Being a horror writer and fan, I've read and seen some books and movies that are scary, gross, and downright disturbing. As a high school kid, I saw the only movie that ever gave me nightmares, DRESSED TO KILL starring (I think) Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine and directed by Brian DePalma. (I suspect if I watched it today it wouldn't bother me as much as it did back then, and I still can't put my finger on why I had such a visceral reaction to that film.)

Since then, I've read King and Koontz, moved on to Richard Laymon (going through most of his huge catalogue), Edward Lee, and some Douglas Clegg and Philip Rickman. More recently I've read William Malmborg and Bryan Smith and Ian Rob Wright and Joe Konrath and even Matt Shaw and Tim Miller. Some pretty extreme horror to go along with the more traditional supernatural tales and ghost stories.

But nothing has really bothered me like Jack Ketchum's THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. Let's face it: There is an unreal element to most horror, even the stuff that tries to be realistic. Bill Malmborg wrote a story called TEXT MESSAGE about a girl being terrorized and made to do terrible things in a mall because some psycho is getting off on watching her degrade herself. He makes her do these things because he has her sister. A pretty horrific situation, somewhat realistic, but in the end, you know it's just a story. Same with Konrath's serial killer stuff and Laymon's crazy stories about psychos and supernatural terrors alike.

I read Ketchum's story years ago after reading a review by a horror fan who I respected, and I suppose in retrospect I knew going in that this one was gonna be a little extra-specially disturbing. Then I read that it was based on something that really happened. Ketchum's book was a fictionalized version of a real life horror story. And THAT was what made it disturbing.

So I sorta forgot about it, and this morning I was looking for something on YouTube (we went to a high school play and I wanted to see if one of the five short one-act plays was on YouTube in a professional format), and in the results for my search to that play, a clip from THE GIRL NEXT DOOR popped up. Seems it was made into a movie, twice. Once back in the 90's and again in 2007. In the suggestions was the full movie.

So I clicked on it and began watching. I'm at work, so I couldn't watch for long...and eventually I began skimming through it. But even with the digest version of the story on film, I ended up having that same visceral reaction I had to it when I read it originally in the early to mid 90's. It just set a bad taste in my mouth all morning. Now I'm wondering why I even started watching it.

In a world where crazed fundamentalists confuse evil for good and burn people alive and behead others in the name of their god, we should be well aware that evil exists, and it is people who are evil, not the world itself. After a weekend of news about ISIS and plenty of other bad stuff, watching even a small part of this movie this morning probably wasn't my best idea.

Too late now, though. I need to write something super happy! Or read something super happy.

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