Film audiences are familiar with the term "home invasion horror" due to its common use by film critics, reviewers, and studios promoting releases, not to mention the prevalence and popularity of the narratives themselves. Despite this, surprisingly little has been written about the sub-genre. There has been an explosion of home invasion films in the twenty-first century, with over 100 released in the 2010s alone, but this book represents the first major exploration into the sub-genre, establishing the elements crucial to the narratives, tracing the history of each variety, and analyzing both cinematic and societal influences responsible for an increase in releases during specific periods.

Home invasion narratives have been around nearly as long as cinema itself, first popularized by the silent era's "race-to-the-rescue" and classic Hollywood's "gangster raid" films, influenced by the slasher and stalker sub-genres, and evolving into a fully formed sub-genre following the success of major releases like The Strangers (2008) and The Purge (2013). This book includes a comprehensive list of home invasion films while also examining the reasons for their popularity and potential allegorical readings of the narratives. Breaking the subgenre up into subdivisions based on varieties of invaders, both commonalities and differences are found in the criminal, stalker, and psychopath home invasion films, in addition to the inverted and hybrid releases that revise established narratives.