10 Horror Movie Background Scares That Will Scar You For Life

Home invasion horror is such an effective genre because it brings violence into a deeply familiar and disarming setting, where we feel safest. For reasons better left to the psychologists, we love to experience the thrill of being so close to danger, so on the edge of fear, that we feel it could really happen to us.

While it may not have the creative flair of Funny Games (2007), or the audience-pleasing comeuppance of You're Next (2011), Bryan Bertino's The Strangers (2008) is one of modern cinema's most effective home invasion films. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman star as Kristen and James, a young couple in the midst of relationship troubles who have come to stay at James' childhood summer home following a friend's wedding. Some strangers appear at the door in the early hours of the morning, and soon they are inside the house playing murderous games.

Before they know anything is wrong, however, Kristen is alone in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and a hooded figure appears from the shadows of the hallway. He watches her for a whole 40 seconds before she looks round, but by then the man has gone.

So chillingly effective was the staging of this scene, it was used as one of the central images of the film's marketing campaign, appearing on the posters alongside a typeface that was subsequently popularised by the Twilight series.