Songfacts®:

• "Disturbia" is like a horror movie set to song, with Rihanna in a state of anguish as something sinister overcomes her. The title is not original: In 2007, a year before the song was released, there was a movie called Disturbia about a serial killer hiding in plain sight.
• This dance-pop track was co-written by Rihanna's boyfriend at the time, Chris Brown, who also contributed backing vocals. The other co-writers are Andre Merritt and Robert Allen, who together with Brown comprise his songwriting team, the Graffiti Artists. The trio also penned Brown's hit "Forever."
• Contrary to early reports that credited the music video to fashion photographer David LaChapelle ("Dirrty," "I'm With You"), the clip was actually directed by Rihanna's longtime collaborator Anthony Mandler.
  
  In the nightmarish video, Rihanna is imprisoned in a creepy facility where she endures several methods of torture, including being kept in a cage, tied to a bed, crawled on by tarantulas, dragged to a gas chamber, and nearly burned at the stake. During the bridge, she performs a "Thriller"-inspired routine with her dancers, which she emulated during her performance at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards.
  
  Mandler credits the singer with the dark concept, which marked a pivotal moment in her career.
  
  "'Disturbia' was probably the biggest moment because that was the first time she let the world see what was inside her," he told Vanity Fair in 2013. "I think she probably paid for a lot of it herself. And she said, 'We're doing whatever I want. You can't tell me anything.' And I said, 'No problem.' When I saw it together, I knew it was something special. It scared the shit out of the label. I think there was a conversation at one point about shelving it. It was one of those moments when she was kind of smarter than everyone else."
• "Disturbia" was Rihanna's first Auto-Tuned hit. Just about every pop singer and rapper was using the software to process their vocals in 2008 to give them a slightly robotic sound.
• This was produced by Brian Kennedy, who has also worked with Ciara ("My Love"), Jesse McCartney ("Runnin'") and Menudo ("Inside Out").
• This was Rihanna's fourth #1 hit in the US, following "SOS," "Umbrella" and "Take A Bow."
  
  "Umbrella" was from her third album, Good Girl Gone Bad, released in 2007 when she was 19. In 2008, her record label Def Jam reissued the album (as Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded) with "Take A Bow" and "Disturbia" added. Rihanna notched her fifth #1 later that year when she featured on the T.I. track "Live Your Life."
• L.A. Reid - the head of Rihanna's record company Def Jam, told MTV News that with this song, the Barbadian singer was taking control of her career. Reid said: "It was the first time that Rihanna actually came to me and said, 'Here's the song I want to put out.' She played me the song. That was her taking control, even on her last album. She understands what hits are, and she knows what she wants to say. She's at that place where she can do it."
  
  Rihanna, though, didn't get a songwriting credit on the track or any others from her Good Girl Gone Bad album, in part because Def Jam kept her busy on the road promoting her existing songs instead of working on new ones. Back on her first album, Music Of The Sun, released in 2005 when she was 17, she has a handful of credits on songs she worked on with Evan Rogers, who discovered her when he was on vacation in Barbados. Rihanna asserted more creative control on her 2009 album Rated R, where she has songwriter credits on most of the tracks.