Sicko mode
Reading Michael Seidlinger's "Anybody Home?" in the middle of a never-ending slasher marathon.
“The cults watch everything. The cults will show up to the premiere, buy it when it comes out on video, tell the world so you won’t have to. They’re all looking, wondering why one is any better than the rest.
I’ll tell you why so few rise to the top while the others sink and become just another crime statistic.”
Within the realm of fiction, home invasions are the ultimate “it's on you” crime. No
siege can be mounted on some old duplex: no masked intruders are waiting outside a
railroad apartment. The show can only start after the financial perimeters have been
established. And everybody feels suitably chilled whenever a home invasion happens
in real life – it could have been me, goes the reflex – but that comes from the basic fear
someone might have noticed you without you noticing them right back.
Slowly but surely, what might have started as a simple variation on a broad narrative
(stranger/s come to town) has become the sicko sub-genre above them all, because it
allows immense leeway in terms of acceptable horror. How much does it cost? You need
a house and like three people. How far can we push it? Feel free to kill the dog. Sexual
assault is a possibility, always, the implicit threat you can carry out or just hint at
before the option is yanked off the table, without anyone truly scraping up the
motivation to get mad at you. “Home invasion” replaced “slasher” as the story no one
puts on trial for perpetrating harmful stereotypes.
More. It requires zero introspection or character work. Someone's in the house. Let's go.
Protagonist? Barely registers. Moral dilemmas? Ehh, you had maybe three of those in
the whole pool (that would be the dude from The Collector, the girl from Don't Breathe,
and Fool from The People Under the Stairs, extra points due to Fool being a literal kid).
And it lends itself to near-instant exportability: we're past the point of decoding
social norms, back to “bunch of disposable idiots party in the woods”. Someone's in the
house. Run.
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The genre is joyfully difficult to elevate because it refuses to be elevated.
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It can be executed with restraint – what is The Strangers but unhappy couple deteriorates
over the weekend – it can lean into an audience's appetite for violence. According to its
makers, You're Next was written and directed to secure a spot in the Midnight
Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival, after a smaller movie from the same
team failed to make much of a splash in the horror festival circuit. (Creative process
goes how about we make a home invasion flick, we’re gonna have a ton of rich people
getting eviscerated, just bodied.)
You may be able to find a producer like that, you're bound to find an audience like
that: you can't talk your way to respectability like that, no matter how many meta-
narrative layers you’re dumping into the mix.
Michael J. Seidlinger's latest endeavor, Anybody Home? (Clash Books), is a horror
novel built around this state of affairs. Ostensibly, the novel is packaged as a how-to
guide, delivered from a veteran of the crime to a willing newcomer, faceless and
eager, here to learn every trick of the trade and, crucially, to gain the veteran's
approval. Go for it. The intimacy of a shared purpose binds two characters that never
meet on the page. The apprentice could be anyone; so could be the narrator, since he
got away with it. He will take a little time to reminisce about his main claim to fame
(heavy shades of Funny Games) before the original story kicks in.
It could happen to you – except, no. The victims have been chosen for one practical
reason: abundance. A giant house, three cars, spare rooms, clothes never worn, a
maintained lawn, a few lucky plot conveniences (there's a crawlspace). A strong
element of situational class hatred enters the picture and never leaves. The invaders
are well served by disguising themselves as delivery people, gardeners, repairmen,
safe in the knowledge no one will pay attention to any action they might perform,
provided it sounds boring and reasonable, far above the targets' existential pay grade.
This is the plan: isolate your victims, let them know no one's coming to the rescue,
humiliate them, turn them against each other, get them to participate in a number of
torture scenarios. Kill them, too, but it's almost an afterthought.
With that in mind, meet your new contestants. An architect with a history of
extramarital affairs, a medicated stay-at-home wife who doesn't even cook, a deeply
hatable male teenager, and a little girl whose single conceivable fault is being born
amongst this splendor.
Don't ask about the dog.
Yes, it's bigger than this. Of course it's bigger than this.
“It isn’t worth the effort trying to hack into an account, learning of passwords and
various security codes, when you’re already so close to the victim, considered a friend,
a valued name, someone they recognize, have been talking to for quite some time.”
The eventual perpetrators stalk the victims for quite some time as part of their master
plan: fabricated social media profiles (when not entire, semi-compelling backstories)
have been deployed to extract information from separate people in the family unit.
You're never alone, you're never safe: you should keep your guard up – so you don't.
You trust strangers to be who they say they are, out of depression or a perverse strain
of stubbornness, a determination not to care about whatever happens to you.
Anybody Home? shines every single time its calculating nature pops up to the surface.
Characters are denied names, stripped down to their roles (“victim 1”, “invader 2”).
More than a tool, the “mask” the narrator celebrates is the mask of commitment. As
the chief invader, “you have only one mandatory mask, and it’s your role as lead, your
role as the one that pulls the trigger, stabs first, without hesitation, and beyond
anything to do with violence, you wear the mask of the one that walks in first and
leaves last.”
The classic genre template demands you put yourself in the victim's place, but this
time you know it could never be you. (As if you have a walled house in the
countryside, come on.) This book twists and bends the power imbalance to its
considerable advantage: you're urged to discover or re-awaken a kind of reflective
malice about other people's possessions.
All through the story, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the performance element,
blurring the lines between the aggressors' need to remain in control and their desire
for this particular spree to capture the attention of “the cults” – that is, any audience
gravitating around violent crime scenes.
If you ever spent an afternoon in the company of habitual kill count playlist watchers,
if you ever paid good money for a collector's edition in the hope it would tie the
dining room together: you know what it feels like.
An untold ingredient in the history of the Scream franchise – its first installment
somewhat inspired by the 1990 burglary-rape-murder spree of a man nicknamed “the
Gainesville Ripper” – is the ridiculous amount of space and material wellness its
characters all appear to enjoy to the same degree and in the same manner – right
until it's too late. Door slam power cut. Kevin Williamson's spare original script does
pause to establish the first victim's surroundings when the killer initiates contact
with her, and it goes like this: “It's a nice house. Affluent”.
Two adjectives can take you much further than learning the character is “a friendly
face with innocent eyes”.
Because of its current status as the red-headed chain-smoking neighbor in a
sometimes fashionable, always profitable genre, a home invasion story brings a
detached thrill to the experience. Oh look at that poor girl thing making a mess of her
designer sweater as she tries to crawl out of the death trap, how about it. Oh nooo, she
cracked her iPhone. When popular escapist fare takes covert pleasure in destruction –
bullies must be punished by crashing their cars and their parties and stealing their girls
– and most stories ask you to feel bad for the victims under pressure, but still demand
a degree of removal, otherwise there would be no comfort in revisiting familiar
tropes, Anybody Home? comes at you with a nastier, edgier proposition: put yourself in
the picture and feel good about the ruin – as you stare at its cost.
The most surprising chord the narrator hits is when he plays up the potential
direness of a saturated media market against the murderers' desire to create
nonetheless – their own urge to produce trumping the anxious search for a surefire
hit. Complete with waves of emptiness settling in once the work has been finished and
the scene is left waiting for the authorities to investigate, additional material all ready
to be sent to interested parties.
Over the past couple of years Clash Books has been carving out a sizable niche by
publishing offbeat horror and winky meta-fiction that must still read smoothly, both
to be enjoyed as much as one would consume a sleek piece of entertainment. This
one is a fast jumpy read. It's not perfect. If its ultimate purpose is to stun you, there
could be a meta layer too many getting in the way. You are treated to TV screens
playing some of the action in real time, but maybe not; a minor character might have
indulged in a bit of true-crime-watching himself, or was it just a movie; and what
about the omnipresent “camera” the narrator and the lead acknowledge? In-universe,
it's a device set to blur the assailants' faces out as the events are being recorded. Not
so much a machine, then, but the all-seeing eye of a neutral spectator. A you.
Somewhere.
Welcome to Runaway, a project all about expectations, reality and the inevitable crash.
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