A glimpse into the world of cinematic horror and sci-fi.
Siege
Author: Serena Debegnach
The goal of this Tag is to unite a collection of films sharing the theme of a siege, an extended surround-and-attack maneuver carried out by a tenacious antagonist against a group of characters - often few in number - determined to wage a fierce resistance. In these situations, the thriller component is intensified by the overwhelming nature that tends to characterize the enemy du jour, due to either the large number of attackers or to their innate peril (consider the case of "Cujo", a film based on the Stephen King novel of the same name in which a single Saint Bernard infected with rabies executes the furious siege).
Among the ultimate goals of the attackers, the most common are:
- conquering "territory" so that it can be plundered or occupied. In that regard, Invasions in a sci-fi context are frequently a prelude to siege dynamics.
- capturing and/or killing those under siege for motives possibly linked to: primordial drives/instincts (basic predatory activity is a classic in the Killer Animals subgenre), revenge ("Assault on Precinct 13", 1976), hatred (homophobia in the case of "Self Defense", 1983), a desire to silence inconvenient witnesses, etc.
The centripetal structure typical of such contexts has been superbly exploited in genre cinema, including various slasher films that fall into the "Home Invasion" category, as well as that milestone of the Seventh Art that is George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968).
Examples
- Cinema/Television: "Straw Dogs" (Sam Peckinpah, 1971), "Aliens" (James Cameron, 1986), "Attack the Block" (Joe Cornish, 2011).
- Literature (fiction): "The House on the Borderland" (William Hope Hodgson, 1908), "I Am Legend" (Richard Matheson, 1954), "The Siege of Trencher's Farm" (Gordon M. Williams, 1969).
The table below includes only the films we’ve already reviewed, filtered by the current Tag. We know many important titles are still missing: they’ll come in time. Some features are reserved for our Patreon supporters.
| Title | Directors | Year | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dawn of the Dead | Zack Snyder | 2004 | 4 |
| Demons | Lamberto Bava | 1985 | 5 |
| Fiend Without a Face | Arthur Crabtree | 1958 | 7 |
| Frogs | George McCowan | 1972 | 3 |
| Island of Terror | Terence Fisher | 1966 | 6 |
| Krull | Peter Yates | 1983 | 4 |
| Mutant | John 'Bud' Cardos | 1984 | 5 |
| Night of the Living Dead | Tom Savini | 1990 | 5.5 |
| The Blob | Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. | 1958 | 4.5 |
| The Blob | Chuck Russell | 1988 | 6.5 |
| The Day of the Triffids | Freddie Francis, Steve Sekely | 1962 | 4.5 |
| The Fog | John Carpenter | 1980 | 7 |
| The Green Slime | Katsuhiko Taguchi, Kinji Fukasaku | 1968 | 5 |
| Tombs of the Blind Dead | Amando de Ossorio | 1972 | 5 |