, he seems weirdly incapable of sympathizing with the victim. This compassion for the narrator/witness rather than the victim comes dangerously close to authorial self-indulgence, as if it was the narrator who is to be pitied for having to watch Meg's torture and not Meg.

Still, the uneven characterization does not dull the impact of the book's main idea. Though its violence makes it unsuitable for younger readers, this books nearest literary relative is not American Psycho, but The Outsiders. It is actually a finely detailed and emotional valid depiction of the birth of a truly moral individual. It's this theme, this important moral center, that redeems the novel's excesses, makes them necessary, and elevates them to the point that Ketchum makes the whole miserable trip worth taking.

The Girl Next Door is rightly viewed as one of the most brutal works of modern horror. The label is fair. And it would be possible to read it as the literary equivalent of those cinematic endurance tests that so capture the indie underground's attention. But to do so misses the achievement of what Ketchum's done. If you've got the stomach for the dark stuff, I recommend subjecting yourself to The Girl Next Door.

NB: Ketchum's inspiration for The Girl Next Door was a actual 1965 murder case dubbed "the single worst crime perpetrated against an individual in Indiana's history". Follow the link for details, but be forewarned that they are, if anything, even worse than what happens in Ketchum's novel.