By Katherine Ramsland

Reportedly, screenwriter Christopher Landon got the idea for Disturbia from being "disturbed" by the apparent perfection of suburban life in the San Fernando Valley; he imagined that a serial killer might just as easily operate in this environment as in a large city or on lonely stretch of road. "One night, as I was driving home from my sister's place," Landon states in the film's production notes, "this idea just popped into my head — a story about a kid who is stuck in his house and begins to notice bizarre things happening across the way.  He eventually comes to suspect that his neighbor is a serial killer."  

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The thought is not original, nor even necessarily fictional.  Among the most well-known suburbia serial killers is John Wayne Gacy, who lived (and killed) in an ordinary home in an ordinary neighborhood in Des Plaines, Illinois.  Much of what occurs in Disturbia seems influenced by this case.

In December 1978, a police officer assigned to follow Gacy on suspicion of a kidnapping noticed a morgue-like odor in Gacy's home, arising from below.  He informed his superiors, who got a warrant to excavate the crawl space for human remains. 

From the ground around and under the house at 8213 Summerdale Avenue, the team uncovered twenty-eight separate bodies of young men in all different states of decomposition.  Five more were dredged up from the river (Gacy ran out of space), and Gacy was charged with numerous counts of first-degree murder.  The final official victim toll was 33.

Gacy had resided for years in this place with these corpses, and even had his mother and wife living there.  He gave neighborhood parties and whenever people complained of the smell, he'd dismiss it as a septic problem.  But it wasn't.  It was a moldering graveyard full of missing boys and young men.

In Disturbia, seventeen-year-old Kale (Shia LaBeouf) is subject to house arrest for an assault.  He grows sufficiently bored to start spying on neighbors with his binoculars and video camera.  Simultaneously, he hears about a local missing woman and notices that one neighbor, Robert Turner (David Morse), drives a car similar to one spotted where the woman was last seen; it's even similarly damaged.

Joined by his friend, Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), and Ashley (Sarah Roemer), a new girl from next door, Kale watches for clues that his neighbor is indeed a killer.  He's aware that the current case of a missing woman is reminiscent of one from Austin, Texas, in which several redheads all went missing (and reminding us of yet another serial killer, Glen Rogers, who picked up and killed redheaded women).

So while Disturbia is purported to be a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window for the cell-phone set, it's not a bad rendering of what could have happened had a teenager noticed Gacy's late-night treks to acquire companions who never emerged thereafter from his house.  Surely at the time, notions that a successful contractor who entertained sick children and threw generous parties was a killer would have seemed absurd; just as surely, had Gacy known some nosy kids were spying on him, he'd have devised a way to outwit and eliminate them as witnesses — especially the boys.  And he'd have had a cesspool full of rotting bodies under his house. 

Since serial killers have — and do — live among us, sometimes passing as a normal neighbor, the film could be more disturbing as a rendition of a rare but possible reality than as a mere remake of fiction.  Those who know such truths will probably experience that added frisson of dread.  

by Katherine Ramsland

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