Up til now, not much has come out of the recent obsession with home-invasion movies. Okay, sure, they do provide an interesting window into what scares Americans in the 21st century. In the ’80s, we were afraid of going away to summer camp and getting slashed by some psycho; now, the big fear is that the psychos are at our doorstep. And man, we are screwed, cause these psychos clearly spend all their pre-invasion prep time shopping online for scary masks (they’ve got to be from Etsy, cause they always have that handcrafted, no-sane-person-would-want-this look to them) and learning how to move with the kind of stealth that would make Seal Team 6 weep openly (despite the lack of peripheral vision in the aforementioned masks pretty much taking away their ability to see or walk).
So yeah, like any horror trend, this one has something to teach us about our times. But as movies? Man, are they lame.
From 2008’s The Strangers to this year’s hit The Purge, the new American home-invasion flicks have been empty exercises in stretching suspension of disbelief way past its breaking point. As Scream taught us, any real person threatened by masked maniacs would fight tooth and nail to take them out—and in these films, the intended victims even have home court advantage. The three wispy, unarmed invaders in The Strangers wouldn’t last 10 minutes against the Kardashians, let alone people with smarts and resourcefulness. Nor is any house—even the mansion in The Purge—so amazingly immune to the laws of physics that it could provide miles of interior hallways for the protagonists to sprint through. These films are superficial, contrived attempts at scares, and they fail miserably.
Now comes You’re Next, a film from up-and-coming horror director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett. It’s an easy film to compare to Scream, because it plays off and twists the clichés of the home-invasion subgenre the same way Scream deconstructed slasher films.
It’s a tricky comparison, though, because while it has some genius moments of black humor, You’re Next is not a satire on the genre. Instead, it digs deeper into the issues these other films glossed over. Without spoiling anything, let me say that You’re Next truly gets behind the masks in a way that previous home-invasion movies were too dumb or scared to do.
The story takes place at a remote vacation home in the countryside, where the Davisons are having a reunion. As the various family members arrive with their significant others, we’re introduced to an eccentric cast of characters, in a set up straight out of Agatha Christie.
The first clue that this film is different than your average modern horror flick is that none of these characters are teens. Instead, they’re all adults, and most of them seem to hate each other. The dysfunctional family dynamics play out almost like straight drama for a short while, until the first arrow comes through the window. After that, it becomes clear that masked killers are trying to get in, evoking some very unexpected responses, from one character in particular. After that, let’s just say that things don’t go at all according to formula.
The kills are bloody, but the surprises are fun, and the humor is refreshing in an age where these films seem to get grimmer and grimmer, in a desperate attempt to prove that they’re scary or important. (Can anyone remember a movie less fun to watch than the snobby, audience-loathing Funny Games?)
You’re Next mixes a little bit of retro into its otherwise hypermodern vision of living-room siege, and it pays homage to the very first home invasion movie, Night of the the Living Dead. But mostly it seems to align itself with the French horror movement, drawing on the intensity and blitzkrieg editing of films like High Tension and Inside (though it’s not as shocking or disturbing as the latter). Strangely, it seems to take some inspiration from Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible as well, at least in the bassy rumbling that gets the viewer right in the pit of the stomach. Certainly this is one of the best sounding horror films ever, one more example of how carefully crafted it is, and how much it pays off for horror fans.
