How To Prevent A Home Invasion, According To The Movies

Home: it’s the place where you’re most comfortable and, as such, the place where you’re most vulnerable. Which is why personal domiciles have made terrifying settings for dozens of movies over the years, including Adam Wingard’s upcoming You’re Next, in which a long overdue family reunion at a posh country estate is rudely interrupted by a gang of animal mask-wearing interlopers intent on spoiling the civility.

An instant favorite at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it premiered in the Midnight Madness section in 2011, You’re Next is getting ready to scare up a whole new bunch of moviegoers when it hits theaters on August 23. While we can’t promise that you won’t jump, flinch, or scream your way through its 96-minute running time, we can help you prepare for any battle that might arise on your home turf with this step-by-step guide.

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Guns miss and knives break but bear traps are forever. We’re guessing you probably can’t buy one at the local Walmart, but we can rattle off a number of recent movies that have used this frightening device as a torture/murder weapon, including Saw, Saw VI, Saw 3D, The Collection, and The Cabin in the Woods.

But few people have wielded a bear trap as skillfully as David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), the fish-out-of-water American defending his wife (Susan George) and their rural English farmhouse in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971). After being terrorized by a group of local thugs, including Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Del Henney), who were hired to help renovate their home, David trades in brains for brutality when he clasps the trap over Charlie’s head, ending their tussle for good. James Marsden pulled the same move on Alexander Skarsgård in Rod Lurie’s 2011 remake.

The Sumners in Straw Dogs would have made out better had they done a background check on their hired help. The same goes for Michael (Michael Reilly Burke) and Victoria Chase (Andrea Roth), who become the target of not one but two of their contractors in The Collector (2009). On the same night, no less!

First there’s Arkin (Josh Stewart), the ex-con-turned-handyman who sees no other way to pay a debt to his ex-wife than to rob his employers’ safe. But he arrives to find that he’s got some criminal company of a much more sadistic kind in The Collector (Juan Fernández), a masked marauder who gets his kicks from “collecting” one human specimen from each home he enters and killing everyone else.

Turns out that The Collector, too, had done some work around the Chase household, as an exterminator (appropriately enough). We’re guessing they didn’t find these guys on Angie’s List.

A home invasion can only be successful when said home’s proprietors are caught off-guard. And when that does happen, one simple fact can get muddled in the mayhem: It’s the victim, not the assailant, who has the home-court advantage. Which should make it all the easier for he or she to level the playing field.

That’s how Susy Hendrix (Audrey Hepburn) bested the baddies (Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston) in Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967), an early entry in the home invasion subgenre. Recently blinded and alone in her basement apartment, the men gain Susy’s trust—and entrance into her home—by telling her that they are police. In reality, they’re a couple of con artists attempting to recover a doll full of heroin that was given to Susy’s husband (neither one of them knowing its contents).

When she realizes the truth—and that they’ve exploited her disability—Susy (temporarily) eliminates their ability to see by knocking out all of the apartment’s light bulbs, putting them at the same disadvantage.

Dang cell phones. When they’re not autocorrecting you, they’re always needing to be recharged or find a better signal.

In Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008), Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) has got much bigger problems than worrying her next text will end up on Damn You Autocorrect. She has just declined a marriage proposal from her too-good-to-be-true boyfriend James (Scott Speedman), who has left her alone in his remote family cabin while he takes some time to cool off.

But Kristen has a sneaking suspicion that she’s not alone, which is soon confirmed by some persistent banging on the front door. She tries to call James for help, but her cell phone is nearly dead, so she plugs it in to juice it up. When she returns just a few minutes later to try, the phone is gone—confiscated by one of the masked intruders who will spend the rest of the night torturing them, simply “Because you were home.”

Fact: In real life and in Hollywood, the majority of vicious intruders are going to have Y chromosomes. But there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, including Alexandre Aja’s High Tension (2003), David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005) and Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside (2007).

In that latter example, both the victim and the perpetrator are women—and their meet-up is no accident. It’s Christmas Eve and mom-to-be Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is still mourning the loss of her husband, who died in a car accident several months earlier. Suddenly there’s a woman at the door (Béatrice Dalle) asking to use the phone. When Sarah declines, the woman persists to the point that the police are called, though they find no trace of her. But the vanishing doesn’t last for long.

As Sarah sleeps, she’s awoken by the same woman, who is now in the bedroom and attempting to remove Sarah’s unborn child with a pair of scissors. We won’t give away the ending, but we will say that the body count rises as Sarah desperately tries to save her own life and the life of her child.

Evil never looked so innocent.

Like a storm shelter, a panic room is a space with a single purpose: protection. Close the door behind you before an intruder gets there and you’re home free… right? Unfortunately for Meg (Jodie Foster) and Sarah Altman (Kristen Stewart) in David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), the loot the intruders who’ve infiltrated their newly-acquired Upper West Side brownstone are looking for is actually in the panic room.

The trio of bad guys (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam) take some pretty drastic measures in order to evacuate the room, including gassing the women. The lesson? Keep your safe out of your panic room.

Two heads are better than one, particularly when you’re using them to stay one step ahead of a prowler and disrupt his or her (or their) plan of attack.The buddy system also serves as a great distraction tool, as Clémentine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michaël Cohen) discover in David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them (2006). The couple quickly realizes that there’s strength in numbers when a group of hooded hoodlums begin terrorizing them late one night, first making off with their car then playing little tricks like turning on the television set. After locking themselves in an upstairs bathroom, Lucas keeps watch while Clémentine looks for an escape route through the attic.

OK, so that plan doesn’t work out perfectly, but they do manage to escape the house and into the surrounding woods where, yet again, the power of two prevails: Lucas, nursing an injury, hides in the bushes while Clémentine goes for help. Alright, so that plan doesn’t work out either. Nor do the next couple of attempts at teamwork. But having a partner in anti-crime certainly double’s ones chances of survival.

Back when movies like the original When a Stranger Calls (1979) and Black Christmas (1974) were being made, caller ID wasn’t a standard phone feature. But it is today, and can be the very technology that saves you a lot of time, frustration and phone-answering if you know—from the get-go—that those harassing calls you’re receiving are coming from inside the house.

In the case of Black Christmas, there’d be four more sorority girls, one housemother, one red herring boyfriend and one police officer to ring in the new year had the caller’s location simply popped up on the receiver.

Even the world’s greatest Boy Scout wasn’t taught to “be prepared” for an unwanted visitor. Which means that if you want to fight back, you’re going to have to improvise.

If a delinquent like Alex (Malcolm McDowell) can attack a woman with a phallus-shaped sculpture in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), then parents John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma Collingwood (Monica Potter) can use a microwave to murder the psychopath who attacked their daughter in The Last House on the Left (2009), Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) can hurl a host of home furnishings to keep Ghostface at bay in Scream (1996) and young Isa (Manuela Vellés) can ward off a would-be rapist with a decorative statue in Miguel Ángel Vivas’ Kidnapped (2010).

This may very well be the most important survival tip: If the intruders are not wearing masks, they don’t believe there will be any survivors to identify them. Meaning, if you’ve got a chance to run, take it.

There’s no room—or time—for second-guessing, as poor Georgie Farber, Jr. learned in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (a.k.a. Schorschi in the original 1997 Austrian film, of which the latter was a shot-for-shot remake). After being taken hostage in their own home by a couple of fresh-faced teens (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett) who look more ready for a game of tennis than a night of sadism, the young son of George and Ann, who are also being held against their will, manages to escape. But rather than run for help, he tries to save the day by shooting one of the aggressors.

Unfortunately for Georgie, the gun gets stuck and he is forced to endure yet another one of those Funny Games in the title. The ending is not a happy one. For anyone.