Besides, playing on the fears and misunderstandings of the general public is what movie writers do, and chavs are the current boogeymen, just like back in the 80′s it was communists and in the early 90′s computers were going to kill us all.

I’m not kidding about the kids I went to school with by the way, various peers have been up in front of judges for kidnapping, burglary, GBH, murder and literally tearing a man’s ear clean off of his head… :-/

If you’re going to argue class war then what about North vs. South? If anything I should be offended by this movie. Except for the fact that it’s sadly quite representative of the little shits up North. They are feral and racist and a lot of the parents I was familiar with wouldn’t think twice about giving their kids a swift smack. Anybody who disgarees with me obviously grew up in a nicer area of the North West than I did!

At the end of the day, what you get out of a movie is what you consciously choose to get out of it. I generally don’t like my political beliefs to infringe on my horror viewing so I left all that at the door. Had I not, then I would probably find myself agreeing with you entirely.

The lower class scum adults slapped kids, had naked orgies, screamed at each other, drove like nutters, while the children were basically psychotic and seemed to happily set an Asian kid on fire (because they’re racist, see? Bloody BNP bastards or something).

Although a tensely made horror movie, it was just so obviously a “Them versus Us” story that made out the lovely, nature-loving Middle Classes were at war and outnumbered by the evil Lower Classes, whose moral compass has been destroyed through years of drinking, f*cking and beating their relatives “cos they is c*nts”.

I figure subtlety was sacrificed for headlines, which it got in bucketloads, earning some unsurprising split reviews for some of our leading classist papers:

Daily Mail review – 5 Stars – “At last! Here’s a first-rate British horror film that taps into our deepest fears and offers a thought-provoking insight into such topical subjects as knife crime and gang culture”

The Sun review – 1 Star – “It is not often that The Sneak feels like walking out of a movie. But this exploitative, patronising and nauseatingly violent take on Britain’s yob culture had your critic eyeing up the exit.”

I doubt I need to say more than that – I fully understand why people loved it, but I found the heavy-handed way the creators portrayed our “underclass” utterly offensive and endlessly infuriating. But maybe that’s just because I come from Essex…

I definitely agree with downfall you mentioned. The way they insist on approaching the kid’s becomes annoying. Watching the film a second time frustrated me when he went to the house at the beginning and just waltzed in and hid upstairs, then climbed out of the window. Seriously, who would EVER do that?!

I think it’s quite clever that the people who came up with the original idea decided to use teengers as the evil entity. It seems to be quite common ground now, but despite lots of other films cottoning on to the trend, it still hasn’t managed to dilute the effects of Eden Lake for me