A Married Couple, Anna and Georg, their son Georgie and their dog

Corolfi arrive in their holiday home beside a beautiful lake in Austria. Soon enough,

they receive some visitors, two men dressed in white, who politely ask to borrow some

eggs. Initially, these two men seem harmless if a little awkward, but soon Anna and her husband

realise that they're caught in the middle of a deadly game and that these two men have no

intention of leaving. Michael Hanukkah's controversial film, Funny Games, was made to explore and

examine our obsession with violence and horror on screen. The film uses confrontational techniques

such as characters breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing us, its audience,

questioning why we are enjoying watching this. The result is a brutal and uncomfortable watch,

a film which led to over a third of its audience walking out during its premiere in Cannes,

but Hanukkah felt that the themes were so important he returned to this story 10 years later

to make a shot for shot American remake in the English language. Whether it was Hanukkah,

Hanukkah's intention or not, Funny Games is now considered one of the quintessential textbook

Home Invasion movies, one that arguably designed the blueprint for the bleak,

nihilistic and unrelenting tone that we now all come to associate with the modern

Home Invasion film. Join me as we continue exploring the evolution of Home Invasion,

and we dive into the bleak, confrontational world of Michael Hanukkah's Funny Games.

Welcome back to the Evolution of Horror. My name is Mike Munter, as ever I am your host.

In this podcast, we explore and dissect the history and the evolution of the horror genre

one subgenre at a time. We are currently in the middle of our ninth season exploring the

evolution of Home Invasion, and this is part 20. As the intro suggested, we are going to be

talking about that controversial Michael Hanukkah classic Funny Games from 1997.

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