The 10 Most Disturbing Home Invasion Movies

Did Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke need to remake his 1997 gut-puncher Funny Games for American audiences in shot-for-shot fashion? Not really, and, truthfully, this stateside version of the controversial writer-director’s most polarizing film adds little to nothing in the way of fresh ideas or plot revisions. In the same breath, though, it’s just as skillfully acted and thematically devastating as its predecessor.

Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play a loving husband/wife team who, along with their young son, are held under the psychotic control of two sadistic, seemingly yuppie douchebags (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet). Breaking the fourth wall, Pitt frequently talks directly into the camera, involving the audience in hideous acts of torture-porn-like violence, including a shotgun blast that kills one character, leading to an extended post-murder shot that prolongs the grief.

Haneke probably felt compelled to redo Funny Games for Americans as a response to Hollywood smashes like Saw and Hostel, flicks that exist only to show people being killed and maimed for the viewers’ collective pleasure; with Funny Games, Haneke implicates the film’s watchers in the nightmare, using Pitt’s character to question our reasons for voluntary witnessing Watts shriek, Roth having his bones broken, and a little kid’s sudden death. Good luck trying to answer him.

These days, David Fincher is the big cheese within Hollywood, having directed last year’s Oscar favorite The Social Network, as well as arguably 2011’s most anticipated Hollywood production, December’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. With all of his recent fanfare, it’s easy to overlook his earlier, less-heralded yet altogether top-shelf flicks, namely 2002’s Panic Room. Nine years after its theatrical debut, Fincher’s claustrophobic thriller hasn’t lost any of its rich cat-and-mouse tension.

Jodie Foster stars as a divorced mother who moves with her teenage daughter (a young Kristen Stewart, years before the first Twilight book was even written) to a posh NYC brownstone that has a vault-like “panic room.” The mini fortress is put to use once three criminals (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam) break into their pad, looking for a stash of cash that’s inconveniently located inside the “panic room,” where Foster and Stewart are hiding. Making matters worse, Stewart’s a diabetic in need of medication, which, naturally, is stored outside of their safety room.

Fincher mines David Koepp’s taut script—a heart-pumper with devilish maneuvers from its villains and brainy retaliations from a rock-solid Foster—for a sufficient amount of suspense; as the violence escalates along with the stakes, Panic Room treats its audience with respect, earning its thrills without gratuitous bloodshed or nonsensical plot twists.

The 74-minute French horror-thriller Them is about as lean and mean as a movie can get. A husband and wife are hanging out inside their secluded mansion when a group of hooded assailants show up, play mind games with the couple, and then engage in a bit of stalk-and-prey. It all leads up to 20-minute long chase that clamps onto the viewers like a vice grip, before releasing its hold with a haunting final shot that gives the entirety of Them an unforeseen and even more sinister context.

Directors, and co-writers, Xavier Palud and David Moreau do a masterful job at keeping the antagonists’ identities shrouded in mystery, giving each of their brief appearances a somewhat supernatural feel. But Them isn’t a spook-show by any means; rather, it’s a showy exercise in bare-bones filmmaking. Palud and Moreau don’t waste a single second of the movie’s scant running time, subjecting the husband and wife characters to a random nightmare that goes from bad to worse to “You’re fucked.”

Story wise, Kidnapped is pretty familiar: A family moves into a new house and, during its first night there, three ski-masked deviants break in and terrorize them, with a financially minded ulterior motive. So, it’s basically an amalgamation of every movie that’s appeared on this countdown thus far.

But here’s the thing: Director, and co-writer, Miguel Angel Vivas clearly didn’t make Kidnapped to tell an innovative story. Staged as 12 single-take sequences that span 80 minutes, this short and brutal thriller perturbs the senses through technological trickery. Midway into the film, a split-screen effect materializes at the height of a gripping chase sequence, doubling the intensity by showing both the villains’ and victims’ franticness.

Kidnapped truly belongs on this list, however, for its final 15 minutes, which batter one’s head with ultra-violence, yet another interestingly used split-screen, effective gore, and a final shot that’s quite possibly one of the bleakest closing images in cinematic history. Vivas’ punishing flick is a descent into uncompromising domestic grimness—don’t expect to smile for at least ten minutes once it’s over.

Memorial Day Weekend 2008 was supposed to be owned by those horny cougars in Sex And The City; that was, before Bryan Bertino, the first-time writer-director behind The Strangers, tamed Sarah Jessica Parker and her randy cohorts at the box office. Genuinely creepy and intelligently made, The Strangers blindsided Hollywood, capitalizing on a superb trailer (see above) and turning a huge profit on the strength of positive word-of-mouth exposure.

And, yes, we too let our appreciation be known. Hell, we still are—other than Insidious, no mainstream horror flick has come close to matching The Strangers in legitimate scariness since that fateful Memorial Day Weekend.

Harking back to spooky genre classics such as 1963’s The Haunting, Bertino skipped gruesomeness for atmospheric chills, mounting tension through off-camera sounds, skipping vinyl records, and out-of-focus shots of the film’s masked intruders prowling behind stars Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman.

The Strangers also has the best reasoning from a villain about his or her choice of home-to-invade out of all this subgenre’s entries; when Tyler asks one of the anonymous baddies why she and her hubby are under attack, her emotionless assailant simply says, “Because you were home.” Translation: “You’re just shit out of luck, girl.”

Films like Panic Room and Kidnapped owe everything to director Terence Young’s masterful suspense flick Wait Until Dark, which is easily the most prestigious “home invasion movie” of all time. How so? Two words: Audrey Hepburn. How about three more words: Academy Award nomination.

The elegant Hollywood legend contributed a knockout performance as a blind woman battling criminals who’ve broken into her apartment under the assumption that she has a heroin-filled doll they so desperately need. Wait Until Dark is notorious for its tense climax, in which Hepburn defends herself against a cold-blooded Alan Arkin (playing the head bad guy); with the apartment’s lights shut off, the heroine’s blindness is no longer a factor.

Young, however, uses the sequence’s lack of illumination more against the audience than Arkin. He manipulates the setting with his delicately positioned camera, misdirecting the viewer’s eyes to conceal one of cinema’s all-time great “Oh shit!” jump scares. You’ll never see it coming.

How’s this for a hook: a more pornographic and deranged rip-off of The Last House On The Left directed by the dude who made one of the most heinous films ever shot, Cannibal Holocaust. With such labeling, it’s hard to imagine Ruggero Deodato’s heavily maligned The House On The Edge Of The Park being anything but incredibly sick. And if sick is what you want, this nasty little freakshow certainly doesn’t disappoint.

It’s a rather straightforward tale: A couple of psychos bumrush an intimate house party, where the head psycho (played by maniacal Last House alum David Hess) uses a razor to slash apart one girl’s body, disrobe another woman before raping her, and dice up her male friend’s face.

Oozing with the sordid mood of the sleaziest exploitation flicks, The House On The Edge Of The Park is icky, morally corrupt, and consistently disgusting. In other words, it’d make for a great double feature alongside Home Alone!

For a solid hour, High Tension is an unbeatable horror flick. The music is disorienting, the characters are interesting, and the carnage comes out of nowhere. A young co-ed travels to her friend’s parents’ isolated cottage for a weekend of studying, and, for the houseguest, some up-close-and-personal time with a gal pal she secretly lusts after. But then a silent hulk in a delivery man’s outfit ring the doorbell and proceeds to hack up nearly everyone in sight. A dresser is used to decapitate the father (we won’t spoil “how” exactly, but just know that it’s completely badass), the mother gets carved up like slaughterhouse meat, and even the friend’s little brother dies.

French director Alexandre Aja (who most recently made Piranha 3D) shows off with a Master’s class in slasher movie-making throughout the home invasion sequence; unfortunately, he also fancied himself as the next M. Night Shyamalan, and that’s never positive. High Tension topples quite a bit in the end, with an implausible twist that undermines everything that happens before it and taints what could’ve been a modern-day genre classic. But for two-thirds of its running time, High Tension is the truth.

You can rarely beat an original, and Funny Games is a prime example. As previously addressed in this here countdown, Michael Haneke’s 2008 U.S. remake is undoubtedly a tough watch, but it’s far less scarring than this 1997 original, which presents the exact same series of events yet pierces the senses much more sharply.

For one, there are no recognizable Hollywood stars (i.e., Naomi Watts or Tim Roth) that allow us to acknowledge that Funny Games is only a movie. More importantly, though, the general concept was unique back in ’97; take the film’s unexpected use of internal rewinding, for example, through which one of the bad guys erases his partners death, pretty much shitting all over the viewers’ hopes for a happy ending.

Like most of his films, Funny Games comes from a truly dark place within Haneke’s mind, a section of the brain where his most cynical thoughts lie, and, basically, we’re all seen as scum. Folks who’ll gladly pay to see people brutally murdered on screen, as long as there’s fresh popcorn and overpriced soda on hand. By the time the fittingly bleak ending of Funny Games reaffirms the notion that Haneke is one sick (and clever) fuck, you’ll feel quite bad about yourself. Or you’ll want to slap Big Mike in the face for subjecting your eyes to such unwavering nihilism. Either way, Funny Games will leave a mark.

Really, any chance to show love to Inside is welcomed, but the fact that it’s technically a home invasion movie makes it the only logical choice for top ranking here. Arguably the best horror film of the last decade, this French shocker has it all: unbelievable gore for the bloodhounds, spot-on performances and stylistic direction for cinematic purists, and a quick, 80-minute length for those with the attention span of a sock.

It’s also one of the only films in recent memory to make us cover our eyes more than once, proving that even the most experienced and numbest of horror lovers can still be pushed beyond his or her limits. In other words, we shriek like female dogs every time we watch the damn thing.

Inside, written and directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, starts off simply enough. A depressed pregnant woman decides to stay home alone on Christmas Eve to mourn her lover’s recent death via car accident, when a mysterious woman (who’s kind of hot, in a psychotic way) invades the premise and says that she wants our protagonist’s unborn baby—that’s right, this Woman in Black wants to cut the fetus out, no anesthesia. What transpires is a downward spiral of butchered family members, blown-off cop faces, and a C-section with scissors, amongst other extreme brutality.

If you’ve never seen Inside, and what we’ve just said has enticed your inner sicko, here’s some advice: Just buy the “unrated” DVD and avoid any rental discs, since pussy-footed censors refused to allow the movie’s uncut rawness to be Blockbuster accessible. We’ll never call French people “soft” again.