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

The Other and making the home strange

Bachelard (1958) well evokes the centrality of the home to ‘the modern Anglo-European imaginary’, but also to the individual’s situated construction of self and identity (Mallett, 2004: 63). Over time, this is where ‘our memories are housed’ (Bachelard, 1958: 8). In Mallett’s (2004: 63) elegant phrasing, this ‘formative dwelling place’ becomes a ‘place of origin and return, a place from which to embark upon a journey’. In a more programmatic manner, in Hillier and Hanson’s (1984) The Social Logic of Space, home is where a clear spatial hierarchy can be learnt and imposed. It regulates the interactions that occur at the various ‘levels’ within its confines. A certain spatial discipline is established. In contrast, Busch (1999: 27) baldly states that ‘where we live can never be landscapes of logic’. Rather, these are places of play and passage, dream and nourishment that do not bend to deterministic spatial codification. Whatever our reading, the home is clearly of foundational importance. We can see them as, at once, the sites where we begin to construct the story of our selves and also where we learn the spatial codes to take beyond the sheltering walls of the homestead. We will see how the home invasion genre subverts, problematises and reaffirms these categories and identities in equal measure. However, even within seemingly hagiographic texts of the home and dwelling, the spaces to subvert them already exist. As Short (2006: ix) puts it, ‘The home is also a place of loathing and longing.’ There is already ambivalence toward the home. Its familiarity can breed contempt. As a site of identity formation, it is already and always a space and place of contestation. In a more metaphorical sense, Bachelard points to the very fabric of the house as concealing and obscuring. It is as though the keys and locks, cellars and attics, are designed for repression. It is when these are disturbed, when the repressed return, that we encounter the uncanny.

The uncanny as envisaged by Freud (1919) carries with it multiple meanings, each lexically swirling around one another. It is concerned, among other things, with doubling (or the familiar made strange through repetition), fear of burial and ghosts (the return of that which was once known). If we pick apart the word itself, ‘the prefix “un-” is not merely a linguistic negation, it is the “token of repression”’ (Masschelein, 2011: 8). In this sense, repressing something calls it up. As such, ‘it is perfectly possible that something can be familiar and unfamiliar at the same time’ (ibid.). Kearney (2003) draws this out further, by examination of the etymology of unheimlich. Here ‘geheim (secret), heimisch (native) and heimlich (homely)’ each feeds into the same linguistic well (ibid.: 73). The familiar, the forgotten, the home and the Other all swim around one another. This inability ‘to ken’ touches on the disruption of boundaries that comes with the uncanny (Jentsch, 1906; Twitchell, 1985).

Lacan, in searching for a linguistic analogue for the uncanny in French, settled on extimité. This speaks to a confusion of interior and exterior states. We can expand this out to a disordering of categories more broadly. That which is ‘categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory [or] incomplete’ is perceived as Other (Carroll, 1990: 32). This horrific nature is also infectious. The reasoned can become unreasoned by contact. Further, the same can be said of the locations from which these figures emerge. These are ‘marginal, hidden or abandoned sites: graveyards, abandoned towers and castles, sewers, or old houses’ (ibid.: 35). My argument is that the Other also renders the familiar home unfamiliar. Or, rather, that their presence draws it out. Twitchell (1985: 24) illustrates this by calling upon the Universal Studios’ classic figures of horror (themselves taken from Gothic literature): ‘the vampire [and] the Frankenstein creature’. These characters are unknowable (and hence uncanny) as ‘they block our attempts to classify, categorize and hence control them’ (ibid.). A popular recent example can be found in Paranormal Activity (2007, dir. O Peli). Here, the unseen antagonist makes the home unsettling and draws out repressed elements of the female character’s past. Cavallaro (2002: 1), in apposite phrasing, states that ‘the rationalist dreams fostered by the Enlightenment are likely to spawn monstrous aberrations’. So, if uncanny nightmares seep out of the dreams of modernity, what lurks in the shadows of late modernity? In some ways we can draw from the same well of fears. However, where the Gothic monsters touched upon a certain type of categorical uncertainty, the late-modern uncanny figure is characterised by their rootlessness. They are the vagabond re-imagined for a period of ontological insecurity. Indeed, Bhabha states that the uncanny ‘is a key concept to grasp the experience of extra-territorialisation, estrangement and ambivalence of the post-colonial subject’ (Masschelein, 2011: 137). This further draws the Other closer. They are not an absolute outsider, but rather they were always and already within. As we proceed, I will suggest that the late-modern figures of terror see their unknowability leach out into their surroundings. They render their (and others’) environment unfamiliar and unknowable. It is the invader that confounds or plays with the categories that we thought were familiar. It is when the home becomes fluid and spatial boundaries break down that the ‘myth’ of a separation between our family and the Other is exposed (England, 2006). ² The sense of detachment from one’s past and environment finds form in ‘disturbances of the spatial sense’ (Collins and Jervis, 2008: 14).

Bachelard alludes to this in relation to the shadowy dimensions of homes. It is the cellar that is the ‘dark entity’ of the house. At odds with the ‘rationalized’ spaces elsewhere, it speaks of the ‘irrationality of the depths’ (Bachelard, 1958: 18). Likewise, Troutman (1997: 145) evocatively talks of the ways in which ‘closets, hallways, stairways, doors and windows, attics, basements, eaves and cabinets expand and contrast with fear and desire’ (ibid.). Of course, from the criminological literature, we know of the myriad troubling ways in which the domestic setting is a place of real fear and violence (Harne and Radford, 2008). My focus here though is on the cinematic representations of violence within such settings. As such, it is more appropriate to talk of the domestic as being, as in Troutman’s (1997: 143) phrasing, ‘a collision of dream, nightmare, and circumstances, a portrait of the inner life.’ As with the discussion of Gothic Criminology earlier, whilst relating to ‘real’ experience, this language also alludes to that which exists in the ‘reel’.

Having built up the house and Freudian uncanny as central frameworks for this article, it is important here to test the foundations before bringing it down on top of ourselves. Williams (1995: 242) unequivocally describes how reductive it is to bring Freudian analysis to bear on the Gothic:

All those dark closets, winding stairways, and dank dungeons invariably hide the same psychosexual secret: the dangers of the irrational desires with the ‘other’.

My focus is to go beyond the ‘Freudian Easter Egg Hunt’ of uncanny tropes that Williams describes. Rather, it is to locate these tropes and place them in historical and contemporary context. To quote Foucault (cited in Kearney, 2003: 203), ‘there are monsters on the prowl whose form changes with the history of knowledge’. It is worthwhile mapping the nature of that change.

Paradise Lost: Gothic and the domestic

In an engaging argument, Ellis (1989) maps Milton’s Paradise Lost onto descriptions of the homestead and domestic in Gothic literature. In this framework, there is ‘masculine Gothic’ and ‘feminine Gothic’. Broadly, this equates to characters being locked out (masculine) or locked in (feminine).

Either the home has lost its prelapsarian purity and is in need of rectification, or else the wandering protagonist has been driven from the home in a grotesque reenactment of God’s punishment of Satan, Adam and Eve. (Ellis, 1989: ix)

We can see the former applying to the descriptions of the home rendered uncanny above and the latter will relate to the ‘doubled’ family that we will come to later. The home is set up as a place that should be safe and yet is rendered dangerous by the antagonist. Within the patriarchal framework of the Gothic, it is for the familiar characters to bring the home back to its prelapsarian state of purity. It was for them to create ‘a bulwark against this danger [and in so doing] paradoxically keep them ignorant of corruption, immorality and violence’ (Ellis, 1989: 11). Perversely, Ellis notes, ‘women were being told to reverse the events of the fall, to give up knowledge in return for safety’ (ibid.). The family was to take precedence. So, far from being simply escapist, Gothic literature was socially and culturally coded (Cavallaro, 2002; Ellis, 1989). As Williams (1995: 22) puts it, ‘“the Gothic myth”, the mythos … is the patriarchal family’. And its location was the home.

Happiness was to be found in the ordered home while unhappiness lurked outside. The task of making the home ‘safe’, ‘sheltering’ and within the bourgeois ideal was an ideologically loaded exercise. Yet, the characters could not ‘escape’ this patriarchal setting. They were imprisoned ideologically as much as by dank castle walls. Indeed, as Twitchell (1985) argues, in the early Gothic, it was the family itself that provided the threat. It is ‘the story of a single and specific family romance run amok: “father” has become monstrous to “daughter”’ (ibid.: 42). Again, this will take on an importance when we explore doubled and ‘dark’ families who are placed in (supposed) contradistinction to our idealised bourgeois family unit. Perhaps though, the situation is not as deterministically hopeless for our characters as first suggested. The boundaries that enclose can also be transgressed or reconfigured. There is still space for resistance. That said, transgression can also bring with it punishment.

Horror, terror and the abject

In looking at both uncanny environments and definitions of the Other, it is useful to examine Kristeva’s (1982) notion of the abject. To paraphrase Botting’s (2008) useful description, the abject is that which disrupts the ‘real’ as envisioned by Lacan. This is the ‘real’ as it amounts to shared signs and symbols. Horror comes from the links between these shared structures being dissolved: ‘its aesthetic effects evoking the gaps’ (ibid.: 140). So, that which questions these frameworks or acts to disrupt them is itself acted upon violently. In the conflicts that are generated between protagonist and antagonist, self and Other within the uncanny setting, the self of ‘I’ is threatened. As Kristeva (1982: 1) puts it, ‘the abject has only one quality of the abject – that of being opposed to I’. The matter becomes confused if we consider home to be an extension of self. This too is disrupted. The ‘abjection becomes a state more likely to occur when spatial boundaries are questioned’ (England, 2006: 354). Inviting the abject within the home further acts to disrupt spatial boundaries: as stranger becomes guest becomes threat.

This discussion also relates to the labelling which we apply to the home invasion genre. Is it indicative of horror or terror? Once again, this is a matter of boundaries being transgressed and confused. One point of departure is to consider both terror and horror as being part of the fantastical. By this I mean, following Hantke (1998), that they rely upon a coming together of two ‘incompatible’ worlds. Where the locations or agents of rationality co-mingle with irrationality, the fantastic occurs. For Castex (cited by Hantke, 1998: 181) it is a ‘brutal intrusion’. It is Rabkin’s (cited by Hantke, 1998: 181) notion of ‘structural ambiguity’ caused by the fantastic that most directly speaks to both the abject and extimité. For Carroll (1990) horror relates to the supernatural, whereas terror has a psychological or naturalistic explanation. Inevitably, this line also proves to be permeable. Twitchell (1985) frames the comparison slightly differently. Evoking a vision of Dean Stockwell miming to Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet (1986, dir. D Lynch), ‘the etiology of horror is always in dreams, while the basis of terror is in actuality’ (original emphasis, Twitchell, 1985: 19). As has been implicit to this point, it is my contention that the home invasion genre provides an uncanny blurring of the dream/nightmare and actuality. Their setting is in the bricks and mortar of homes that dream (to echo Lovecraft). Their characters are similarly villains who disrupt the ‘real’. Theirs is a brutal irruption of one world to the other, curdling, shifting and altering structures of meaning. How that irruption occurs can be questioned though. As Jervis (2008) suggests, the uncanny either enters an ordinary, rational world or the irruption reveals that the uncanny was already present in that world. To be clear, and despite these overlaps, the characters and situations that my focus is upon here evoke the ‘terror’ of the ‘everyday’ and not the ‘horror’ of the supernatural. An alternative supernatural reading of home invasion could point to The Exorcist (1973, dir. W Friedkin) or the aforementioned Paranormal Activity (curiously, since Stoker’s Dracula, vampires tend to be very particular about being invited into homes). My intention here though is to draw upon the depictions of the Other that are found in Germany’s Aktenzeichen XY…unbekannt or its UK equivalent, Crimewatch. The reconstructions of crimes on these popular television programmes share the same formal cinematic techniques as ‘everyday’ home invasion films (Jewkes, 2011). Here the ‘monstrous’ is human, but equally derives uncanny force from ‘the sleep of reason’. This takes overlapping forms. For the sake of clarity, each of the examples that follows largely focuses on one element of the uncanny: Last House on the Left (doubling), Straw Dogs (home) and Funny Games (the Other).

As each of these films relates to the cinema of the fantastic – as envisaged by Castex – it has become a truism to say that this wider genre provides a way of working through contemporaneous social troubles. For example, the alien invasion films of the 1950s can be read as comments on the ‘red menace’. ³ Thinking of particular sets of films as evidencing a social ‘wound’ and the trauma associated with it allows for a more nuanced reading (Lowenstein, 2005; Blake, 2008). Lowenstein (2005: 2) in particular talks of the ‘allegorical moment’ as ‘a shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted and intertwined’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the light of the Summer of Love was being extinguished. Manson and the My Lai massacre all played into a narrative of societal rupture. Nowhere is this clearer than in Wes Craven’s (1972) The Last House on the Left.

The Last House on the Left: ‘Creepy crawling’, violence and the American family home

In Last House on the Left (1972) we follow Mari Collingwood on the eve of her seventeenth birthday. We see her good-naturedly sparring with her parents: to their dismay, she refuses to wear a bra when going to see a band called ‘Bloodlust’. She is due to see the band with a friend, Phyllis. Before she leaves, Mari’s father gives her a necklace with a peace symbol on it. Mari and Phyllis go to ‘the city’ and encounter Krug Stillo, Fred, Sadie and Junior.

Krug and Fred have just escaped from prison. In contrast to the virginal Mari, Sadie is portrayed as sexually aggressive (however, when they allude to feminist thinking and women’s liberation, both are shouted down by their respective ‘families’). Junior (Krug’s son) is a heroin addict. Krug and company take Mari and Phyllis to woodland (coincidentally close to the Collingwood’s home). They rape and kill both girls. The alternative family then arrives at the Collingwood’s door and are invited in. Mari’s mother finds the peace symbol necklace that Mari had passed on to Junior. The mother and father find Mari’s body and then proceed to kill the alternative family. The film ends on a freeze frame of the bloodied parents.

Filmed under the title Night of Vengeance and then tested under the more salacious Sex Crime of the Century, Last House was released in 1972. Its difficulties with the censors are well documented by Szulkin (2000). In America, it found success on the drive-in and ‘grindhouse’ circuits. In the UK, the film gained notoriety for its inclusion on the Director of Public Prosecution’s list of ‘video nasties’. Wes Craven and Sean S Cunningham (director and producer respectively of the original) produced a remake in 2009. It jettisons the grainy, documentary-style filming of the original, along with any of the allusion to cultural conflict, while emphasising the class conflict between the ‘families’. In a bid to smooth some of the more unpalatable edges of the original, Mari survives in the remake, as does Junior who – in this version – acts as the audience’s surrogate.

The title of the film has a political resonance (Lowenstein, 2005). The ‘left’ were the hippies, the anti-war, the feminists and the civil rights campaigners. In Celluloid Crime of the Century, a documentary that accompanies the UK Metrodome DVD release, Craven suggests that the title evokes death (Last) and haunting (House). The ‘Left’ refers to the French sinistre. This goes some way to placing the film within the framework of the uncanny outlined here.

The context of the original was very much the titular ‘Nixonland’ of Perlstein’s (2008) book. Having suggested earlier that applying trauma theory offers a more nuanced approach, it is difficult to locate any one particular ‘wound’ to which Last House could be said to correspond. Rather, we could point to a death by a thousand festering cuts. There was televised violence in Vietnam, at the Democratic National Convention and at Kent State. The Manson family had ‘creepy-crawled’ into the home of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. Last House was released during these ‘death throes’ of flower power (Szulkin, 2000: 16). It reflects the ‘political demonology’ of the period (Rogin, 1988, cited by Lowenstein, 2005: 113). Or, to be precise, it reflects it and then subverts it. Initially, the principal characters are stock types: the (mildly) rebellious teenager, the straitlaced parents and violent hoodlums. Bourgeois culture and counter-culture are set in opposition to one another, with Mari bridging the gap. The married couple then comes to adopt the violence of the hoodlums. The resolution – the bloodied Collingwood couple standing shocked among the bodies and carnage of Krug et al. – could be read either as the standard horror trope of the reassertion of conservative values or as a comment on the seeping pervasiveness of violence. Wes Craven, speaking in 1979 (cited in Williams, 1996: 130–1), stated

There’s a famous phrase in the United States: ‘Why are we dragging these things out? Why do we have to talk about Vietnam again? It’s over.’ It’s not over with – it’s going to come in through another door.

For Craven, the trauma of Vietnam had been played out on America’s television screens. It had already kicked its way through the door and forced its way in. There is a sequence in the remake where the Stillos dry themselves by the fire in the Collingwoods’ home. It resembles a dark mirroring of a Normal Rockwell painting. For Lowenstein (2005: 118), the Stillos ‘expose the bleak underside of certain countercultural impulses taken to their limit, where the outcome is not progressive social change and self-awakening but addiction, rape, and murder’. As such, they provide a cinematic analogue for the Manson family. ⁴

In the bestselling true-crime account of the Manson murders, Helter Skelter, the authors described the pervasive fear that spread throughout Southern California at the time. As Manson (Emmons, 1986: 212) himself put it: ‘everyone in L.A. began double-locking doors, looking over their shoulders, panicking at every sound and carrying guns.’ This itself offers an eerie, counter-culture echo of Capote’s (1966: 3) In Cold Blood where the murders of the Clutter family caused ‘many old neighbours [to view] each other strangely, and as strangers’. As Fahy (2010: 115) quoting Capote notes, these particular murders rendered the familiar strange ⁵ : ‘the place itself became unnerving. ‘Monsters howling the bloody night long. A horrid racket … That hateful wind.’‘ However, when Capote describes his antagonists, Hickock and Smith, ‘as monstrous on physical and psychological levels,’ the Stillos owe more to Kristeva’s abject (Fahy, 2010: 61). They may ‘mock bourgeois values, defy conventional notions of sexual morality, and use drugs,’ but they are immoral, not amoral (Lowenstein, 2005: 118). They appear conflicted and confused themselves in the aftermath of Phyllis’s disembowelling. This is recalled in the shocked faces of the Collingwoods at the film’s end. They too have embraced the Stillos’ violence. The Stillos’ ability to disrupt categorisation is more complicated than the typical monstrous in horror. They provide a counterpoint to the bourgeois family. In playing ‘house’ with the Collingwoods they offer a gross parody of domesticity. Yet, this doubling goes beyond simple critique.

Doubling: Two families, one house

Do not thy force on me

Or my father will deal with thee

(Töre’s daughters in Vänge in Szulkin, 2000: 210)

The societal lines of fracture from the 1960s found form in the cinematic representation of the family in the 1970s. It would be difficult to imagine the patriarch of the Hilliard family (as seen in The Desperate Hours in 1955) asking his daughter: ‘What’s this tits business?’ unlike the exasperated Dr Collingwood. The solidity of the family unit, as evidenced by the Hilliards, had come under ‘severe assault’ (Williams, 1996: 13). Indeed, where the Hilliards survived and were able to reassert the primacy of the traditional family by rejecting the assault of Humphrey Bogart’s hoods, the resolution for the Collingwoods is more complex.

However, the fault lines were visible before. As we have seen in the earlier discussion of the family in Gothic literature, there were already points of discord. These are further complicated by the uncanny. What we see in the Stillos (both in the original and remake) is an alternative family unit. This allows for the Stillos to be used as a critique of the values of the Collingwoods and for the Collingwoods’ values to be reasserted when confronted by the Stillos.

We could make the argument that the disruption that the Stillos bring to the Collingwood home is carnival-esque. As Carroll (1990: 200) describes it, ‘customary decorum, morality and taboos may be relaxed … conceptual schematizations … turned upside down, backwards and inside out’. By the film’s end, in both the original and remake, the Stillos have attempted to mimic the bourgeois lifestyle of the Collingwoods, while the Collingwoods have used the sex and violence of their doubles. Post-carnival, there is resolution. Of sorts. Ordinarily, we might see that the reconstitution of the norm and negation of the alternative as the ‘dominant cultural viewpoint’ is vindicated (ibid.: 201). In Carroll’s phrasing, it has been ‘lanced’ of the abnormal. Yet, while this is perhaps an apposite reading with regard to the remake, the situation with the original is more complicated. The suggestion with the original is that the ‘wayward, maybe brooding, thoughts and desires’ that came to the fore in a carnival, were always and already present (ibid.). The ‘lancing’ has merely brought the infection to the surface.

It is here where we see the full effect of Freudian doubling that the Stillos represent. They embody excess of drink, drugs and sex. They even ‘talk too much’ (Lowenstein, 2005: 19). These are, along with their violent tendencies, repressed by the Collingwoods (Williams, 1990). It might break through to the surface, as when Dr Collingwood jokingly says to his wife: ‘Come into the living room. I want to attack you.’ Largely though, there is an outward disdain or rejection of the values of the Stillos and the ‘love generation’. What occurs when the doubled family arrives at the home is that:

the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. (Freud, 1919: 234)

Mrs Collingwood ‘seduces’ Fred before emasculating him, as Sadie has attempted to play a sexually ambiguous ‘mother’ to the brood. Likewise, Dr Collingwood adopts the violence of his opposition patriarch. The differences between the two families and their dwellings are initially evoked by the juxtaposition of the squalid apartment of the Stillos in the ‘city’ and the Collingwoods as they decorate their home in preparation for Mari’s birthday (Lowenstein, 2005). In the conclusion, the bourgeois home has been demolished. Or rather, that is the case in the original. In the remake, after the Collingwoods leave their home, the end credit sequence is played out over exterior shots of the house in sunshine. Nothing is amiss. Order has been restored. Perhaps even a prelapsarian purity has been reinstated. This is a very different ending to the ambivalence of the original. To arrive at an understanding of these differences, it is useful to once again locate the film as part of a lineage of Gothic literature and depictions of the homestead.

Berger (1984, cited by Mallett, 2004) points to the splintering of ‘home’ that was contemporaneous with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century. There was a split between the ‘homestead’, the site of dwelling and associated with ‘safeguarding familial property, including estates, women and children’, and the ‘homeland’ (Mallett, 2004: 65). The latter was ‘appropriated by the ruling classes to promote a form of nationalism and patriotism’ (ibid.). If we think once more of Last House as a reaction to the social wound and trauma of exterior events, we can see the Collingwood home as a collapsing back of homestead and homeland. Here is a depiction of home dealing with the violence of Vietnam and ‘America’s delusive view of itself and the brutal violence unleashed outside in a far country, a violence returning home to confront its beneficiaries’ (Williams, 1996: 138). As Craven suggested, Last House was an attempt to ‘demythologize abstracted Hollywood-style violence, to capture the kind of raw documentary footage from Vietnam that he suspected was being censored in film and on television’ (Lowenstein, 2005: 120). The ‘happy’ ending of the remake then perhaps corresponds more to the unreality of televised wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Extreme violence can be brushed off and normality resumed.

Capote (1966: 84) described how ‘imagination … can open any door – turn the key and let the terror right in’. If home is ‘a projection of the ego’, then an attack on the house is an attack on the ego (Praz, 1994, cited by Jacobs, 2007: 34). In Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, this is driven home with propulsive force.

‘This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house’: Violence and the home in Straw Dogs

[Men are] creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is … someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, … to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.

‘The knock at the door meant the birth of one man and the death of seven others.’

The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, adapted for cinema as Straw Dogs by Sam Peckinpah (1971) and Rod Lurie (2011), was published in 1969. Written by Gordon Williams, the novel follows an American academic and his English wife and daughter as they relocate to a Cornish village. Their arrival is met with suspicion and concludes with the titular siege as locals attempt to break into the farm. Peckinpah, who having said of the book in a Playboy interview that ‘you’ll die gagging in your own vomit’, excised the character of the couple’s daughter for the film adaptation (cited in Simkin, 2011: 86). This shifts the focus more directly onto the fractious relationship of the renamed Amy and David. After their arrival, the couple employs some of the local men to repair the farm buildings. They steal Amy’s underwear and, later, kill the couple’s cat. David finds it hanging in their bedroom cupboard. Having failed to confront them, David is taken hunting by the men, whereupon he is swiftly abandoned. One of the men, Charlie, returns to the farmhouse. He and Amy had had a relationship prior to her leaving for America. He rapes Amy. Amy’s reaction becomes ambiguous as the sequence unfolds: it seems that it becomes consensual. Another of the locals, Norman, arrives. He threatens Charlie with a shotgun and then he too rapes Amy. Later in the film, and against Amy’s wishes, David brings Henry Niles into the house. Niles has accidentally killed the daughter of the local patriarch, Tom Hedden. Hedden, Charlie, Norman and others besiege the farm. David makes his stand and repels them.

While man’s (sic) capacity for violence is a central theme of the book, the first film adaptation relies heavily on Robert Ardrey’s (1961, 1966) notions of the evolutionary ties between territory and aggression. The two approaches rely upon similar imagery, yet the focus is subtly different. The 2011 remake, relocated to America’s deep South, sees David – now a Hollywood scriptwriter rather than academic mathematician – and his wife Amy – a returning homecoming queen – face a local patriarch who is no longer a farmer but a retired highschool football coach. For Lurie, Ardrey’s thesis is nihilistic and so the film’s commentary on violence is subtly different again. Interestingly, critical ire has shifted since the original film’s release from the oppressive, unrelenting atmosphere of violence of the siege to that of the earlier rapes. To be clear, the latter is not an unproblematic sequence. However, it can be reappraised if considered to be recalling gendered depictions of characters and locations from Gothic literature.

The home in Straw Dogs (1971 and 2011) is clearly set up as a patriarchal site to be defended. Anything within – including other family members – should come under the ‘care’ of the male provider. Amy’s father, we imagine, would not allow the (initial) transgressions that David does. Indeed, this is clearly not David’s home in her eyes. This is established early on. Shortly after moving in, Amy lounges in a chair. David asks ‘is that your Daddy’s chair?’ She answers ‘they’re all my Daddy’s chair’. The sense of ‘invasion’ is problematised by David’s ambiguous relationship with the domestic. It is not his house. Nor, really, is it Amy’s. It belongs to the men of the past. The chairs are her ‘Daddy’s’ and, in the remake, an old shotgun of her father’s is found hidden under the floorboards. Similarly in the remake, when Charlie comes into the house to speak with Amy, the 6′4 ″ Alexander Skarsgård (playing Charlie) touches the cross beams in the living room. His is an imposing physical presence. He imposes himself on the space. It is an act that suggests that he is remembering the dimensions of the house, as well as giving insight to the nature of their former relationship. There are echoes here of the masculine and feminine Gothic. Charlie having been locked out has returned (with the old patriarch dead) and Amy, having left, is to be punished now she has returned.

For David, his initial ‘exclusion’ from the house comes from his character flaws. In the original, he begins the film as the typical academic: ineffectual and slightly cowardly. He has failed to take a stand on an undisclosed issue, presumably back in America. He weakly argues that he ‘never claimed to be one of the “involved”’. Amy is evidently disappointed in this element of his character. When they find their cat strung up, she blames the local workers. For her it was a way of them ‘prov[ing] to you that they could get into your bedroom’. The foreshadowing of the sexual violence is clear, if not directly echoing Bachelard’s notion of spaces within the house containing secrets to be revealed (as with the gun under the floorboards in the remake). In eschewing confrontation about this, David’s cowardice is also brought further to the fore. David’s subsequent use of violence comes when he asserts his domain.

The shooting context was, as with Last House, one of societal fracture and violence. This is well evoked in the following dialogue from the original:

Simkin (2011) points to the same examples as those highlighted by Craven as influencing Peckinpah: My Lai, Kent State, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We can well imagine that for David, initially at least, the bucolic England he has come to is in direct contrast to the violence that he has left behind in America. This is a landscape that seemingly owes more to the agrarian eighteenth century than one that has recently emerged from the swinging 60s. This is a pastoral of ‘smiling landscapes unshadowed by the bloody conflicts and fears of earlier times’ (Tuan, 1979: 136). This context also explains the influences of Robert Ardrey’s texts (1961, 1996) that are felt throughout the film. The film could also easily be read as a reimagined or relocated Western. In the novel, David has a ‘flashing image of women loading rifles, of men crouching beneath small windows in log walls, of Indians…’ (Williams, 1969: 100). So, while the novel and original see such recurrent themes as divorced from location and located in the individual (and perhaps framed by other representations of violence in and against the homestead in popular culture), the remake prefers Tuan’s (1979) sense of violence as situated in place. The area in which the action occurs has strong ties to the Civil War, with all of the racial subtext that that brings. Here the bloody conflicts and fears from the past churn away just under the surface. A key sequence sees a ‘Preach and Play’ where the local community gather in a church before going to the centrepiece activity of a football game. This, according to James Woods’ football coach, has its origins in the Civil War. The violence of the game is directly twinned with the warfare of the past. Further, the farmhouse in the remake was designed to echo Civil War period forts. This is somewhat different to Peckinpah’s Ardrey-inflected reading. Ardrey saw the desire to protect one’s territory as an evolutionary characteristic. Referring to Huxley (1934), the force of this is well evoked by Ardrey (1966: 90):

Any territory is like a rubber disc: the tighter it is compressed, the more powerful will be the pressure outward to spring it back into shape.

In the original, when the violence is over and the threat removed, David picks up a chair that has been knocked over. This is a simple act that restores order. The rubber disc has reverted to its original shape. For David, the uncanniness of this comes, using Freud (1955: 249), from the way in which ‘primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’. That ‘powerful share of aggressiveness’ that Freud talks of in the quote that opens this section, and that David has sought to suppress, comes vividly to the fore.

The uncanny moves beyond the world seen on-screen in our final film: Funny Games.

‘It’s as real as the reality you see’: Funny Games

Funny Games, directed by Michael Haneke, was released in 1997 and starred Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Müle as Anna and Georg. Along with their son Schorschi and dog Rolfi they go to their lakeside holiday home for a vacation. Once there, they are terrorised by Peter/Tom/Beavis (Frank Giering) and Paul/Jerry/Butthead (Arno Frisch). The two boys use these names interchangeably throughout the film when addressing one another. They evoke, at once, cartoon-like violence and saintliness. This apparent playfulness renders them unknowable. There is also, seemingly, no reason as to why this white shirt, shorts and glove-wearing duo should be so violent. One by one, the family members are killed. The film ends with Peter and Paul at the door of another family.

Throughout Funny Games, Haneke questions our consumption of the film. That which had troubled Craven and informed Peckinpah had, for Haneke, been normalised and commodified. Violence was not simply part of the news. It had become entertainment. In a Q&A after a screening, the director (cited by Wheatley, 2008: 21) stated that ‘anyone who leaves the cinema doesn’t need the film. Anyone who stays does.’ An English-language remake, starring Tim Roth and Naomi Watts as the couple, was released in 2007. Remade almost entirely shot-for-shot, this was an attempt to move from the arthouse to the mainstream. Both films use genre codes to comment upon the violence within the film.

Following Castex’s notion of the fantastic coming from the irrational entering the rational, this idea becomes confused in Funny Games. There is no explanation offered for the boys’ behaviour. Rather, their ‘funny games’ seem to be an elaborate series of Garfinkelian (1967) experiments: those acts that puncture the thin veneer of the everyday and throw into relief the unspoken codes of social practice. As examples of the abject, they disrupt conventional signs and symbols. The ‘civilization’ of the couple is poked, tested and mocked. Early in the film, Peter arrives unannounced at the house. He asks Anna for some eggs that he then proceeds to ‘accidentally’ drop. He asks for more. He drops these too. Anna’s initial irritation swiftly becomes fury as Peter demands yet more eggs. When Georg appears, he is more confused than alarmed at Anna’s response. This infuriates her still further (we might be reminded of David’s ‘civilised’ inaction in Straw Dogs here). Georg politely asks Peter (now joined by Paul) to leave. The funny games then begin in earnest. The family’s dog is killed and the violence toward the family escalates. The boys play ‘kitten in the bag’ by putting a cushion cover over Schorschi’s head. It is hard not to be reminded of Elias’s description of a similarly named ‘game’ (1994: 171). The boy is then shot. A little later – after ‘playing’ a game of ‘the loving wife’ or ‘by the knife or by the gun, losing your life is never fun’ – so is the father. Finally, the mother is drowned.

Haneke, in an interview for the 2009 UK Artificial Eye DVD release, simply states that ‘all the rules that exist to keep society functioning are nothing to them’. The boys exist outside of the rules of society and outside of the film. It is the explicit manner in which the two boys move between the diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds of the reel and real that I wish to address here. If the uncanny exists in the collapsing of two worlds, what happens when the Other invades ‘our’ ‘real’ world at the same time? There is a conversation between Peter and Paul in the penultimate scene. Having just pushed Anna overboard while on the family’s boat, they discuss a film that Peter has seen. They talk about the blurring of reality between the fictional world of the story and the real world of the viewer. Uroborus-like, this reflects back on Funny Games itself.

At several points, Paul turns to the camera and addresses the audience. He winks at ‘us’ or asks what we think of the action. In this, Haneke is correct in that we are complicit with the boys (despite Paul’s question: ‘you’re on [the family’s] side, aren’t you?’). This might remind us of Twitchell’s (1985) reference to a particular detail in Hogarth’s The First Stage of Cruelty. In this, Hogarth depicts ‘a dog licking the hand of his tormentor … an image embedded in horror of the innocent conspirator’ (ibid.: 34). Is this us, the audience, or the family? Both are drawn to their tormentors. It is useful to frame this in relation to Kristeva’s (1982: 9) abject since ‘so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims – if not its submissive and willing ones’. It comes from the dropping of the frontier between subject and Other. As they are ‘swallowed up’ by the Other, they ‘joy in it. Violently and painfully’ (ibid.).

The motivations of the Other in Last House and Straw Dogs are more of a known quantity. Principally manifest through class differences, they transgress the norms of the middle-class families whose homes they invade. The antagonists of Funny Games, however, are seemingly without motivation. Paul lists the overlapping and contradictory reasons for Peter’s behaviour: his parents are divorced, his father is an alcoholic, he has a sexual relationship with his mother, he is a drug addict, he is spoilt and ‘tormented by ennui and angst’. Paul’s subsequent question (‘what answer would you like?’) is addressed to the audience as much as it is the father. This toying with explanations is a feature of a paedophobic sub-set of the home invasion genre. Them (2006, dir. D Moreau and X Palud), The Strangers (2008, dir. B Bertino) and Cherry Tree Lane (2010 dir. P Williams) each feature young antagonists and equally obfuscate any explanation for their violence. There are throwaway references in the latter to the latest ‘seductions of the innocent’, but these are piled up, as with Paul’s suggestions, so as to be meaningless or even satirical. In this sense, the boys are rootless. However, this is a more profound rootlessness than that suggested by Bhabha or Masschelein earlier. Rather, they are entirely ‘categorically interstitial’. Without category, save perhaps for their youth, they are more than simply unknown. They are unknowable.

The home is also, once again, central to these discussions. Or rather, it is these characters’ second home. Chevalier’s (2006) study into French second-home ownership makes interesting comments that we can apply to this example (both within the German original and American remake). Chevalier (2006: 83 citing Weiner, 1985) points to the way in which, with a second home, there is an ‘anchoring of … lineage in a materialized space’. We can see how this was problematic for Amy and David in Straw Dogs as neither truly belonged to the home. This link is much less explicit in Funny Games. The family has clearly occupied the house in the past, but they have not made it into ‘place’. This empty banality somehow accentuates the uncanniness and violence of the action. There is, in particular, a ten-minute, single take sequence that occurs after the son has been shot and the killers have seemingly left. The camera pivots in place as it follows the mother moving to the stricken father. The room is dimly lit and blood spattered. It has echoes of Susan Hiller’s (1983-4) Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on Your Wall. In Hiller’s art installation, a television sits in a mock-up of a sparse living room: footage of flames flicker on the screen. Akin to a Rorschach test, the flames induce different imaginative responses in different viewers. For Hiller, the installation is a way to induce past states of reverie and the possibility of communal hallucination. It is unheimlich. In the film, the mundanity of the setting is in juxtaposition with the death of the child. Violence has irrupted into the everyday. We are confronted by it. We are forced to watch. We are forced to respond.

Discussing the canon of Haneke’s work more broadly, Sorfa (2006: 93) sees the threat of violence underpinning depictions of the domestic as a recurrent theme: ‘the home is fundamentally predicated on aggression and fear rather than kindness and security’. In both Hidden (2005, dir. M Haneke) and Funny Games, the bourgeois family unit attempts to insulate itself from the outside world. However, this only serves to lock them in, offering no escape (ibid.). Heidegger (cited in Kaika, 2004: 265) proposed that the house is ‘the most primitive drawing of a line that produces an inside opposed to an outside’. The clear-cut dichotomy of inside(r) and Outside(r) is, in the first analysis, a powerful one. It would seem that the domestic interior is predicated on the opposition of its exterior. However, as we have seen, the line is a porous one. As Sorfa (2006: 98, original emphasis) puts is, ‘the place of safety (the Heimlich) is the very place of danger (the Unheimlich)’. And, in the case of Funny Games, this also extends beyond into the extra-diegetic world.

Confining and enclosing: The family in the invaded home

In the 2009 Artificial Eye interview, Haneke ‘chastise[s] the viewer’ for their role as ‘accomplice’ to the killers in films such as the ones explored here. He focuses ‘not [on] self-reflexive films [like Funny Games], but films that portray violence in an “acceptable” way’. It is my contention that the genre films highlighted here are indeed self-reflexive, not least in their inter- and meta-textuality. Be it with regard to violence, familial relationships or depictions of the Other, these themes are problematised. It is not simply that these films maintain hegemony or attempt to subvert it. Rather, they embrace this thematic messiness.

This is reflected in the uncanny that, as a phenomenon, has the tendency to be observed wherever the observer chooses. As stated earlier, the intention here is not to simply present yet another list of such instances. Rather, in examining it through synchronic and diachronic lenses, we begin to see its utility in relation to the broader criminological examination of the aesthetic of crime and punishment. In so doing, this lends weight to Picart and Greek’s (2003, 2007) call for a ‘Gothic Criminology’. We see how the home invasion genre calls upon the tropes and systems of representation of Gothic literature. It echoes the ways in which familial relationships played out in domestic settings. Foucault (1990, cited by Williams, 1995) pointed to the ways in which the family structure has served two functions. First, it has served to delineate lineage. Second, it ‘confines and encloses’ (ibid.: 95). ‘Home’ as a site of the family serves to dictate and regulate desires. Transgression of these is punished. Further, these films can be used to unpack lines of contemporary social rupture. In looking at the home, we are also drawn to that which lies outside. As such, these offer a useful means of drawing out the shape of a particular period’s Other. It provides a means of examining the construction of a given period’s figurative ‘dark figure of crime’ within the popular imagination. And it is a popular imagination. Recent box office successes such as The Purge (2013, dir. J DeMonaco) and You’re Next (2011, dir. A Wingard), as well as critical acclaim for Kidnapped (2010, dir. M Ángel Vias) suggest that there is a ready audience. This is the aesthetic commodification of fear and safety. And where this genre once responded to the televised violence of Vietnam, in a post-9/11 world they echo the extimité of national borders. They evoke images of terrorist violence inside unstable borders and war outside. The home invaders embody the ‘contentious internal liminality’ that exists in/outside the homestead and homeland (Bhabha, 1990, cited in Vidler, 1992: 11). We see how and why the Other’s presence renders the everyday unheimlich. Yet, often the home has been unheimlich long before the arrival of the Other. It simply brings into focus the pre-existing cracks, the socio-cultural fissures of a given period. Filtering these aesthetic representations of the monstrous, callous and corrupt through the theoretical material outlined here gives us ways to read responses to the ‘real’. We can see how this feeds into the interplay, the ‘comedy of errors’, between public and policy responses (Green, 2006).

The repressed return. Primitive beliefs are confirmed. Order is restored. And yet. For both the protagonists and audience, the uncanny changes or reveals the nature of ‘home’:

INT. Morning. The suburban home.

 The married couple sit quietly.

 The Other lies dead at their feet.

Fade to black.