The Collector is a 2009 horror film directed by Marcus Dunstan and written by Dunstan and Patrick Melton, starring Josh Stewart as Arkin, alongside Michael Reilly Burke, Andrea Roth, Juan Fernandez and Madeline Zima. It runs 90 minutes, was made for roughly three million dollars and took around ten and a half million at the box office. It was poorly received on release, arriving after audiences had grown tired of the torture-horror wave, but it has since been reappraised into something of a cult classic, and having now seen it, I understand why.

My first and most pressing question is a logistical one. Where does one man acquire this many bear traps? Is there a supplier? A trade account? And the string, of which there is an extraordinary quantity. And the knives, which suggest someone walked into a large retailer and cleared out an entire aisle. The film never addresses the procurement side of the operation, and I remain curious.

What caught me off guard early was the misdirection. Arkin is a handyman who has been working at a family's house, and who plans to rob it to pay off a debt. I assumed, reasonably I think, that the man breaking into the house was the villain. He is not. He is simply a thief who has chosen the single worst night imaginable to commit a crime, because somebody considerably worse has already arrived, taken the family captive, and turned the entire building into a death trap. It is a genuinely clever reversal, and it gives the film an energy most home invasion films lack.

The traps themselves are the main event, and they are relentlessly inventive. Blades, hooks, tripwires, and a living room floor effectively carpeted in bear traps. There is also a liquid spread across one floor that I can only describe as the stickiest acid ever committed to film.

That acid leads to the moment I will remember longest. A cat becomes stuck in it, and in what is arguably the most heroic act in the film, Arkin frees the animal and releases it to safety. It immediately runs into another trap and is killed. I genuinely did not anticipate that the cat would be one of the casualties, and the film delivers it with a bluntness that is simultaneously horrible and, I am slightly ashamed to admit, darkly funny.

Then there is the boyfriend, a young man who came over to the house hoping for a pleasant evening and received, instead, the worst evening of anyone's life. He trips a wire, falls onto the bear trap floor, and every one of his limbs is caught. It is grim, gratuitous and extraordinarily memorable.