Victims are murdered with a trash compactor, a bill spike, a knife from the produce department, an industrial grade meat cutter. The workplace itself is turned into a weapon against the working class by the bourgeois. The capitalist/consumerist threat comes from within the store, not part of the tangible scary city imagined at night. On top of that, the initial character we’re led to believe is the titular intruder actually winds up becoming, at least partly, a saviour. Even the locked doors experience a moment of subversion when they’re sealed tight and our protagonist can’t manage to open them to escape the real threat, which was inside with her all along. At work, we expect a certain degree of safety, such as the locked doors of a store meant to keep danger from the exterior breaching the interior. A brief, ironic, and macabre moment wedged between scenes of a killer using knives to dispatch his victims.Īside from the idea of workplace safety is a general sense of safety and comfort. Maybe the funniest part of the movie occurs when the camera lingers on a sign reading SAFETY FIRST – KNIVES ARE SHARP, PLEASE BE CAREFUL. Take the idea of workplace safety- from the late ’80s onward, this has become more a concern with every passing year for businesses, particularly small ones who don’t have the same insurance benefits for their employees as bigger ones. Spiegel impressively subverts notions of safety and comfort. Intruder puts legitimate economic fate into slasher horror form, then uses it to tear apart unsuspecting victims. In essence, the city’s reliance on a capitalist system have forced small business owners towards drastic measures, as is the case in real life. The store and its employees are left in the wake of big box stores and franchises. Here, the ruins of capitalism- a small business being forced to sell to the city instead of awaiting a slow, torturous economic death. Spiegel’s use of a familiar slasher trope – the unseen killer – takes on new meaning when combined with the rest of the movie’s themes.Ī local grocery store itself is a symbol. As the intruder gets closer to the people in the store, the shots move to various areas: the cooler, behind the boss’s blinds, around corners, through grates. The first of these shots is from inside the rotary dial of a phone, after the store staff decide they have to call the cops about a potentially violent intruder. Spiegel gives the camera a sense of being the Panopticon, a roaming surveillance eye never allowing workers any privacy. Either the boss is always watching the proletariat, or, particularly nowadays, the cameras are watching. The owners of the modes of production need to be sure their employees are working all the time. Part of capitalism, explicitly or implicitly, is a surveillance state. ![]() We get all this thematic goodness combined with a heap of gruesome gore and expert cheese to boot! It also confuses us as to where the biggest modern threats are coming from – convincing us the only dangers are those hiding in the dark – and numbing us to other danger like the bourgeois bosses unconcerned with the individual and focused solely on profits, among other things. What message, exactly? Capitalism kills us all, physically and mentally. Not only is it an interesting place for a slasher, by virtue of location the plot lends itself to hammering home a message. Spiegel uses setting to his advantage, placing the screenplay’s action in a local grocery store about to close up shop for good. Funny, seeing the sub-genre has been used by plenty of studios for a quick buck. Intruder‘s effective due to the fact it’s one of the slasher sub-genre’s best offerings from the 1980s leaning towards capitalist critique. Any movie gets better when underlying themes help it transcend subject matter. Personally, I prefer if they’re either tongue in cheek or relentlessly brutal- Scott Spiegel does a fantastic job hovering on both ends of that spectrum. Starring Elizabeth Cox, Renee Estevez, Danny Hicks, David Byrnes, Sam Raimi, Eugene Robert Glazer, Billy Marti, Burr Steers, Craig Stark, Ted Raimi, Emil Sitka, Bruce Campbell, & Lawrence Bender.Īlways one to read deeply into a movie, Father Gore’s love of Intruder runs deep in and of itself.
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