Jack Ketchum's Evil

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Movie
German title Jack Ketchum's Evil
Original title The Girl Next Door
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2007
length 91 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Gregory M. Wilson
script Daniel Farrands
Philip Nutman
production William M. Miller
Andrew van den Houten
music Ryan Shore
camera William M. Miller
cut MJ Fiore
occupation

Jack Ketchum's Evil is the German title of the US feature film The Girl Next Door from 2007; a film adaptation of the novel Evil by Jack Ketchum . The film was directed by Gregory M. Wilson .

action

1958: After the accidental death of their parents, 14-year-old Meg and her 12-year-old sister Susan have to move in with their aunt Ruth, who is already busy with her three sons. Meg survived the car accident with minor injuries; However, Susan has to walk on crutches and wear leg supports.

Meg quickly senses that she is a burden to Ruth, who she and Susan only took in against payment from the state. Again and again, the two - often in the presence of their cousins ​​- have to endure humiliation. Meg becomes friends with the twelve-year-old boy next door, David, who tells the story in retrospect from 1989. The boy has to watch helplessly as Ruth, whom he calls by her first name and who has long known to be a friend, takes out her aggression more and more on Meg and Susan. If it is "just" insults at the beginning, the situation comes to a head when David has to watch Ruth hitting Susan because Meg was naughty in her eyes.

Now, in her desperation, Meg makes a fatal mistake and turns to the police. After Ruth got rid of the policeman, she grabs Meg and locks her in her laundry room, where an indescribable ordeal begins for the girl. Assisted by her three sons, Ruth begins to torture Meg, often in the presence of the increasingly helpless and horrified David: She is hung up for nights by her wrists, stripped of her clothes and even burned with a cigarette.

David doesn't know what to do. When asked carefully, his father replies that it is justified now and then to use violence and that David should stay out of other people's affairs to avoid getting into trouble. When he has to witness how more and more children from the neighborhood go into the basement to be there when Meg is tortured, he wants to help Meg escape. Since Meg insists on taking Susan with her, her escape is discovered prematurely.

Meg's true martyrdom only begins now. David is tied up and has to watch Meg being raped and Ruth carving the words I FUCK / FUCK ME into her stomach with a glowing hairpin. But Ruth wants to make sure that Meg is not only disfigured and therefore uninteresting for any man, she also wants to make sure that Meg doesn't want a man anymore: She burns Meg's clitoris with a Bunsen burner.

With the unconscious Meg alone in the basement, David manages to free himself and start a fire whose smoke alarms the police. But first Ruth comes down the stairs and David kills her with several blows with Susan's crutch. Before the police can rush to help Meg, she dies in David's arms as a result of severe abuse.

Differences from the novel version

  • The psychological abuse is even worse in the novel: Meg has to eat dog poop and is peed on by the boys.
  • Ruth doesn't use a bunsen burner for her greatest torture, but a red-hot iron.
  • It is not the fire that alerts the police, but the disappearance of David.
  • David doesn't kill Ruth with a crutch, but pushes her down the basement stairs, breaking her neck.
  • In the novel, Meg is dead before the police even appear.
  • Meg says shortly before she dies that she will make it and survive, in the film the opposite happens.
  • Megan's "I love you" to David at the end is missing in the novel.
  • In the novel, Rutherine is 37 years old, in the film she is in her late fifties.

Furthermore, there are numerous additional deviations from the novel.

Effect and authenticity

  • The case is based on a true story; What happened in 1965 to 16-year-old Sylvia Likens , who was also tortured to death by a family in their cellar, differs greatly from the description by Jack Ketchum. The murder of Sylvia Likens was filmed again in 2007 under the title An American Crime . This film is based on actual events.
  • US writer Stephen King said: "The first really shocking American film that I have seen since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer 20 years ago." (Quote from the cover of the German DVD)

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