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Why We Love Home Invasion Movies So Much

We are finally getting to meet Mother! – Darren Aronofsky’s highly anticipated, mysterious horror film which stars Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Ed Harris. Like the rest of the Academy Award nominee’s filmography, Aronofsky’s Mother! is not something that can be easily encapsulated, beyond the fact that it is a work that is allegorical in nature. What we can say, though, is that the film is, at its most fundamental level, a home invasion tale.

Women As Aggressors

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The home invasion premise can challenge our ideas of stereotypical femininity as much as masculinity, though – particularly when women are depicted as the aggressors. What’s notable is that home invasion tales based around women aggressors tend to be about the notion of colonization, rather than fear of vulnerability, or physical violation. The best, most referenced examples of female aggressors in the traditional home invasion tale are undoubtedly the 1992 Curtis Hanson film, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, and Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female from the same year. Both these films employ the ‘cuckoo’ concept – which is to say that a woman appears and earns trust, only to be revealed as a usurper – eventually taking control of the ‘nest’ (the home and family) by way of the manipulation of those inside.

In contrast to films like Unbreakable, where the aggressor simply gets inside by sheer physical force, female aggressors are most often seen gaining access to the target home by cunning, strategic planning – conniving and weaselling their way to their ultimate goal. Eli Roth’s 2015 film Knock, Knock is an example of this method of entry, which mixes with physical aggression later in the story. It depicts a happily married man who invites two young, supposedly stranded women into his home while his family is away, and allows himself to be seduced by them. They then spend time psychologically and physically torturing him.

The 2008 movie The Strangers is a rare story that effectively removes altogether the aspect of gender politics from the home invasion premise, and has two women and a man – all in masks – terrorize a young couple in a remote house, for no other reason than that they were home. Here, the women are as physically aggressive as the male attacker, and the female victim is as resourceful as her male counterpart. As such, it fits with the general point of the tale, which is the fact that victims do not always get to know why they’re being targeted, or by whom.