Gender Bashing: Couple Dynamics in Home Invasion Horror
Anya Stanley
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*Contains spoilers for The Strangers, Funny Games, and The Purge*
Many home invasion films, while not always strictly horror, play in its register (Cape Fear, Dial M For Murder). Sometimes the script is flipped, with the invader becoming the hunted (Don’t Breathe, The People Under The Stairs, The Collector) or with a lone man as the target of women invaders (Death Game and its remake Knock Knock). But by and large, these movies have one or more assailants descending upon a young woman (Hush, Wait Until Dark, Better Watch Out), a loving couple (Them, The Strangers), or a well-to-do family (Funny Games, You’re Next) in their previously peaceful residence. No matter the principal characters at play, the genre does what it’s always done: usher social or political macrocosms past our front porch to forcibly occupy a visible space in our living rooms. Where the domestic home used to be portrayed as an insulated safe space from social mayhem, the horror genre (and home invasion horror in particular) has eroded the distinction between the unforgiving outside world and our most intimate territory.
Film theorist Vivian Sobchack notes in her essay Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange: “Figures from the past and future get into the house, make their homes in the closet, become part of the family, and open the kitchen and family room up to the horrific and wondrous world outside this private and safe domain. A man’s home in the bourgeois patriarchal culture is no longer his castle. In the age of television the drawbridge is always down; the world intrudes. It is no longer possible to avoid the invasive presence of Others – whether poltergeists, extraterrestrials, one’s own alien kids, or starving Ethiopian children.”
The sentence about a man’s home no longer being his castle came to mind when I saw the trailer for the upcoming home invasion sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night. After a couple of decades spent watching a genre that has historically been hit-and-miss on onscreen gender narratives, I was curious to see if traditional roles of the protective man and the meek but enduring woman play into vaguely recent post-9/11 home invasion horror films that focus on random couples and families as the victims in their own domiciles. This is a pocket of the genre specific enough to (without spoiling their respective plots) exclude the likes of High Tension, Green Room, and You’re Next but allows for the varied spread of Them, The Strangers, and The Purge (among others).
In David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s 2006 French-Romanian horror gem Them (Ils), French schoolteacher Clementine and her novelist boyfriend, Lucas, live a quiet life in the creaky-but-beautiful home that they’re renovating, when prowlers arrive in the evening. At the first sign of trouble, Lucas investigates when their dog barks incessantly at an unknown threat. It’s a task he takes on reluctantly, as it’s his turn to hush the dog up. It’s not until nearly 4am the next morning that Clementine hears a noise outside and wakes Lucas. They find that her car has been brought to the front of the house, and she didn’t park it there. Despite her reluctance, he goes outside to check it out. After the car is stolen by unseen thieves, the couple retreat back to the house, wherein the power goes out. Again, Lucas simply sees this as a seemingly unrelated problem to solve while his girlfriend is the only apprehensive one. He strolls over to flip the fuse switches and hears bumps in the night. Once the couple realizes that they are not alone on the property, Lucas does not puff his chest, nor does Clementine collapse into a whimpering puddle. Rather, they stay together and barricade themselves into a bedroom. She asks, “What do we do?” His answer:
“I don’t know.”
He is just as terrified as she, though he does reassure her that everything will be okay. There is no knight-in-shining armor attempt to fend off all who would do his lady harm. At different points in the film’s jam-packed 74-minute runtime, Lucas and Clementine both venture alone outside of their refuge to find an escape route, and both physically engage with their tormentors. The nasty leg wound Lucas receives is a result. He limps back to the bedroom, and the couple scurries into the bathroom to regroup. Clementine notices the entrance to the attic and volunteers to go up to find a way out, but this seems to be due to her boyfriend’s injury rendering him immobile. Again, the decisions are driven more by practicality than by gender. And like Lucas, she is punished for her ventures outside of her refuge. When the couple reaches a point where Lucas’ injury prevents him from escaping with her, he implores her to leave him behind and to get help. When they reunite later, they attempt to leave together, but above all, the goal is survival and escape. It’s not heroics; it’s just the logical thing for them to do.
By comparison, Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers finds a relatively passive couple in Kristen and James. Once they both realize that there is a very real danger on the property (though it is noteworthy that he initially dismisses her claim that someone had briefly entered the house), they attempt to flee together by car. That doesn’t pan out, and so the pair retreat to a bedroom together, armed with a shotgun. But after an unfortunate mix-up results in the cancellation of the only outside help they’d receive for the night, James leaves Kristen behind in an attempt to call for help via a radio transmitter in the backyard shed. This decision seems like old-school valiance, but it’s just as practical as any decision made in Them; the 1970’s house that serves as the setting of the film is James’ childhood summer home. He’s the one who knows that there’s a radio out back and would likely find it quicker than Kristen would. That said, Kristen remains a quivering heap inside while her man provides the necessary action, and things take a turn for the worse from there. While Them features a couple that’s largely equal in their fight and flight as logic and logistics dictate, The Strangers’ protagonists act as counterweights in a sense; Kristen’s reactive cowering versus James’ determined initiative to flee, fight, and flag down help.
The presence of children naturally complicates the dynamic. Whereas domestic horror in this vein usually presents couples that make themselves vulnerable only when attempting to escape or fight, home invasion films involving families rarely miss an opportunity to highlight the parent who puts themselves at risk to protect their offspring. In Miguel Ángel Vivas’ 2010 psychological thriller Kidnapped, married couple Jaime and Marta and their teenage daughter, Isa, are targeted by thieves. When one of the men tries to rape Isa, Marta desperately offers her own body in her daughter’s place, which doesn’t pan out. Similarly, Michael Haneke’s brutal 2007 remake of his own film Funny Games has a mother stripping down to her underwear in order to appease the pair of intruders who nearly asphyxiate her son. Once there is no longer a child to protect, the algorithm can dictate a return to the basic goals of escape and survival as George and Ann attempt in Funny Games, or they can get straight-up confrontational, like the parents of dearly departed Mari in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left.
Home invasion takes on a dystopian bent in 2013’s The Purge, in which North American society is set up like a “Star Trek” episode (for real, look up the original series’ “Return of the Archons” episode) and for a 12-hour period every year, all crime is legal. The Sandin family (James, Mary, and their two teenage children, Zoey and Charlie) have an impressive, fortified home that nevertheless falls prey to a gang of masked youths, and the family is forced to act. For about two thirds of the film, the main protagonists’ actions fall into traditional gender boundaries. As the patriarch, James goes into protector mode once the household is threatened and hurries his family into their most secure room and defends the home with a shotgun while the wife and kids fearfully try to wait it out, like Kristen largely does in The Strangers. It’s only after James succumbs to his wounds that Mary, Zoey, and Charlie become aggressive in their fight to make it through the night. This is an interesting contrast to Moreau and Palud’s French Extremity film, in which the conventional roles that Clementine and Lucas would have played dissolve when faced with invasion and death, resulting in a utilitarian recalibration that puts all hands on deck for survival.
So are couples in home invasion horror driven along rooted gender paths? That depends. For North American stories of this sort, the shoes fits, at least in the first act. But across the Atlantic, European home invasion cinema prefers its characters to be more pragmatic under the threat of slaughter. Parents will do everything in their power to protect their kids, regardless of the film’s national origin. As The Strangers: Prey at Night opens in theaters next week, it will be intriguing to see how the couple dynamic plays out.
Anya Stanley is a California-based writer, columnist, and staunch Halloween 6 apologist. Her horror film analyses have appeared on Birth Movies Death, Blumhouse, Daily Grindhouse, and wherever they’ll let her talk about scary movies. See more of her work on anyawrites.com, and follow her shenanigans on Twitter @BookishPlinko.
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