Diksha Sundriyal
Directed by Rob Cohen, ‘The Boy Next Door’ follows an affair that goes horribly wrong. The protagonist is a high school teacher named Claire, who is in the middle of separating from her husband, who cheated on her. When she meets 19-year-old Noah, she is seduced and loses her sense of judgment for one night. The next day, realizing the enormity of the situation, she decides to call it off with Noah, but he is not ready to accept it. And that’s when things start to get out of hand. While the 2015 film is mainly a thriller, it has realistic elements that make us love or hate the characters. But how real are they?
The Writer Cooked Up the Idea for the Movie on a Walk
‘The Boy Next Door’ is a fictional story written by Barbara Curry, who came up with the idea while walking by a house she’d thought of buying. While she loved the place, there were several factors to consider before she and her husband could okay it. The screenwriter discovered that right next door lived a boy who had a tumultuous history. He had been involved in several skirmishes, among other things, and was the bad boy that Curry didn’t want to influence her son if they lived right next to him. The desire to protect her son kept her from buying the house, but it also led her to imagine how a person like that could easily draw a wedge within a family.
At first, the idea was to focus on the fraught relationship of a woman and her 12-year-old son, who is inflicted by the bad boy who lives next door. As the script progressed, Curry became more focused on the woman’s entanglement with the boy, with things becoming even more complicated due to the sexual nature of their trysts. Sex is one of the reasons she increased the age of Noah in the story. Moreover, she wanted the audience to root for Claire, so making her have an affair with a minor would have worked against the whole idea of the film.
Curry revealed that she also looked towards real-life cases like Mary Kay Letourneau and her affair with her student, who was 12 years old at the time, to get a better sense of developing Claire and Noah’s relationship. While she did find the cases fascinating, she didn’t entirely lean into that aspect. She focused more on developing the story as a thriller, referencing ‘Fatal Attraction’ and ‘Swimfan.’ She was more focused on the obsession that drives people to do bad things, which formed the core of the story.
Barbara Curry Wanted to Make Claire’s Character More Sympathetic
While Noah is revealed to be a dangerous psychopath who is not beyond killing people, Curry knows that Claire’s flaws will be on full display even before the audience knows about Noah’s dark side. This meant it would be easy for them to hate her and not root for her, unraveling the thriller’s whole point. This is why the writer consciously tried to balance the scales so that Claire is not entirely hated even with the mistakes she makes. After adjusting Noah to a more acceptable age, Curry focused on Claire’s situation.
At first, she imagined Claire as a happily married woman, but that countered her intention for the character, and she decided to have her divorced from a husband who cheated on her. Dealing with her son, who doesn’t completely understand her situation, made Claire a vulnerable character and someone that the audience could relate to and sympathize with. More importantly, it would help the audience understand why she falls so easily for the first person who makes her feel worthy. She is dazed by her sense of insufficiency and insecurities.
Once Claire’s character was sorted, Curry gave Noah more negative traits. She made him aggressive, even in his initial pursuit of Claire, because that, mixed with her vulnerability, would explain Claire’s momentary lapse in judgment. All these details worked well with the thriller side of the story, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that there was, in fact, some scope for a serious romance between Claire and Noah. The writer ensured that the audience saw the emotional connection between the characters as well as their similarities (common interests in literature and other things), drawing them together.
She wanted the audience to understand why two people like that could fall for each other and wonder what it would have been like had things been in their favor, be it in reference to the age or the guy’s mental state. Considering the attention to detail Curry put into the characters, it’s no surprise that Noah and Claire appear highly realistic to the audience despite being entirely fictional. This realism naturally adds to the thrill and makes ‘The Boy Next Door’ compelling.
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