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Disturbia
Theatrical release poster
Directed byD. J. Caruso
Screenplay byChristopher LandonCarl Ellsworth
Story byChristopher Landon
Produced byJoe MedjuckE. Bernett WalshJackie Marcus
StarringShia LaBeoufDavid MorseSarah RoemerCarrie-Anne Moss
CinematographyRogier Stoffers
Edited byJim Page
Music byGeoff Zanelli
Production
companies		DreamWorks PicturesCold Spring Pictures[1]The Montecito Picture Company
Distributed byParamount Pictures
Release datesApril 4, 2007 (Hollywood)April 13, 2007 (United States)
Running time105 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$20 million[2]
Box office$118.1 million[2]

Disturbia is a 2007 American psychological thriller film directed by D. J. Caruso and written by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth. It stars Shia LaBeouf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer and Carrie-Anne Moss. Partially inspired by Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window,[3] it is about a 17-year-old named Kale Brecht, who is placed on house arrest for assaulting his school teacher and who spies on his neighbors, believing one of them is a serial killer.

Disturbia was released on April 13, 2007. It grossed $118.1 million against a budget of $20 million and received generally positive reviews from critics.

Plot

After his father dies in a car accident, 17-year-old Kale Brecht becomes a troubled outcast. During Spanish class, Señor Gutierrez reprimands Kale for poor performance and mentions his recently deceased father, which leads to Kale attacking him. Gutierrez sues Kale for the assault, and a sympathetic judge sentences Kale to three months house arrest, with an ankle monitor and a proximity sensor.

On Kale’s first day of house arrest, Detective Parker explains the purpose of the monitor and how it functions. The officer overseeing him is revealed to be Señor Gutierrez’s cousin. Kale watches television and plays video games until his frustrated mother Julie cancels his Xbox Live subscription and cuts his television’s cord. Bored, Kale watches his neighborhood with binoculars, including his attractive new neighbor Ashley Carlson, and Robert Turner, a solitary man. He accidentally trips his proximity sensor after chasing pranking children. A police car quickly arrives, and Kale is handcuffed by Officer Gutierrez. Afterward, Kale sets up a line marking the edge of the allowed zone, and is careful not to step outside it.

One night, Kale becomes suspicious of Turner after he returns home in a 1960s Ford Mustang with a dented fender, which matches the description of a car given on a news report of a serial killer at large. Kale befriends Ashley and they begin to spy on Turner with Kale’s best friend Ronnie. Turner arrives home with a woman, who they later see running frantically from him, but later appears to drive away.

Kale becomes jealous when Ashley throws a party and flirts with popular people from school, prompting him to blast non-party-related music to disrupt her party. Ashley breaks into the house to turn it off, and Kale reveals he has been observing her since she moved in and is romantically interested, so they kiss.

The following day, Kale has Ashley follow Turner to the supermarket so that Ronnie can obtain Turner’s garage controller’s code. She agrees, but Turner catches her in the parking lot and intimidates her. Shaken, Ashley stops helping in the investigation. Ronnie then realizes he left his phone in Turner’s car and breaks into his garage, with Kale watching at a distance. When Ronnie gets trapped when the garage door closes, Kale tries to rescue him, but alerts the police by tripping the ankle monitor. They arrive and search the garage, as Kale accuses Turner of murder. However, they only find a bag containing a roadkill deer.

Julie goes to Turner’s house to convince him not to press charges against Kale. Ronnie escapes from Turner’s house and gives Kale the video he made while running through the house. Freezing a frame and zooming in, Kale sees the corpse of the woman from earlier. Meanwhile, Turner incapacitates and binds Julie. Turner then enters their house, bashing Ronnie over the head with a bat. After binding and gagging Kale, he reveals he will frame him for the murders of Ronnie and Julie and make it appear that Kale then killed himself. However, Ashley arrives, distracting Turner and allowing Kale to club him in the face. Kale throws him from the top of the stairs before Ashley unties Kale’s hands and mouth. They jump out of the window into her pool, and Kale’s ankle monitor again alerts the police.

Kale enters Turner’s home to search for his mother. Inside, he finds evidence of Turner’s previous murders, including the corpses of his victims and a woman’s dress and wig, indicating Turner posed as the woman leaving the house the night Kale and Ashley were watching. When Officer Gutierrez arrives, Turner hides in wait for him and snaps his neck. Kale finds his mother bound and gagged in the cellar. Turner appears, slashes him in the back and pins him to a wall. But before Turner can kill Kale, Julie stabs him in the leg with a screwdriver, allowing Kale to impale Turner with gardening shears.

Following the discovery of the murders, Kale’s ankle bracelet is removed early for good behavior. Kale exacts revenge on the pranking neighborhood children before kissing Ashley on his sofa, while Ronnie playfully videotapes them.

Cast

  • Shia LaBeouf as Kale Brecht, a troubled high school teenager who is traumatized by his father’s death and placed under house arrest after assaulting his teacher
  • David Morse as Robert Turner, a serial murderer
  • Sarah Roemer as Ashley Carlson, Kale’s girlfriend
  • Carrie-Anne Moss as Julie Brecht, Kale’s mother who gives strict authority to her son
  • Aaron Yoo as Ronald “Ronnie” Chu, Kale’s best friend
  • Jose Pablo Cantillo as Officer Gutierrez, a short-tempered police officer and the cousin of Kale’s teacher who monitors Kale’s house arrest while abusing and making fun of him
  • Matt Craven as Daniel “Danny” Brecht, Kale’s father who dies in a car crash
  • Viola Davis as Detective Parker, the detective in charge of Kale’s house arrest case
  • Luciano Rauso and Brandon and Daniel Caruso as the Greenwood boys, a trio of neighbors who prank and humiliate Kale
  • Kevin Quinn as Mr. Carlson
  • Elyse Mirto as Mrs. Carlson
  • Suzanne Rico and Kent Shocknek as news anchors
  • Rene Rivera as Señor Gutierrez, Kale’s Spanish teacher
  • Amanda Walsh as Minnie Tyco
  • Charles Carroll as judge
  • Gillian Shure as Turner’s club girl
  • Dominic Daniel as Officer Fox
  • Lisa Robin as big wheel mom
  • Cindy Lou Adkins as Mrs. Greenwood, mother of the Greenwood boys

Production

Development and writing

As Christopher Landon heard an NPR show discussing Martha Stewart being on house arrest, he started thinking on what he would do in a similar condition, “already sort of being a voyeur, I figured that I would just be spying on my neighbors all the time.” He made the protagonist a teenager dealing with his father’s death to reflect his own life experiences.[4][5] Landon wrote a spec script based on that, which ended up sold to The Montecito Picture Company, who brought it into development at DreamWorks Pictures.[6]

Executive producer Steven Spielberg arranged for LaBeouf to be on the casting shortlist for this film because he was impressed by LaBeouf’s work on Holes. Caruso auditioned over a hundred males for the role in five weeks before settling on LaBeouf as he was looking for someone “who guys would really like and respond to, because he wasn’t going to be such a pretty boy”. LaBeouf was attracted to the role because of the director’s 2002 film The Salton Sea, which he complimented as one of his favorite films. Before filming started, the two watched the thriller films Rear Window starring James Stewart, Straw Dogs starring Dustin Hoffman, and The Conversation starring Gene Hackman. They also viewed the 1989 romantic film Say Anything… and “mixed all the movies together”.[7] LaBeouf says he spoke to people on house arrest and locked himself in a room with the bracelet to feel what the confinement of house arrest is like.[7] He commented in an interview, “…it’s hard. I’m not going to say it’s harder than jail, but it’s tough. House arrest is hard because everything is available. […] The temptation sucks. That’s the torture of it.”[7] Caruso gave him the freedom to improvise whenever necessary to make the dialogue appeal to the current generation.

Filming

Disturbia was filmed on location in the cities of Whittier, California and Pasadena, California. Filming took place from January 6, 2006 to April 29, 2006. The homes of Kale and Mr. Turner, which were supposed to be across from each other, were actually located in two different cities.[8]

During filming, LaBeouf began a program that saw him gain twenty five pounds of muscle in preparation for his future films Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.[9]

According to LaBeouf, David Morse, who plays Mr. Turner, did not speak to LaBeouf or any of the other younger actors while on set. LaBeouf said, “When we finished filming, he was very friendly. But he’s a method actor, and as long as we were shooting, he wouldn’t say a word to us.”[10]

Music

Soundtrack

Main article: Disturbia: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Disturbia: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is a soundtrack to the film of the same name, released on March 4, 2007 in the United States by Lakeshore Records.[11]

Score

Main article: Disturbia: Original Motion Picture Score

Disturbia: Original Motion Picture Score is a score to the film of the same name. It is composed by Geoff Zanelli, conducted by Bruce Fowler, performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony and produced by Skip Williamson. It was released on July 10, 2007 in the United States by Lakeshore Records.[12]

Release

Home media 

The film was released on DVD and HD DVD on August 7, 2007 and on Blu-ray Disc on March 15, 2008.

In the “Making of Disturbia” section of the DVD’s special features section it is revealed that LaBeouf and Morse did not have much contact off-set, so as to make the fight scenes at the end of the movie as realistic as possible.

Lawsuit

The Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed a lawsuit against Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks, its parent company Viacom, and Universal Studios on September 5, 2008.[13][14] The suit alleged that Disturbia infringed on the rights to Cornell Woolrich‘s 1942 short story “It Had to Be Murder” (the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window), and that DreamWorks never bothered to obtain motion picture rights to the intellectual property and evaded compensating the rights holder for the alleged appropriation. (Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich’s original story “It Had to Be Murder” and its use as the basis for the movie Rear Window was previously litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990).) Contrary to some media reports, the claim was based on the original Woolrich short story, not the movie Rear Window.

This claim was rejected by the U.S. District Court in Abend v. Spielberg, 748 F.Supp.2d 200 (S.D.N.Y. 2010), on the basis that the original Woolrich short story and Disturbia are only similar at a high level of generality and abstraction. “Their similarities derive entirely from unprotectible elements and the total look and feel of the works is so distinct that no reasonable trier of fact could find the works substantially similar within the meaning of copyright law.”[15] Disturbia contained many subplots not in the original short story.[16][17]

After the dismissal of the copyright claim in federal court, the Abend Trust filed another lawsuit in California state court against Universal Studios and the Hitchcock Estate on October 28, 2010, for a breach of contract claim based on earlier agreements which allegedly restricted the use of ideas from the original Woolrich short story and the movie Rear Window whether or not the ideas are copyright protectable, that the defendants had entered into with the Abend Trust after the Supreme Court’s Stewart v. Abend decision.[18][19]

Reception

Box office

Disturbia grossed $80.2 million in North America and $37.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $118.1 million, against a budget of $20 million.[2]

In the United States and Canada, Disturbia was released alongside Year of the Dog and Pathfinder, and opened first at the box office with $22.2 million.[20] The film remained number one at the box office for the next two weeks, grossing $13 million and $9 million, respectively.[21][22] In its fourth week, it earned $5.7 million and finished second behind the record-breaking Spider-Man 3 ($151.1 million).[23]

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 69% of 175 critics’ reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.30/10. The website’s consensus reads: “Aside from its clichéd resolution, Disturbia is a tense, subtle thriller with a noteworthy performance from Shia LaBeouf.”[24] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on reviews from 28 critics, indicating “generally favorable” reviews.[25] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A−” on an A+ to F scale.[26]

The film earned a “two thumbs up” rating from Richard Roeper and A.O. Scott (filling in for Roger Ebert), with Roeper saying, “This is a cool little thriller with big scares and fine performances.”[27] William Thomas of Empire gave it 3 out of 5 stars and wrote: “despite the ‘edgy’ title, Disturbia is content to be a multiplex-friendly teen thriller with a higher degree of slickness and smarts than most of its contemporaries.”[28]

David Denby of The New Yorker judged the film “a travesty”, adding: “The dopiness of it, however, may be an indication not so much of cinematic ineptitude as of the changes in a movie culture that was once devoted to adults and is now rather haplessly and redundantly devoted to kids.”[29] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it 2 out of 5 stars, writing: “Despite the interesting set-up, the action degenerates into obvious implausibility and silliness – fatal for a suspense thriller – and boredom sets in.”[30]

Accolades

YearAwardCategoryResult
2007Dublin Film Critics Circle AwardsBreakthrough Award – Shia LaBeoufRunner-up
Golden Schmoes AwardsBreakthrough Performance of the Year – Shia LaBeoufNominated
Kids’ Choice AwardsFavorite Movie Star – Shia LaBeoufNominated
MTV Movie AwardsBest Kiss – Shia LaBeouf, Sarah RoemerNominated
Teen Choice AwardsChoice Movie: Horror/ThrillerWon
Choice Movie Actor: Horror/Thriller – Shia LaBeoufWon
Choice Movie: Breakout Male – Shia LaBeoufWon
2008People’s Choice AwardsFavorite Movie DramaNominated
ASCAP Film and Television Music AwardsTop Box Office Films – Geoff ZanelliWon
Empire AwardsBest ThrillerNominated

See also

References

  1.  “Executive Suite: Tom Pollock and Ivan Reitman”. The Hollywood Reporter. October 3, 2011. Archived from the original on June 3, 2019. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
  2.  “Disturbia (2007)”. Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on September 20, 2016. Retrieved September 1, 2016.
  3.  “EXCLUSIVE: Decades-Old Legal Battle over ‘Rear Window’ is Back on”. The Hollywood Reporter. October 29, 2010.
  4.  When does homage become a rip-off?, Denver Post
  5.  Interview: Christopher Landon Reflects on DISTURBIA & Discusses Why We Need PG-13 Horror
  6.  Anthony Kaufman (June 21, 2007). “10 Screenwriters to Watch: Christopher Landon”. Variety. Retrieved January 7, 2008.
  7.  “Interview with Shia LaBeouf– Disturbia”. Biggie. 2007. Archived from the original on December 2, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  8.  “Disturbia Filming Locations”. Archived from the original on June 3, 2009. Retrieved June 18, 2009.
  9.  Hart, Hugh (July 1, 2007). “Shia LaBeouf’s Transformation”. SFGate. Archived from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  10.  Randall, Laura (April 13, 2007). “Shia LaBeouf’s hot, and he’s caught Spielberg’s eye”. Inquirer. Retrieved May 14, 2023.
  11.  Rovi. “Disturbia [Original Soundtrack]”. AllMusic.com. Rovi Corp. Archived from the original on September 23, 2017. Retrieved December 11, 2012.
  12.  “Disturbia [Original Motion Picture Score]”. AllMusic.com. Rovi Corp. Archived from the original on April 16, 2013. Retrieved December 13, 2012.
  13.  Edith Honan (September 8, 2008). “Paramount ripped off Hitchcock Classic”. Reuters. Archived from the original on September 11, 2008. Retrieved September 8, 2008.
  14.  Chad Bray (September 9, 2008). “2nd UPDATE: Trust Files Copyright Lawsuit Over Disturbia“. CNN Money. Retrieved September 8, 2008. [dead link]
  15.  “Abend v. Spielberg decision” (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved March 2, 2012.
  16.  “The “Rear Window Case” Gets a Semi-Sequel”. blog. Hernandez Schaedel & Associates, LLP. Archived from the original on March 13, 2012. Retrieved March 30, 2012.
  17.  “Rear Window copyright claim rejected”. BBC News. September 22, 2010. Archived from the original on July 17, 2018. Retrieved June 20, 2018.
  18.  Gardner, Eriq (October 29, 2010). “Decades-Old Legal Battle Over ‘Rear Window’ Is Back On”. The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on December 19, 2011. Retrieved March 30, 2012.
  19.  “Complaint” (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on December 3, 2011. Retrieved March 2, 2012.
  20.  Germain, David (April 15, 2007). “DreamWorks No. 1 again with ‘Disturbia'”. USA Today. Associated Press. Archived from the original on October 25, 2012. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  21.  Adler, Shawn (April 23, 2007). “‘Disturbia’ Holds #1, But ‘Hot Fuzz’ Tastes Its Own Victory”. MTV News. Archived from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  22.  Adler, Shawn (April 30, 2007). “‘Disturbia’ Does It Again — Better Luck ‘Next’ Time, Nic Cage”. MTV News. Archived from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  23.  Adler, Shawn (May 7, 2007). “‘Spider-Man 3’ Busts Box-Office Records With Amazing Opening Weekend”. MTV News. Archived from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  24.  “Disturbia“. Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved March 26, 2025. 
  25.  “Disturbia (2007): Reviews”. Metacritic. CBS. Archived from the original on September 14, 2007. Retrieved September 27, 2007.
  26.  “”Disturbia” leads crowded pack at box office”. Reuters. The Hollywood Reporter. April 17, 2007. According to polling by Cinemascore, 58% of the audience was under 24. And moviegoers, 57% of whom were female, awarded the film a solid A-minus rating.
  27.  Richard Roeper; A.O. Scott (April 2007). “Disturbia reviewed on Ebert & Roeper“. Ebert & Roeper.[permanent dead link]
  28.  Thomas, William (July 27, 2006). “Disturbia”. Empire. Retrieved March 20, 2022.
  29.  Denby, David (May 7, 2007). “Movies”. The New Yorker. Archived from the original on September 15, 2020. Retrieved August 15, 2019.
  30.  Peter Bradshaw (September 14, 2007). “Disturbia”. the Guardian. Retrieved March 21, 2024.
vteFilms by D. J. Caruso
DirectedThe Salton Sea (2002)Taking Lives (2004)Two for the Money (2005)Disturbia (2007)Eagle Eye (2008)I Am Number Four (2011)Inside (2011)Standing Up (2013)The Disappointments Room (2016)XXX: Return of Xander Cage (2017)Redeeming Love (2022)Shut In (2022)Mary (2024)
Produced onlyThe Hard Way (1991)Point of No Return (1993)Another Stakeout (1993)Drop Zone (1994)Nick of Time (1995)Rebound: The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault (1996)Crazy as Hell (2002)

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