Home Invasion

Home invasion horror takes the one assumption every other subgenre leaves alone, which is that the house is yours. There is no curse and no monster. Someone is outside, then someone is inside, and the film is about the distance between those two sentences. It is the form with the fewest ideas and the tightest grip, because there is nothing to disbelieve.

The rules are a location and a night. A house, usually isolated, usually with the phones handled early. The people inside, who are ordinary. The people outside, who are either anonymous or far too polite, and who rarely want anything you could give them. Then the siege: windows, doors, the basement, the car that will not start. The form rarely has a mythology, because the premise cannot be explained without being weakened, and the films that try, The Purge with its holiday and Us with its tunnels, do it to say something about the country rather than the house.

The lineage starts with thrillers: Wait Until Dark (1967), a blind woman alone in an apartment, and Straw Dogs (1971), which gave the siege its cruelty. Black Christmas (1974) put the killer inside the house and became a slasher. Then the form went quiet until Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997), which built the perfect home invasion film in order to scold you for watching it. The 2000s were the golden run: Them (2006) in Romania, Inside (2007) in France, The Strangers (2008) in America, and Kidnapped (2010) in Spain, each more pitiless than the last. The 2010s made it cleverer and bigger: You're Next (2011), The Purge (2013), Hush (2016), Don't Breathe (2016), which inverts the premise so the invaders are the ones who should have stayed out, and Us (2019), which made the invaders the family's own faces.

The signature techniques are about the frame. The wide, static shot of a room where a figure is standing in the background and the character has not turned around. The sound of a door handle. The window that shows the yard, and then does not show the yard. The masks, which exist so there is nothing to read. And the refusal of a motive, delivered as a line of dialogue, which the form has made into its signature: they do it because you were home.

Slashers are the nearest neighbor, and Black Christmas and the opening of Scream belong to both. Survival is the same siege without the walls, and Green Room (2015) is a home invasion where the home is a bar. Serial killers is where the person at the door goes when the film follows them home. Psychological horror is the opposite pole: all ambiguity where this form has none. Comedy horror has claimed You're Next and Ready or Not (2019), and haunted houses is what this form becomes when the thing at the door was already inside.

For deeper cuts, try Kidnapped (2010), a Spanish film in twelve long takes about a family's first night in a new house, as cold as the form gets. Speak No Evil (2022), the Danish original, is the houseguest variant: a family visits people they met on holiday and keeps being polite long past the point they should have left. And Funny Games (1997) is Michael Haneke's Austrian original, two polite young men in white gloves at a lake house, a lecture on why you watch this kind of film, and unbearable anyway.