Disturbia (2007)
Disturbia is the 2007 thriller where a teenager under house arrest becomes convinced the quiet man across the street is a serial killer.
One hundred feet of world
Kale Brecht (Shia LaBeouf) is seventeen, and he is driving the car the day his father Daniel (Matt Craven) dies in a crash on the way home from a fishing trip. A year later he is a sullen ghost of himself, and when his Spanish teacher invokes his dead father in front of the class, Kale hits him. The judge is sympathetic but firm: three months of house arrest, an ankle monitor, and a proximity sensor with a hundred-foot perimeter. The officer in charge of the sentence is Officer Gutierrez (Jose Pablo Cantillo) — the teacher’s cousin — who treats the assignment as a license. Kale’s mother Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss) cancels his games and his music and cuts the television cord, trying to starve him out of his screens. It works in the worst way. Stripped of every other window, Kale picks up binoculars and starts watching the street.
What the street gives him is a cast: the Greenwood boys, three young neighbours who prank him mercilessly; Ashley Carlson (Sarah Roemer), the girl whose family has just moved in next door; and across the street, Robert Turner (David Morse), a solitary man who keeps odd hours. Late one night Turner comes home in a classic Ford Mustang with a dented fender — a car that matches one described in a news report about a serial killer at large. Kale’s best friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo) becomes his man on the ground, Ashley joins the watch, and surveillance becomes the summer: the guest seen apparently fleeing inside Turner’s house who later drives away unharmed, the evidence that keeps almost adding up, the night Ashley tails Turner to a supermarket and he intercepts her in the parking lot to warn her off. Then Ronnie breaks into Turner’s garage to retrieve a lost phone, gets trapped inside, and Kale blows his perimeter trying to rescue him. The police search the garage and find the body Kale has been promising them: a bag containing a roadkill deer. His credibility — with the police, with his mother — is gone.
How it ends
Ronnie got out of the garage with his camera. Zooming into a single frame of the footage, Kale sees what appears to be a woman’s corpse through a heating vent inside Turner’s house, and the joke becomes a crime scene. Julie goes across the street to persuade Turner not to press charges over the break-in; Turner incapacitates her and binds her in his own house, then comes for Kale — knocking Ronnie out with a bat, binding and gagging Kale, and laying out the frame he has built: Kale will be found to have murdered Ronnie and his mother, and then himself. Ashley’s arrival breaks the script long enough for Kale to club Turner and escape with her through a bedroom window into her pool, tripping the monitor one more time. Kale goes back into Turner’s house with garden shears to find his mother, and the house gives up its secrets in layers: the corpses of earlier victims, and in the cellar a floor that gives way into a pool of water filled with the dead. Julie is down there, bound and gagged, alive. Turner kills Officer Gutierrez when the monitor alert brings him to the house, slashes Kale and pins him — and Julie, from the floor, drives a screwdriver into Turner’s leg. Kale impales him with the shears. The ankle monitor comes off early, for good behavior, and the film closes with Kale turning his new surveillance skills on the Greenwood boys.
Martha Stewart started it
The premise began with a radio programme. Christopher Landon has said that hearing an NPR discussion of Martha Stewart’s house arrest set him thinking about his own confinement: being “already sort of being a voyeur, I figured that I would just be spying on my neighbors all the time.” The dead father at the story’s centre reflected Landon’s own life. Landon wrote the script on spec; it sold to the Montecito Picture Company, which brought it to DreamWorks, and Carl Ellsworth joined him on the screenplay. Executive producer Steven Spielberg, impressed by LaBeouf in Holes, arranged his place on the casting shortlist; director D. J. Caruso auditioned more than a hundred young actors over five weeks before settling on him. Before filming, Caruso and LaBeouf sat down with the ancestors — Rear Window, Straw Dogs, The Conversation, Say Anything… — and LaBeouf prepared by talking to people who had actually served house arrest and wearing the bracelet himself. David Morse kept the method going from the other side of the street: he did not speak to LaBeouf or the other young actors off camera until the shoot wrapped. Filming ran from January 6 – April 29, 2006 in Whittier and Pasadena, California — the houses of Kale and Turner, supposedly facing each other across one street, stood in two different cities. During the shoot LaBeouf gained twenty-five pounds of muscle, simultaneously preparing for the two films that would make that summer his: Disturbia opened in April 2007, Transformers in July.
The Rear Window lawsuit
The film was billed, carefully, as “partially inspired by” Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) — no credit to Hitchcock, his screenwriter, or Cornell Woolrich appears on it — and the comparison followed it into court. Woolrich’s 1942 short story “It Had to Be Murder,” the source of Hitchcock’s film, had already produced one landmark: in Stewart v. Abend (1990), the US Supreme Court held that continued exploitation of the Hitchcock film infringed the rights held by literary agent Sheldon Abend, who had acquired the renewal rights from Woolrich’s executor. In September 2008 the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust sued Spielberg, DreamWorks, Paramount, Viacom and others, alleging Disturbia infringed the story and that the studio had never taken a licence. Much of the coverage framed the case as a fight over the Hitchcock film; the record is narrower and more interesting. Claims premised on similarity to the film were dismissed by agreement in May 2009, leaving only the short story at issue — and the defendants conceded access and actual copying, so the whole case turned on similarity. On September 21, 2010, Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the Southern District of New York ruled for the defendants in Abend v. Spielberg: the two works are similar “only at a high level of generality and abstraction,” their similarities deriving “entirely from unprotectible elements,” with a total look and feel “so distinct that no reasonable trier of fact could find the works substantially similar.” The court noted how much of Disturbia — the dead father, the house arrest, the subplots — has no counterpart in Woolrich’s story at all. A follow-on contract suit was filed in California that October; its outcome is not in the public record this page could verify, and no appeal ruling on the copyright claims exists — reports of one are mistaken. After the federal dismissal, the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed a California state-court breach-of-contract suit against Universal Studios and the Hitchcock Estate on October 28, 2010, arguing that earlier agreements barred the use of ideas from Woolrich’s story and Rear Window whether or not those ideas were copyright-protected.
The money
The production budget is generally reported at $20 million; one contemporary trade column put it at $23 million, and this page prints the consensus with the outlier noted rather than pretending the record is cleaner than it is. The grosses are firmer at the top and fuzzier at the bottom. Disturbia opened at number one on the weekend of April 13, 2007 — a Friday the 13th — with $22,224,982 from 2,925 theatres (the $23 million figure sometimes quoted for the weekend was the Sunday estimate, not the final count), and it stayed at number one for three consecutive weekends before Spider-Man 3 knocked it to second in its fourth. The final totals differ slightly by database: Box Office Mojo records $80,209,692 domestic and $118,114,220 worldwide, while The Numbers records $80,818,974 and $118,537,627. Either way, the film returned roughly six times its budget and made its star — the first half of the LaBeouf summer of 2007.
The reviews
The notices were warmer than the premise’s reputation suggests. Justin Chang found it a “squirmingly fun suspenser that brings Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ into the era of vidcams and cell phones.” Richard Roeper, awarding two thumbs up alongside A. O. Scott — who was sitting in for Roger Ebert, whose famous-sounding praise of this film is actually Roeper’s — called it “a cool little thriller with big scares and fine performances.” Owen Gleiberman reached for the comparison and the compliment in one motion: “If it’s possible to be a rip-off with wit, Disturbia qualifies.” David Denby, at the other pole, called it “a travesty,” and Peter Bradshaw found the action degenerating “into obvious implausibility and silliness.” The awards were teen-shaped and genuine: at the 2007 Teen Choice Awards the film won Choice Movie: Horror/Thriller, and LaBeouf won both Choice Movie Actor in the category and Choice Breakout Male; Geoff Zanelli’s score took a Top Box Office Films honour at the 2008 ASCAP awards. The rating has its own footnote: the MPAA first assigned an R for “violence and terror,” and the PG-13 — “sequences of terror and violence, and some sensuality” — was won on appeal.
For the shadow this film watches from — and the courtyard it can never quite escape — see our Alfred Hitchcock page. Think Horror’s review of Disturbia is on its way through the crew’s check line now.
Legacy and influence
Disturbia was a sleeper hit: three straight weeks at number one in North America, and $118.1 million worldwide against a $20 million budget, carried by word of mouth more than marketing. It made LaBeouf a leading man — he took home the Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie: Breakout Male the same year — and set the template for the modern teen Rear Window, Hitchcock’s premise rebuilt for a younger audience, a lineage later films like The Woman in the Window would follow. The success reteamed the principals almost immediately: Caruso and LaBeouf made Eagle Eye (2008) next, again with Spielberg executive producing.
Trivia
- The idea started with Martha Stewart: writer Christopher Landon heard an NPR piece about her house arrest and wondered what a watcher would see from inside it. Kale is a teenager grieving his father because Landon lost his own father at sixteen.
- Spielberg put LaBeouf on the casting shortlist after Holes, but Caruso still auditioned more than a hundred young men over five weeks before choosing him.
- The pre-shoot viewing list Caruso and LaBeouf worked through: Rear Window, Straw Dogs, The Conversation — and the 1989 teen romance Say Anything… LaBeouf also spoke with people who had been on house arrest and locked himself in a room wearing the ankle bracelet.
- David Morse stayed in character by silence: he did not speak to LaBeouf or the other young actors during the shoot. When filming finished, he was very friendly.
- Kale’s house and Turner’s house, supposedly across the street from each other, were actually shot in two different cities — Whittier and Pasadena, California.
