Genre:
Horror – Sub-Genre: Home Invasion
This whole blog is about movies that thrill and frighten us. The word Genre means category usually of something artistic in nature that shares common attributes. So horror is a genre of film. It has shared characteristics with other films such as plot, character, and considerations of composition and mis en scène. As sub-genres there are such categories as monster films, ghost stories, slasher flicks, erotic horror, and psychological horror. You’re Next falls under the sub-genre of Home Invasion Horror.
Horror – Sub-Genre: Home Invasion
This whole blog is about movies that thrill and frighten us. The word Genre means category usually of something artistic in nature that shares common attributes. So horror is a genre of film. It has shared characteristics with other films such as plot, character, and considerations of composition and mis en scène. As sub-genres there are such categories as monster films, ghost stories, slasher flicks, erotic horror, and psychological horror. You’re Next falls under the sub-genre of Home Invasion Horror.
I think this sub-genre is the most disturbing and potentially most frightening of all the horror genres. It’s fairly easy to dismiss an alien attack while tossing your popcorn tub into the garbage bin on the way out of a climate controlled theater. It’s fairly easy to tell yourself, “Ah, but there really aren’t any ghosts,” as you stick your key in the car door in the parking lot. You can even tell yourself, “There are no vampires, werewolves, mummy’s, creatures from the black lagoon, or even zombies” as you pull into your driveway. But once you stick that key in and open that front door…you can’t deny that you may have been a victim of a home invasion. It’s one of our most visceral fears.
Home Invasion violates the social contract that civilized society strives desperately to maintain. It feeds into our fears of an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world. It taps into our fears of being vulnerable in the one place we should feel most secure—our homes. The nightly news categorizes our fears along race, gender, age, and social moieties nicely for us, so we may therefore
tell ourselves that as long as we stay away from the black men who rape or the
teenage gang bangers, or the Islamic terrorists…we’ll be safe. Fear occludes
rational thought from surfacing because in the back of our minds we KNOW that
not just black men rape…not just teenagers pose threats…not just Islam has
radical members who terrorize. But if we acknowledge all this, then we have to
acknowledge that identifying danger has become problematic. And THAT frightens
us. So for me, that’s why this is the most powerful and affecting sub-genre of
horror and You’re Next plays into all those fears.
tell ourselves that as long as we stay away from the black men who rape or the
teenage gang bangers, or the Islamic terrorists…we’ll be safe. Fear occludes
rational thought from surfacing because in the back of our minds we KNOW that
not just black men rape…not just teenagers pose threats…not just Islam has
radical members who terrorize. But if we acknowledge all this, then we have to
acknowledge that identifying danger has become problematic. And THAT frightens
us. So for me, that’s why this is the most powerful and affecting sub-genre of
horror and You’re Next plays into all those fears.
Because it’s so potentially powerful, it’s not an easy genre to get right. Wait until Dark and In Cold Blood got it right back in 1967. A Clockwork Orange got it right in ’71. When a Stranger Calls pretty much took a bite out of babysitting in 1979. Panic Room nailed it in 2002. Firewall tried its little heart out to thrill us in 2006. The Strangers in 2008 scared me half to death. We got a nice attempt with The Purge in 2013. But You’re Next in 2011 was a welcomed shot in the arm of the Home Invasion sub-genre.
One thing The Stranger, The Purge, and You’re Next all have in Common is the fact that the killers are masked. This adds another layer to our inability to identify danger. Behind the mask could be any demographic. No Face = No Identifiable Prejudice. It leaves us swimming in a pool full of Stranger Danger Sharks. It’s enough to trigger early onset Xenophobia. There’s also a motif of random acts of violence, thus driving home the theme that it doesn’t really matter who the victims are, and that every single person around you is capable of murder and violence, though in You’re Next the killers actually have a motive.
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