Tag: Home Invasion

There’s a New "Final Girl" in the House—and She’s a Beast: A Review of ‘You’re Next’

Movie poster for You’re Next

Written and Lovingly Spoiled by Stephanie Rogers.

Crispian: Where’s Felix?
Erin: I put a blender on his head and killed him.

You’re Next is sick, and I mean sick like “disgusting” and sick like “badass” because somewhere in my 34-year-old brain, I’m also 12.
It’s no secret if you’ve been reading my posts over the past 6 years that I love horror films and, more than anything, I adore the Final Girl in horror films. I want to be the Final Girl, tripping my way through the woods with a shard of glass sticking out of my leg while the audience roots for me to kill the bad guy. The Final Girl, in fact, might be my favorite iteration of the Strong Female Character in that the writers allow her to show weakness—which makes her desperate acts of murder to save herself even more appealing; she gets to be both the freaked out damsel in distress and the hero of the story.
Erin, the Final Girl, wielding an ax
From a feminist perspective, the Final Girl’s combination of strength and weakness accompanied by the (often male) audience’s ability to identify with her plight, further emphasize her importance. The horror film genre in general affords men an opportunity to identify with a female protagonist, and that rarely occurs in other genres. Go horror.
In Carol J. Clover’s book, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, she argues—to quote Wikipedia—“that in these films, the viewer begins sharing the perspective of the killer but experiences a shift in identification to the Final Girl partway through the film.” And in You’re Next, I couldn’t help but smile when Erin bashed in the head of a masked bad guy with a meat tenderizer while the audience cheered. (I smiled because the audience clapped for a female lead, not because I’m a sociopath.)
The quintessential animal masks
The film starts off like an average, run-of-the-mill horror film. The first woman character appears during what looks like pretty unfulfilling sex. My first thought? She’s about to die. Because women characters in horror films always get the death punishment for having sex—which is, I’ll admit, a problematic element of the genre. (A tiny part of me wondered if she might survive given that it wasn’t a steamy sex scene as much as a gross dude getting off while she lightweight grimaced.) Alas, she succumbs to the trope; then the words “You’re Next” appear in blood on the wall before the shitty bedfellow bites it … and so begins the latest incarnation of the Home Invasion journey. 
Get ready for your sex punishment

It may take place in a mansion, but the kitchen and the basement are where shit gets real. The weapons include kitchen knives, blenders, meat tenderizers, and a slew of screwdrivers, as well as a machete (duh) and for some reason a fucking crossbow like it’s The Hunger Games. I liked that the terrorized family members needed to defend themselves with household appliances rather than a random gun they’d hidden for a rainy day. (I almost never buy it when victims pull out their stowed away guns, and those films lean a little too close to a dangerous message: Buy a gun to protect your home, America; otherwise you’ll die at the hands of lunatics, and it’ll be all your fault. The NRA told you so!)
Thank you, You’re Next, for avoiding that convention and making me look at blenders and meat tenderizers in entirely new ways. 
Dude, you are SO next
The film follows a very rich, white, nuclear family whose matriarch (Barbara Crampton) and patriarch (Rob Moran) invite their children (and the significant others of their children) over for a nice, functional (ha) 35th Wedding Anniversary celebration and to see the brand new mansion they purchased. This brand new mansion happens to sit in the middle of nowhere with very limited cell phone service. Oops! And it also becomes clear almost immediately that the three brothers borderline despise one another, and the lone sister Aimee (Amy Seimetz), a total Daddy’s Girl, has been pretty much pampered her whole life. Of course the matriarch, Aubrey, hears a loud-ass noise that shakes the chandelier before the kids arrive, and the husband does that whole, “You’re a crazy bitch, but I’ll check it out anyway just to humor you” thing that always cracks me up in horror films. The message? Listen to women, dumbasses, because they know what’s up. 
Little Sister and Daddy’s Girl, Aimee, freaks out when everyone starts dying
Aubrey, portrayed as a hysterical mess who can’t stop crying, gets a pass from me. I found her response to the creepy loud noises and then the subsequent deaths of her children via crossbow (and a slow-motion sprint that ended with a clotheslining to the jugular) the most normal response of the whole bunch. These take-charge mofos who mindlessly cover their dead family members with a sheet and move on need some serious psychoanalysis. 
One of the masked men looks down on Erin after she jumped through a fucking window on purpose
The father, Paul, the former Man of the House, completely loses his shit at one point, going into a catatonic sob-state that made me chuckle in delight. The witty, suck-up, kind of dick oldest bro Drake (Joe Swanberg) makes incessant condescending comments to the middle brother, Crispian (A.J. Bowen), about his inability to do anything with his life; and Felix (Nicholas Tucci), the youngest, sits back with his girlfriend, rolls his eyes, and observes the dysfunction.

Just your typical dudbro family emasculation sesh.

It took me approximately ten minutes into the movie to realize this home invasion violence was all about money. Specifically white people with money. And the punishment of white people with money, a la The Purge. Can I just say kudos to Hollywood for taking a step back from the Mancession narrative for five seconds? Before the audience can identify with these rich white people and feel bad for their plight, we’re already laughing at them. They’re ridiculous. And the only seemingly respectable person of the lot is a darker-skinned young Australian woman named Erin (Sharni Vinson) who grew up in a Survivalist Camp and has a crapload of student loan debt.
Sorry, murderers. Your crossbow suddenly don’t mean shit. 
Erin (Sharni Vinson) looking a little worn out
Erin rocks. Erin is possibly my favorite Final Girl ever. That’s right; I’m putting her right up there with Ellen Ripley in Alien and Laurie Strode in Halloween. This Final Girl, while more advantaged than her predecessors with her Survivalist Camp superhero skills, also doesn’t get boxed into what has become a Final Girl trope: a young virgin, or a woman who’s never shown having sex, who’s rarely sexualized, who often appears as the “androgynous nerd” stereotype—Jena Malone in The Ruins is a good example of this—and who plays a straight-laced nondrinker or drug user (Erin insists they stop for alcohol). Erin is the new and improved Final Girl 2.0; the home invaders may run around in creepy Fox, Lamb, and Tiger masks, but Erin is the most animalistic of the bunch.
And that brings me to the women in the film. 
Zee, Felix’s girlfriend, tries some sick shit in this scene
I didn’t like that Felix’s girlfriend Zee (Wendy Glenn), the mostly non-speaking goth chick, turned out to be a villain. Why couldn’t the sweet, blond sister, Aimee, be a villain? Change it up, Hollywood! But I did like, for what it’s worth, that a woman got to be a villain—a somewhat likeable villain in the end—and that the filmmakers gave the audience an opportunity to identify with both a woman protagonist and a woman antagonist … who, for once, weren’t fighting over a fucking dude.
All in all, I very much enjoyed every dude’s “um wait whut” reaction to Erin’s skillz with a meat tenderizer. I liked that many deaths at the hands of Erin took place in a kitchen, a space where women were—and occasionally still are—forced to serve and clean up after men and children. You’re Next makes Erin queen of the domestic space but in a way that gives her power over her captors. The entire film could, in fact, be read as a cautionary tale for keeping women locked up in the domestic sphere or otherwise. Erin may not have served them in the conventional sense, but they definitely got served. 

 “Lookin’ for the Magic” by Dwight Twilley Band: the theme song from You’re Next

Horror Week 2012: ‘The Strangers’: The Horror of Home Invasion and the Power of the Final Girl
 
Guest post written by Mychael Blinde. Originally published at Vagina Dentwata. Cross-posted with permission.
The home invasion horror film The Strangers received bad reviews. Like, really bad. Critics wrote things like:
“What a waste of a perfectly good first act! And what a maddening, nihilistic, infuriating ending!”

and:
“Kind of like what The Shining might be if you took out the ESP. And the ghosts. And the chilling atmosphere. So call it The Sucking.”

But The Strangers totally works for me as both a horror fan and a feminist. Here’s why: 
As a horror fan: 
The film opens with Kristin (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) driving to his parents’ rural summer home in uncomfortable silence. We learn that they have come from a friend’s wedding, at which James proposed to Kristen. Kristen has rejected his proposal, not because she doesn’t love James, but because she isn’t ready to get married. 
The sense of discomfort and unease we feel at the couple’s awkward, painful situation transforms into a sense of fear and alarm with a loud knock on a large door at 4 in the morning. We are emotionally invested in the characters when the shit starts to go down — and boy does shit go down. But The Strangers takes its time. 
The cinematography contributes to the film’s tone of discomfort: the camera is never steady, and the subtly shaky hand held shots jostle the viewer. Director Bryan Bertino makes great use of wide angle shots, forcing the viewer to strain hir eyes looking for the killer in the peripheral screen space. 
Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers | I spy with my little eye a creepy-as-fuck guy!
The sound effects are equally disconcerting. The Strangers assaults the audience with banging and crashing, and most terrifying of all, with silence. It insists that its audience listen; diegetic sounds like a repeating record player situate the audience in the film’s world. And in case you had any doubts, Liv Tyler can scream. 
The aesthetic has a vaguely 70s feel (the car, record player), but The Strangers dates itself as late 00s by the two silver flip cell phones. The 70s props and look, paired with the strong sense of rural-areas-are-scary-places-full-of-psycho-killers urbanoia and the masked* assailants call to my mind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is not the psycho killers who invade the house, but their victims.  
James (Scott Speedman) and Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers
 
The Strangers is a more like Funny Games: it’s a home invasion horror in which the violence is presented as horrible, inexplicable, and inevitable. Director Michael Haneke created Funny Games as a reaction to (and criticism of) the Quentin Tarantino style of glamorized violence. Funny Games explicitly asks its audience to think about why we enjoy watching horrible things being inflicted upon people.  
The Strangers doesn’t take things that level of meta cinematic criticism, but it makes its point. 
The Strangers | “Why are you doing this?” “Because you were home.”
Sometimes humans do awful things to other humans for no reason at all. Violence is always horrific, and sometimes it is senseless and inexplicable. In the wake of the shooting at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises — a movie that certainly falls into the category of stylized violence — the representation of violence as ugly and meaningless in The Strangers resonates strongly with me. 
As a feminist: 
Kristin is the character with whom we spend the entirety of the film. In the beginning, while James goes to get her more cigarettes, and later when he stupidly breaks the first rule of surviving a horror film and goes off on his own, the audience stays with Kristen. 
Not only is she the film’s protagonist, she’s a woman who is not presented as a helpless idiot. When the shit gets real, she puts on pants. 
The screenplay makes a point of establishing Kristin’s affinity for her bridesmaid’s dress. After the couple arrives at the house Kristin, takes a bath, and instead of changing into sleepwear she puts on her dress again. She explains to James that this is the only day she gets to wear it, and says, “It makes me feel pretty.”
Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers
Director Bertino could have easily left Liv in her flimsy pink dress for the duration of the film.** Not only would this have accentuated her vulnerability, it would have offered ample opportunity to include titillating look-how-sexy-she-is-while-she’s-being-attacked shots. 
But Bertino opts not to portray violence as sexy. When masked weirdos attack, pretty is not a priority; Kristin doesn’t hesitate to change into something more sensible for combating psychotic murderers: pants! 
 It is Kristin who loads the shotgun after James confesses he’d lied about going hunting with his father and doesn’t know how to work it. Ultimately, James fires the gun, but by loading it Kristin proves she isn’t an incompetent damsel-in-distress. Throughout the film she strives to fight back. 
Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover identifies a film trope common to the horror genre: the Final Girl, the last woman left alive who ultimately wields the metaphorical phallus and kills the monster. 
The Final Girl phenomenon is problematic because it is predicated on society’s sexist notion that women are the weaker sex. But scream time results in screen time, and while watching a movie like The Strangers, with whom is the viewer being asked to identify? The masked maniac? Or the woman frantic to survive? (Hint: it’s not the maniac.) 
The character of the Final Girl offers women a chance to play protagonists in films marketed to men, which offers men the chance to identify with female characters. Which is awesome. 
Kristin doesn’t exactly fit the requirements for Final Girl status, but she is the character with whom viewers of The Strangers are encouraged to identify, and she is presented as woman who is neither stupid nor incompetent. 
Yes, The Strangers is derivative. Films about home invasion have been made before, and a movie about a woman being terrorized by a masked assailant isn’t exactly original. But in spite of its myriad predecessors, The Strangers manages to keep things creepy as fuck — all without resorting to tired sexism or misogyny. 
* * *
*“Dollface,” “Pin-up Girl,” and “Man in the Mask.” What do you make of the way the masks gender the assailants? 
 **Liv does end up back in that pink dress in the film’s bleak climax, but she is never sexualized. 
———-
Mychael Blinde is interested in representations of gender and popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata.