Summary
“Girl Next Door” is another deliberately ambiguous episode, but it leaves an interesting trail of clues for audiences to form their own conclusions.
The word of the day is ambiguity. This has been a recurring theme all throughout Terror Tuesday: Extreme, and it once again characterizes the goings-on – and particularly the ending – in Episode 6, “Girl Next Door”.
Ambiguity isn’t always a good or a bad thing. In a story like Episode 3, “Ode to My Family”, things get a bit too nebulous and speculative for their own good, but I think here there’s a more interesting case. While “Girl Next Door” is happy to be inconclusive about specifics, it does leave enough clues lying around for observant viewers to put together a solid theory.
Bringing Horror Home
This episode employs one of my favorite setting gimmicks – an apartment, or at least an apartment building. My favorite Silent Hill game is Silent Hill 4: The Room, which most people don’t like at all, but it resonated with me and still does. “Girl Next Door” isn’t all that similar, but it’s built on the same bedrock, bringing the horror right to the front door, and contorting a supposed sanctuary into a nightmare.
To be fair, in the case of our protagonist, Bird, the nightmare is in some way self-inflicted. He’s a drug addict, which has led to spiraling financial woes and the breakdown of his relationships with his mother and, eventually, his friend Kie, who helps him move into a new apartment.
When Bird arrives at the apartment, he hallucinates a woman jumping from one of the balconies and splattering to her death outside. Not a good sign.
Probable Cause
“Girl Next Door” progresses into weirder and weirder circumstances, as is expected, but it does it by bundling up a few threads that suggest different possible causes. For one thing, there’s Bird’s drug addiction. Secondarily, there is a woman in the apartment next door with whom he develops something of an obsession, but who also slips him a note warning him to essentially pretend that his apartment is empty after midnight.
Again, not a good start.
But this is a feast for the audience because we’re already weighing up drug-addled visions versus outright demonic haunting. It only gets weirder when, after spotting his neighbor a few times, Bird is informed that the apartment is empty. Nobody lives there, and the previous resident left a long time prior.
After an overly curious Bird breaks into the apartment and spots himself in there, he begins to detach from reality even further, and written warnings that there’s something amiss with the water supply introduces another possibility for what’s going on.
The Girl Next Door
Bird receives some odd instructions in “Girl Next Door”
What we do get some concrete information on is the previous occupant of room 406. It was a woman named Jane, and the building’s owner was having an affair with her. The note that Bird received from her about keeping his lights off and the noise down after midnight was the note the owner left Jane after his wife found out about their affair.
The owner and his wife left the building, leaving Jane in the apartment. She committed suicide out of guilt, which is what Bird saw when he arrived at the building.
But is her spirit now haunting the room? It’s a distinct possibility since some of what happens is seemingly impossible without her spectral interference. Unless – and this is a pretty outside-the-box theory, I concede – Bird actually inhabited Room 406, found some of the clues and such left behind, and put the story together with some embellishments caused by his drug use.
Bird’s Fate
The much likelier explanation is that the episode is simply drawing parallels between these two characters; Jane, who participated in the sin of not just adultery but also subsequently suicide, and Bird, a drug addict who isolated himself from his family and friends and increasingly bought into his own delusions. Both ended up committing suicide – it is confirmed a couple of times over that Bird is dead – and now find their spirits strung to their respective rooms in the apartment building.
Jane leading Bird to the balcony and having him jump with her is, I think, symbolic. The more likely outcome – and there is evidence to suggest this – is that he simply took an overdose as his drug habit and delusions worsened. Terror Tuesday: Extreme Episode 6 ends with his mother paying her ritual respects, and Bird’s ghost watching helplessly on, knowing he can’t reach her.
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