The Girl Next Door

In a quiet, sun-drenched suburb of 1950s New Jersey, teenager Meg Loughlin and her crippled sister, Susan, are sent to live with their Aunt Ruth after the tragic death of their parents. What begins as a search for a new home quickly dissolves into a waking nightmare as Ruth—a mentally unstable and sadistic matriarch—begins a campaign of systematic, escalating abuse against Meg. Narrated by David, a neighborhood boy who develops a crush on Meg, the story captures the terrifying ease with which Ruth grooms her sons and the local children to participate in acts of unthinkable cruelty. The Girl Next Door is a brutal, unflinching examination of the "banality of evil," exploring how quickly a community of ordinary people can descend into monstrous depravity when the moral guardrails of society are stripped away.