Playing Funny Games in The Last House on the Left: The uncanny and the ‘home invasion’ genre

Abstract

This article dredges the 'reservoirs of dogma' and 'symbolic lagoons of social fears' to locate the 'home invasion' film genre within its diachronic and synchronic contexts. As such, we will first situate these films as part of the historical tradition of Gothic literature. This allows us to unpack the ways in which the depictions of the 'home' and 'homeliness' in Gothic literature and the 'home invasion' genre problematise constructions of identity and category formation. Secondly, exploring the genre in its contemporaneous socio-cultural setting allows us to see how particular social traumas are manifest in popular culture. These dimensions are explored by focusing on three key examples and their subsequent remakes: The Last House on the Left, Straw Dogs and Funny Games.

In the Shadow of the Monster: Gothic Narratives of Violence Prevention

“…While also defined as "unhomely," due to Freud's original term unheimlich, the uncanny alludes to sites or places that were once familiar (Freud 1919(Freud /2001Spittle 2011). As a complex analytical framework with multiple meanings, the uncanny concerns itself with doubling, the blurring of boundaries (such as between life and death or self and other), and the repression of that which threatens those boundaries, particularly the sense of self (Fiddler 2013;Fredriksson 2019). The uncanny is the unknowable that separates and yet, paradoxically, unsettles boundaries, which often causes a haunting sense of anxiety.…”

“…The uncanny is the unknowable that separates and yet, paradoxically, unsettles boundaries, which often causes a haunting sense of anxiety. As Fiddler (2013) suggests, the uncanny figure of late modernity, symbolic of our ontological anxieties, is characterized by its alien and estranged character.…”

Cutting through the fourth wall: The violence of home invasion in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games

“…This is something of a trope of the genre. It appears, for example, with particularly vicious force in The Last House of the Left (1972, dir W Craven;Fiddler 2013;Lowenstein 2005). As Sharrett (2010: 216) puts is, 'the external threat to the bourgeois couple may be read as an exteriorization of the deep internal strife of bourgeois married life'.…”

Television drama and the urban diegesis: portraying Albuquerque inBreaking Bad

“…Macek 2006positions the cinematic suburbs somewhat differently from Huq as well as Muzzio and Halper, for he argues that films not only valorize suburban living over inner city living but also portrays suburbanites as being under threat from inner city residents. In films like Home Alone, for instance, the suburban home is under threat from (inner city) outsidershome invasion being a familiar theme or genre in Hollywood film (see for instance England, 2006;Fiddler, 2013). Other films like Judgment Night show the dangers of the middle class getting lost, or being abandoned, in the dangerous inner city.…”