Long before an age of lockdown, films from Rosemary’s Baby to The Shining and In the Shadow unveiled the home as the ultimate fear
• Lockdown watch: film-makers reveal what they’re watching in self-isolation
In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, that classic of locked-down cinema, the photographer LB Jefferies (played by James Stewart) gazes out at his doll’s house kingdom of Manhattan apartment windows, peering remotely into others’ lives. A leg in plaster has confined him to the building, and so he falls back on his professional instinct to watch. As weeks pass, he becomes convinced that the man opposite has committed murder, killing his invalid wife and preparing for a new life with his girlfriend. For Hitchcock’s voyeuristic hero, at least there’s the comfort that wickedness resides in other people’s apartments and not in his own. Likewise, in The Birds, a makeshift family shelters in place, cowering in an enclosed room, awaiting attack. For the director, there were memories in this of a claustrophobic night spent in Claridge’s hotel in
London during the blitz, stuck helplessly in his room, as death fell around him. Again, the danger’s beyond, a threat from elsewhere.
Yet a grimmer version of such locked-in movies exists, gothic visions where the sweet home sours. In these films, when you lock your door, turning the key on your uncertainty, you merely lock uncertainty in with you. Such films play out that archetypal moment from When a Stranger Calls, when Carol Kane learns that the killer’s phone calls are coming from inside the house. For us all, hesitantly emerging, for now, from seclusion, it reminds us how often cinema has hallucinated the home, reimagining our safe space as fraught with menace. In these films, being stuck in the house is to be caught in a trap.