Horror Madness: Panic Room vs Don't Breathe

In this edition of Horror Madness two films examine what the wealthy find truly valuable when the chips are down.

In one corner stands David Fincher’s characteristically cold and precise Panic Room:

And in the other we see Fede Alvarez’s deceptively chaotic, balletic Don’t Breathe:

See the introduction and full slate here http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.

Who gets to have children? It’s a question I ask myself a lot these days. I have them, that’s already settled, but it seems like I’m constantly surrounded by natalism discourse, and the pro and anti side are each convinced of the other’s naivety, selfishness, and short-sightedness. How can you bring children into a world as terrible as this one, says one person. How can we ever make the world what we want it to be without people to do it, says another.

I myself am natalist-neutral. Kids are great. Taking care of them is really hard. I think most people believe both of these statements. Most people who want to reproduce do so, that number hasn’t really budged - we’re just having fewer of them. That has a lot to do with money, but not entirely. Plenty of millionaires stop at one or two. But the question, I think, is still not “who wants to have kids” but “who gets to.” Children, like so many other things we need to survive, are sometimes something only those with money can afford to get, and more importantly, keep.

Panic Room and Don’t Breathe are very different films - it might be a stretch even placing the first in the horror category at all. But ultimately, just as they are both home invasion films they are both about the lengths people will go to to get and keep children. Money is the thieves object in both films, but money is a mcguffin. The heroine in Panic Room only wants security for her daughter; the unnervingly superhuman and even more unnervingly sympathetic antagonist of Don’t Breathe has been driven mad by the loss of his daughter, and tries to force first one captive then another to provide a replacement.

Once again we run into horror’s woman problem. It is not incidental that these are daughters, not merely “children.” Daughters are not only loved human beings in these stories but are carriers of meaning: daughters are a future, are future child carriers themselves. They are people and property to be hoarded. It’s no wonder they hold a special place in home-invasion films, which are always concerned with the hoarding and the theft of property.

What sets Don’t Breathe apart from many films in this genre is how squarely it looks that uneasy topic in the eye. There’s no avoidance in this film. There’s a physicality that is as frightening as anything else about it; you hear the crack of every breaking bone, hear the heaving of every anxious breath. The antagonist’s house is maze-like but perceptible; the filmmakers built a working model of the house when they wrote the script, and they are always aware of which characters are where. The antagonist’s disability is a real hindrance, but not an insurmountable one. It’s visceral. When you watch the film, it sometimes feels like Alvarez is holding your face forward, holding your eyes open, and forcing you to look at what he wants you to see. “Here,” he says, “this is what inequality leads to. This is what urban blight looks like. This is what happens when great wealth exists alongside terrible poverty. This is the terrible thing someone can do out of the desperation of grief. Don’t look away.” Not for nothing was the film shot and set in Detroit; so much of the terror comes from the fact that the house is the only inhabited one in a sea of dilapidation. In a dying city, no one can hear you scream.

Wealth, and the seeming coldness and emptiness of wealth, are just as material in Panic Room. All of Fincher’s films are cold, but this one especially and appropriately so. Instead of wealth leading to abundance, to an opening up of the world - to more experience, more pleasure, more freedom - wealth is signified by a closing and narrowing. The Manhattan townhouse where the film takes place is frigidly minimalist, neither ostentatious nor comfortable. The hidden treasure sought by the thieves isn’t exciting: they’re after simple but valuable bonds, kept in a safe. Wealth, here, is limiting and stultifying. It’s a trap: it makes you a target and limits your horizons. Everyone still wants it though. The lesson, in Panic Room, is that other things matter more.

Which makes it, on the whole, a less interesting film than Don’t Breathe, even as its craftsmanship is surely more expert. Rich people learning what’s really important in life – it’s a story we’ve all heard before. We’ve all read or seen A Christmas Carol. The protagonist in Don’t Breathe is the one who really needs to learn that money isn’t everything: because money really would solve a lot of her problems, and does, but she’s most grateful to escape with her life. The antagonist already knows it - his madness is triggered when a wealthy family tries to buy him off after they kill his only child. He couldn’t care less about the money; he isn’t spending it, and doesn’t plan to. There’s a desperately sad tragedy at work in his story, as he sits on a pile of wealth in a house falling apart, and wanting nothing that that wealth could give him.

These are both films with a surprising amount to say, even in the horror sub-genre that often has the most to say. But the messy, terrifying, and poignant Don’t Breathe takes the crown.