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This paper analyses two Hollywood movies released in 2016: Hush, directed by Mike Flanagan, and Don’t Breathe, directed by Fede Alvarez. The year 2016 saw the release of several horror films and home-invasion movies that pointed to the growing xenophobia in American minds. These movies, along with the standard tropes of horror and fear, also feature xenophobia and home-invasion motifs, reflecting their outward manifestations of submerged fears across the political, cultural, and artistic spheres. While films like Wailing dealt explicitly with the topic, others like The Witch, The Purge: Election Year, and 10 Cloverfield Lane dealt with issues such as the global rise of nationalist politics and paranoia bred by religious frenzy, though more subtly. This paper attempts to establish how the two home-invasion movies selected for study – Hush and Don’t Breathe – are representative of the political and cultural temper of post 9/11 America, the simmering racial prejudices, xenophobia and cultural paranoia.
Ms. Maria Joseph. “Violating the Threshold: Home Invasion Cinema and Xenophobic Anxiety in the U. S.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 554-567. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.33.
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