[Editorial] Revisiting Megan is Missing: When Shock Horror Exploits Teenage Girls

Content warning: sexual assault

I grew up as an only child in the mid-1990s. Coming off the heels of newfound worries plaguing concerned mothers across the nation, my parents were fed a rigorous diet of lingering Satanic Panic woes, stranger danger PSAs, and the egregiously misinformed D.A.R.E. program serving as the cherry on top. Any loving parent being bombarded with these messages on a near-daily basis would take any necessary precautions to ensure their child’s wellbeing. As such, I got the helicopter treatment. There was no Nickelodeon or sleepovers until I was in the double digits. Privacy was a luxury that I was never expected to have. Having a lock on the door to my room seemed like a far-off fantasy, and even if it did have a lock, my door was to remain open at all times regardless. A crack was fine, but it couldn’t be completely shut. And no matter what, under any circumstances, there will be absolutely no discussions about sex or drugs. Ever. 

I stumbled across a book called Go Ask Alice while I was longing for independence and a sense of adventure, and that’s exactly what was promised being labeled as the “found diary” of a runaway 15-year-old drug addict. The cover depicted an ominous eye staring at you against a black canvas. The mysterious teenage girl in question was credited as “Anonymous” and nothing more, which always made it one of the first selections in the Young Adult lineup at Borders (RIP). 

My middle school self devoured the book in a few short days, in secret of course. I hung on every shocking twist this nameless teenager had to tell me. One minute, she was a normal girl adjusting to a new school and gushing about boys. The next, she was given an LSD-laced glass of soda at a party that sent her down the treacherous road of addiction, homelessness, and sex work. After one of her final entries being a hopeful send-off where she’s off drugs, back with her family, and ready to go back to school, the book gives you one final gut punch by revealing that she overdosed three weeks after deciding to stop writing in her diary. 

As a piece of literature meant to be read as a cautionary tale to young people curious about sex and drugs, Go Ask Alice works swimmingly on 12-year-old brains that won’t think about it too deeply. As I got older, reality started to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the story. It did seem rather abrupt for this anonymous girl to try LSD for the first time and then start shooting heroin not that long after. Not to mention, this girl just can’t seem to catch a break in her series of unfortunate events. Every worst possible horrific scenario that could happen to this girl was playing out for her, and yet between hitchhiking excavations and drug benders, she had the wherewithal to keep a diary. 

I came to find out that this published dairy was actually a work of fiction written by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth counselor who is severely lacking in credibility. She became rather notorious for getting these “found dairies” into paperback form and into the hands of our at-risk youth. Other diaries she happened to come across dabbled in Satanism, teen pregnancy, AIDS, and gang violence, the four horsemen of the religious propaganda apocalypse. 

In a world that makes you feel like a criminal for being curious about your own body, sometimes these works of fiction are all we have to go on as a young girl trying to navigate the landmines of adolescence. Judy Bloom’s Forever was the closest thing I had to a well-rounded sex-ed class. Aside from a police officer coming to my school when I was 10-years-old to talk to us about the puff of marijuana to heroin addict pipeline, Go Ask Alice was my only source on drugs at the time. It all made me feel incredibly gullible and naive. I didn’t know what was worse. On one hand, I had family and teachers who wanted to pretend that the realities of the world didn’t exist, and on the other hand, adults were willing to spin the web of lies to be so grand and monstrous to scare you rather than allow you to empathize with people who actually have real stories to tell. 

The emotional rollercoaster of Go Ask Alice reminded me quite a bit of the first time I watched Megan is Missing. The film came out in 2011 when I was finishing up my junior year of high school. I stumbled upon it during a late summer night, looking for something to scare me as I sat in my dark room. Not too dark though. My door was slightly ajar after all. 

Megan is Missing is a found-footage style horror film about two best friends, Megan and Amy, who live in an alcohol and sex-laden distortion of the teenage girl experience. When Megan disappears after meeting up with an online stranger, Amy must endure a terrifying journey as she searches for answers of what happened to her friend. 

Megan is Missing opens with a message: “The following film is based on actual events.” This is technically true according to Michael Goi, the writer and director behind the film. Though, some viewers might interpret that to mean this story is based on one real case and Megan and Amy were real.

Goi claims to have worked closely with forensic investigators that served as advisors to him on aspects about the disappearances. He also assures that the dialogue is a direct transcription of 13 and 14-year-olds he recorded when trying to learn how modern teens talk. “Everything that's in the movie is based on real cases, there's nothing in the movie that I made up. Everything came from documents, court transcripts, surveillance videos, file photos, all of that from seven different cases,” Goi said to Entertainment Weekly. “And so in that sense, it's entirely accurate to what actually happened in these individual cases, just the seven cases were melded into one storyline.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Goi had good intentions when embarking on this project, certainly having better intentions than Sparks. He saw the impending rise of internet usage begin to bubble to the surface. It’s no secret that not every parent is going to be too privy to monitoring their child’s screen time, especially in 2006 when the film was shot. The film desires to be a PSA, warning parents of the dangers of unsupervised adolescence online.

It may be true that everything in this film was derived from some type of factual source. From Megan trading sexual favors for nondescript white powdered drugs to one of the most disturbing points in the film where she is retelling the time when she was sexually assaulted by a 17-year-old camp counselor when she herself was only 10, I’m sure these were things that Goi heard while in the process of compiling his script. The issue rises when looking for the reason why these things are included in the first place. 

When looking at the gruesome summer camp assault, Megan is telling the story in graphic detail to Amy, almost in a joking manner that two girls would use when gushing about their innocuous school crushes. It’s clear that Megan doesn’t understand that what she went through was assault, and Goi claims that this is why he chose to use this dialogue between the two leads. This is a true story that came from one of his friend’s daughters. He recalled how shocked he was to hear a young girl tell a story of being assaulted, but it was so normalized to her that she didn’t see it that way.

This is of course an unfortunate reality for many young girls. They are way more likely to be assaulted by someone they know and trust than a complete stranger, but rather than discuss the reasons why a young girl can be assaulted and not understand that they’re a victim, the dialogue used here is meant to elicit one’s gag reflex rather than a moment of self-reflection for the parents watching. It’s especially disturbing to think that this was a traumatizing event in a young girl’s life that was used primarily for shock value. 

Both Megan and Amy meet an early grave, but not without exploitative imagery making up the bulk of the film’s ending. After Megan meets up with a faceless man named “Josh” that she spoke with online, she gets abducted by him, with Amy destined for the same fate three weeks after her. The last act of the film includes violent, BDSM-styled photos of Megan, a brutal rape scene, and Amy being buried alive in a plastic barrel containing Megan’s corpse. While these are the most horrific scenes in the film, they serve little purpose to the overall message of the film aside from fear-mongering.

When Go Ask Alice exploited the reality of teenagers that become addicted to drugs, rather than adding a human element to it that would allow us to view it through a lens of reality, Sparks sought to scare her audience by presenting the protagonist as a grotesque caricature. If you go to a party even once, according to Sparks, you’ll be forced to take drugs and then you’ll end up a homeless sex worker in a psyche ward. 

Megan is often presented in the same unforgiving way. She’s a cartoonish depiction of the wild child every parent would want their child to avoid. This warped perception is particularly damaging for teenage girls. While the film strives to be informative, it never evaluates itself with any empathy for the characters depicted. It lets parents know that if their child falls in with “the wrong crowd” with a girl like Megan, it’s going to be ten times worse than any parent would imagine, complete with constant pressure to have sex and use it as currency in exchange for alcohol and drugs. 

I found Megan to be at her most honest in brief flashes where she was with Amy and her family. Megan wants nothing more than to preserve Amy’s innocence to save her from the trauma she has endured her entire life, and the pain she feels from wanting a stable home life like Amy shakes her confident demeanor a few times, but the film doesn’t dwell on these moments for too long. 

Megan is Missing has the tone of a 5 o’clock news segment, alerting concerned parents that their teenagers may be using common household products as the latest designer drug. The onslaught of this type of rhetoric keeps parents in a state of constant fear while forcing their daughters to keep secrets from them. This type of media only offers more hurdles for teenage girls to overcome. They show that any freedom given to an adolescent girl will only result in tragedy, encouraging parents to forever watch their teenagers like a hawk while ignoring the common threats to young girls hanging right under their noses. 

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