Disturbia (Caruso, 2007) is a thriller film that follows Kale Brecht, a teenager who has been put under house arrest after assaulting his Spanish teacher. In isolation and looking for entertainment, he finds himself acting as a voyeur, watching his neighbours, and discovering what lies behind close doors. However, life in suburbia is not what it seems, as he is quick to suspect his back-door neighbour is a serial killer from Texas, therefore making it his mission to discover the truth, consequently putting his and his loved one’s lives in great danger.

It is important to mention how the thriller genre and the hard-boiled detective formula are linked to each other and how the former took the latter’s forming structure and traits, and applied them onto power, suspense and conspiracy narratives in several other genres that fall under its umbrella, therefore being conceptualised as a metagenre (Rubin, 1999, p.4).

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Disturbia, is a clear example of the thriller’s conceptualisation, as it falls under different genres such as teen films, crime dramas or suspense, which are coloured by the thriller’s spectrum. Furthermore, its hard-boiled detective formula heritage is clearly visible throughout, as Ogdon (1992, p.71) has described: the full perspective of the film comes from a heterosexual white man (Kale), who is a loner – in this case, isolated due to home arrest – and, given the circumstances, is forced to take over the basic functions of exposure, protection, judgement, and execution, as Cawelti argues (1977 p.152). Nonetheless, although Disturbia links to the hard-boiled detective story, it differs from Ogdon’s argument about the hard-boiled detective being based in an urban centre (1992, p.71) and, instead, is based in a seemingly safe, peaceful and idyllic American neighbourhood, a place where, at a first glance, nothing too bad could ever happen. Disturbia then, takes as its central stage a world that is perceived as fundamentally not thrilling as Rubin discusses (1999, p.15); a world where everyone is thought to be safe, therefore adhering to the concept of the thriller.

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Palmer (1978, p.86) argues that a conspiracy that springs up from nowhere is the specificity of the thriller. Thus, the suburban setting in Disturbia being disrupted is idyllic for one of the cultural concerns of the genre to arise: paranoia. This paranoia can echo with the one from the spectator, as thrillers carry a heavy freight of contemporary anxiety (Dickstein,1981, p.49) and can reflect the fears a society has in real life in a specific moment in history. In Disturbia, we find that Kale’s neighbour, Mr. Turner, is indeed a serial killer, but he is not killing only to provide a corpse, he is killing for a reason, following the hard-boiled formula (Chandler.1988, p.14) and his victims are, more specifically, women.

We could argue that Disturbia reflects the femicides situation that was taking place in the United States in the early 2000s, which therefore reflected society’s fears of disruption to the “safe” American lifestyle. However, although murdering is clearly illegal, Palmer argues that in the thriller this is not enough, for the crimes committed must be disgustingly wrong and not just criminal in the technical sense (1978, p.16). Therefore, to discuss how the crime in Disturbia is disgustingly wrong, we must analyse the roles that morality, disgust and transgression play in the structural resolution of the film.

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While Kale can be perceived as a troubled teenager surrounded by white privilege (e.g. assaulting his Spanish teacher, yet being able to avoid prison and, instead, being put under home arrest, where he can still play with his X-Box and enjoy garbage food) he is, nonetheless, the detective hero of the film. Morality, however, must be broken for him to realise that Mr. Turner is the one who could be a femicide. Implementing surveillance on his neighbours can be seen as being morally wrong, especially when the main purpose of this surveillance with the use of binoculars is to get a better look at his new next-door neighbour, Ashley, who often gets undressed in front of her window and sunbathes in her garden. It is this action which takes him to notice Turner’s blue 1960s Ford Mustang and its dented left side, which turns him into Kale’s main suspect, as the car matches the description of the vehicle that an unidentified murderer had been driving, as described in the news.

Nonetheless, following the cultural concern of paranoia that overtakes the film, Disturbia is hesitant to provide a confirmed suspect from the very start of the film. Contrary to the hard-boiled detective formula, where criminals are identified early in the story, Disturbia creates an atmosphere of mystery, therefore opaquing the hero’s world and outmanoeuvring him (Palmer, p.58), as it makes Kale – and the audience – question their own ideas regarding the murderer’s identity.

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Disturbia can be argued to be a hard-boiled thriller, taking place in a world of deception, where motives are unfathomable and appearances treacherous (Dickstein, p.52). Officer Gutierrez, the Spanish teacher’s cousin, serves as the only person in a position of power who could help Kale solve the mystery, but also as a “villain”, since he could have personal reasons to keep a close eye on him, thus complicating Kale’s quest for finding the truth about his neighbour. Gutierrez is always ready to arrest Kale whenever he is innocent or about to discover the truth, or late to the scene whenever Kale happens to be in great danger. Therefore, he complies with a trait from the hard-boiled ideology, where the immigrant character supposes some sort of threat for the main character, as Dashiell Hammet has argued (Ogdon, p.76).

However, regardless of being unable to act and take physical action, Kale is still a free agent as he can exercise his power to influence others (Goodland, 2003, cited in Dey 2015, p.882), being his friends Ronnie and Ashley the ones who will break into Turner’s house or spy on him to find out whether he is the killer- in a very similar dynamic to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1955) – with the goal of stopping him and delivering a sense of justice and safety back to the neighbourhood. Therefore, Disturbia is a film interested in justice or the absence of it, as well as in the good and bad morality that exists today, as Patricia Highsmith has argued suspense stories – which are interchangeable with thrillers – should be (Derry, 1988, p.19).

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The crime and horror in Disturbia, create a wild anticipation, which Hantke described as “the one that sustains an intangible sense of dread from disruption of natural law” (2010, p.61). Here, the narrative tells the audience that female lives are being violently terminated, a scenario that simply does not relate and feels contrary to the peaceful suburbia, thus bringing in the transgression of the film. The reason why this works and causes engagement in the audience, is possibly because, as Beverly Gage maintains, Americans tend to think of violence as something outside of the American experience (cited in Bryant, 2010, p.114-119).

An important aspect of the hard-boiled genre is that victims are usually non-white, immigrants or women (Ogdon, p.76) and, although Ashley can be seen less as Kale’s love interest and more as a linchpin of the film, as she navigates – in one scene – in places where he can’t go (Masten, 2008, p.29), the narrative simply reproduces a cliché of crime fiction where women are offered the key identity of being “the body”, whether for the male’s voyeuristic pleasure or as victims. Furthermore, Disturbia, being heavily influenced by the detective formula, reserves the action until the very last minutes, contrary to thrillers, where the main attraction is the persecution and action scenes (Palmer, p.93). It is until then, that Kale’s paranoia fades away and the danger is confirmed as the audience is presented with the disgusting truth behind Kale’s neighbour. Turner’s victims were not only killed, but they were also preserved to delay their decomposition, before having their bodies twisted and jammed into his house walls.

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Having a femicide with a collection of dead women’s bodies between his house walls does not affiliate with the code of conduct expected in the relatively safe and predominantly white suburbs. Therefore, it raises an awareness in the audience, which, although trapped in Kale’s nightmare, faces an anxiety coming from their own fears – in this case, of living in a dangerous society, as Dickstein suggests occurs when watching thrillers as well as horror films (1981, p.68). Also, the violence in Disturbia may not be too far away from the real-life context.

As of 2008, there were 2.6 homicides per 100,000 in women aged 18-24 in the United States, while the numbers nearly doubled for black females (Cooper & Smith, 2011, p.14). Two out of five female murder victims were killed by intimate partners and, although homicides committed by a spouse were more common until 1980, these decreased in the following decades, leading the proportion of homicides committed by a boyfriend or girlfriend to increase 45.6% by 2008 (Cooper & Smith, p. 19), just one year after the release of the film. Considering that two out of every five female murder victims were killed by an intimate partner by 2008, it can be argued that the plot in Disturbia was accurate to the social context that was occurring at the time in the United States, choosing a murderer who would commit passional crimes, as Mr Turner’s victims were either dates or call girls that he would pick up on the street.

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However, there is something more transgressive in Disturbia that is not entirely explored, but rather hinted at. While Mr. Turner’s character is not fully dissected in the film, there is a manoeuvre in the narrative that suggests he also does cross-dressing with his victim’s clothes and hair. In a scene, Kale thinks Turner has killed his red-headed date, however, moments later he witnesses a red-headed figure walking out of the house, therefore thinking he was wrong, since the woman was not killed as he thought. Nevertheless, in the final moments of the film, Kale discovers Turner’s room of torture where he keeps his victim’s clothes and personal items, right before noticing the red-head’s wig. “She never left”, Kale says to himself, implying that it was Turner the one who came out of the house that night cross-dressed as his victim, wearing her clothes and wig.

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Cross-dressing is never openly addressed in Disturbia, and Turner is never fully seen dressed as a female – opposite to other serial killers and “monsters” of the thriller and horror slasher film, such as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), or Norman Bates in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), where killers’ masculinities are severely qualified, as they range from being virginal or sexually inherent to the transvestite or transsexual (Clover, 1987, p.25). Nevertheless, Turner does fulfil the notion of being a killer who is propelled by a psychosexual fury, which Clover argues to be a trait of the serial killer. Therefore, out of the three categories of motives to kill that Palmer has commented on for the thriller (1978, p.16), it seems clear to indicate that Turner’s motives are fuelled by the pursuit of having power over women.

Overall, morality in Disturbia must be broken to find the immoral as well as his transgressive existence in the suburbs and, by doing so, the audience is unsettled with the unveiling of his disgusting practices. Having a femicide in a thriller would not be disturbing enough, however, having the white male as recipient of this evil, jamming and preserving female bodies, in times when passional homicides were on the rise in the United States, could make audiences engage with the plot by its own disgusting nature. Furthermore, although scarcely hinted at, the reproduction of the cross dresser serial killer character, however distant from the reality that cross dressers and transsexuals live, is an idea that could have been majorly transgressive to think of existing in the predominantly white suburbs of America in 2007.

Going back and forth with traits from the hard-boiled detective and the thriller, Disturbia reinforces the female identity as that of being the murdered body, while the immigrant character, Officer Gutierrez, although once representing threat towards Kale, is finally murdered by Turner. Longhurst (2012, p.68) argues that detective novels provide reassurance “by having the mystery dissipated, the evil punished, and the order restored”, which align with the cinematographic ending in Disturbia where, being a positive thriller as well, Kale’s world becomes secure again, gets the girl, and enjoys a glamorous suburban ending, thus exacerbating the phallic egocentrism of the film (Derry, p.29).

The disgustingly wrong crimes in Disturbia can be argued to embody the audience’s biggest fears, reminding them that the world they once perceived as relatively safe, could, in reality, be far from it behind closed doors. In the end, whether in literature or cinema, coloured by the hard-boiled ideology or the thriller, the whole purpose of American detective fiction is to bloody its audience with reality (Ogdon, p.74).

Bibliography

Bryant, S (2010) Thrillers, Detective Stories and Bloody Narratives. Reviews in American History, 38(1), pp.114-119.

Caruso, D.J. (Dir) 2007 Disturbia

Cawelti, J (1977) Adventure, Mystery, and Romance Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chandler, R (1988) The Simple Art of Murder. 1950. New York: Vintage.

Clover, C.J (1987) Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film. In: Representations, 20, pp. 187-228.

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Cooper, A. and Smith, E (2011) Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 [online] Available at: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf [Accessed: 13th March 2021]

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Demme, J. (Dir) 1991 The Silence of the Lambs

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Dey, A (2015) Power and Narrative Pleasure in Twentieth Century Detective Fiction: Contesting the Authority in The Day of the Jackal and Angels and Demons. Journal of Popular Culture, 48(5), pp. 878-897.

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Dickstein, M (1981) Beyond good and evil: the morality of thrillers. American Film, 6(9), pp. 49-69.

Hantke, S (2010) American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

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Hitchcock, A. (Dir) 1960 Psycho

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Longhurst, D (2012) Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure, Volume 9. London: Routledge.

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Masten, K (2008) Cherchez la Femme: A Good Woman’s Place in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction. Clues, 36(2), pp.29-39.

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Ogdon, B (1992) Hard-boiled ideology. Critical Quarterly, 34(1), pp.71-87.

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Palmer, J (1978) Thrillers: genesis and structure of a popular genre. London: Edward Arnold.

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Rubin, M (1999) Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Originally written in 2021 for one of my last uni assignments, which gave me -alongside another research in publishing media- the Nickianne Moody Prize upon graduation