Thursday Movie Picks - Home Invasion

Written as part of the weekly blogathon series hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

Thankfully, I have never had my home broken in to. Knock on wood, of course, as I don't want to ever have such a thing happen. It's a truly terrible thing to have happen, a deep, personal invasion that can leave lasting effects. Thankfully, we have movies that allow us to get catharsis in watching others go through this horror, and also perhaps give us some lessons on what to do - or, more likely, what NOT to do - should we ever find ourselves in this trying situation.

The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008) From the simplest of set-ups (a couple in crisis, a house in a remote location, three masked assailants), Bertino creates a masterpiece of creeping dread and steadily-mounting terror. There are jump scares in The Strangers, but the things that stay with you aren't the things that make you scream. Instead, it's the moments of quiet, where a masked figure appears deep in the background, or other moments where the tension is so thick that you just want to yell at the characters to TURN AROUND or move to the left instead of the right... so many moments where safety is just inches, seconds away, but there's nothing to be done. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, as the couple whose home gets invaded, are so believable as a couple on the verge of breaking up that you're even more invested in them as people when things start to go south and they come closer together. Which makes the whole thing even sadder in the end.

Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) Sure, some of the visual effects haven't exactly aged well, but everything else about Fincher's crackerjack thriller works like gangbusters. When Mom Jodie Foster and diabetic Daughter Kristen Stewart move into a Manhattan brownstone, they don't even get one night's rest before they find themselves trapped in the house's panic room, a steel-and-concrete-reinforced room that should protect them in the event of a home invasion... but the three thieves who show up include an employee of the security company that built and installed the panic room... and the separate phone line in the room hasn't been activated yet. Originally slated to star Nicole Kidman, who aggravated an injury from Moulin Rouge! and had to drop out, causing Foster to step in. Naturally, with Foster involved, her part was rewritten to emphasize the character's strength and similarities to her daughter. I can't help but think that this was all for the best, despite wanting very much to see what the Kidman version would have looked like.

When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979) By far one of the best (and scariest) opening sequences in all cinema, Carol Kane's babysitter finds herself terrorized by increasingly threatening phone calls asking if she has "checked the children". That's it, but this scene is brutally terrifying in the best way, a brilliant combination of lighting, editing, sound, and score. To say nothing of Kane's performance, brilliantly showing a smart, resourceful woman slowly fraying at the seams. The rest of the film is a bit dull, as it turns into a police procedural... until the terrifying conclusion!