Wingard: You're Next (2011)

Horror films often ascribe a certain oblivion to their victims – and revisionist horror often involves poking fun at that oblivion. While You're Next follows in that revisionist mould, it also does something a little different with it, making for a slasher self-consciousness that's definitively post-Scream. After an elliptical prologue, the film opens with an extended family arriving at their country home for the weekend. It’s a creepy, macabre house, set amongst gnarled, stunted woods – and the family knows it.  In fact, they spend the first part of the film obsessively checking the house for sounds, creaks and shadows, allowing the film to really capture that obsessive drive to investigate just one more creak, as well as the deeper, creepier implication of creaks – not just that someone is waiting to kill you, but that someone is waiting full stop, symbiotically sharing your space (and the killers spend some time just occupying the house before they strike). It’s a bit of a surprise, then, how badly the family deal with the killers once they appear - most of them are killed off so quickly it feels as if the film is over before it’s begun. What that enables, though, is a secondary, supplementary narrative in which the killers suddenly find themselves challenged to elude the last few family members, who are led by a guest who turns out to have grown up on a survivalist compound. That’s not to say that the narrative simply inverts – it’s not merely that the hunted become the hunters – since that kind of deliberate, flamboyant subversion is an earlier kind of revisionism than what’s on display here. Instead, Wingard maintains the symbiosis between killer and victim that was so creepily evoked in the opening scenes to position the remainder of the film at the margin of error that can make orchestrating a home invasion as terrifying and suspenseful as being invaded. Both killers and victims, the film suggests, are slaves to the contingencies and continguities of domestic fixtures – it only takes a window or door in the wrong place to remind them of their inextricability, of the thread that suspends suspense between them. It feels right, then, that some of the cast and crew are drawn from the mumblecore universe, since the mumblecore attention to diffuse domestic illbience works quite well for this obsession with the elastic zone between killer and victim. And that zone often recalls the risk management horror of the later Final Destination films - a great deal of the film's dark comedy stems from the way it collapses home invasion and property risk assessment, to the point where it’s the endless conundrums and confabulations of risk that are doing the invading. 

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A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still images which, when shown on a screen, creates the illusion of moving images due to phi phenomenon. This optical illusion causes us to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession.