Jodie Foster starred in the harrowing 2002 film Panic Room. In the movie, three men break into Foster’s house looking for a fortune, and Foster and her diabetic daughter (played by Kristen Stewart) lock themselves in a hidden room to avoid the burglars. (It doesn’t work, btw.) The film was fiction, of course, and the title, Panic Room, exposes the extra-dramatic dimension the film sought to convey. More commonly, rooms hidden away in the house for use in the event of home invasions are called safe rooms. It was a safe room the actress Sandra Bullock called 911 from last June, and it wasn’t in a movie.
Bullock retreated to her safe room–or a closet in her bedroom, which had a “safe door,” as she called it in the nervous 911 call–during a home invasion. The call was recently played in a court case about the invasion, and so became public information. You can hear it here. The event went a lot better for Bullock, who was unhurt, than it did for Jodie Foster’s character in the film. Safe rooms are increasingly being added to high-end homes and offices.