Get ready to sleep with your lights on thanks to one of Netflix’s latest additions, The Girl On The Third Floor. Not only is the script inspired by a series of reported hauntings, but it was filmed in the location where they supposedly happened. Nothing is left up to your imagination, so your imagination will be well-rested and ready to give you guaranteed nightmares.
Don Koch (former pro wrestler Phillip “CM Punk” Brooks) attempts to redeem himself in the eyes of his pregnant wife by buying a Victorian mansion in desperate need of repair. With a history of addiction, cheating to get ahead, and infidelity, the fixer-upper is as much a project to save their marriage and prove himself as it is a real estate investment. Bursting pipes and rotting walls are part and parcel for any major remodeling project. The unidentifiable slime and supernatural disturbances? I’m not a homeowner, but I suspect that is outside both the realm of normal home repairs and the realm of the living.
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Koch soon discovers that the house has a much darker history than he could have ever imagined. “This story takes place in an actual house that has a history of being haunted,” Stevens told Syfy in an interview, adding that the mansion where they filmed is in Frankfort, Illinois. “That house actually sits across from a church. And was reported to be a bordello before. So those dynamics were there. That’s all real.”
As local legend has it, two girls died in the house in the early 1900s. One died of illness in 1909, and another was reportedly murdered. Sadie, who was allegedly about 12 years old when she died, worked as a maid in the house in 1901. At the time, the house was operating as a bordello. She was murdered by a man who mistook her for a sex worker. According to Kevin Ziegler, who has owned the home for the last 13 years, both girls died in the same third-floor bedroom.
When writing the script, Stevens took into consideration the lives of the women who may have been at the house and how they likely suffered at the hands of men not too dissimilar from Koch. In a way, in telling their story, it reveals more about the person being haunted than the one doing the haunting.
“We thought it would be fun to shoot a haunted house movie in an actual (allegedly) haunted house. And while our film is not based on a true story — it is entirely a work of fiction — we thought the house would be a really great hook,” producer Nicola Goelzhauser told the Chicago Tribune.
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The movie is currently in Netflix’s top 10 films and has a 80% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes. I predict that after watching it, a lot of people will be thinking twice about renovating any old houses.
You can stream The Girl On The Third Floor on Netflix.