Director: Bryan Bertino
86 minutes (15) 2008
Second Sight Blu-ray region B
[Released 28th September]
Rating: 7/10
Review by Christopher Geary
Home-invasion movies have long since become a staple of modern horror pictures, partly resulting from combination of siege thriller with slasher shocker, especially following such notable remakes as Cimino’s Desperate Hours (1990), and Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991). Themes of urban anonymity and masked antagonists adds a weighty layer of paranoia to any such suspenseful plotting. The Strangers builds up considerable tension with a rural setting, where, at four o’clock in the morning, fright begins with a shadowy visitor asking “Is Tamara home?”
After going to a wedding, then falling out over his proposal, Kristen (Liv Tyler) and Jamie (Scott Speedman) end up in a country house troubled by annoyingly persistent nocturnal visitors who turn frightening by their lurking threats, even before they resort to physical violence. The spectre of Halloween (1978) haunts this with a similarly eerie supernatural mystery, generating shifting moods and electrifying tones - where hell is found in ‘hello’, and Hell is certainly other people.
“Why are you doing this?” The tragedy of a first killing ushers this nightmare movie away from a simple crime drama, where judgements against victims’ foolish or illogical actions might be valid criticism, and locates The Strangers in that ‘Twilight Zone’ of inescapable terror beyond genuine rationality that makes human aspects fearsome, while unexpected noise matches the equally disquieting charge of deathly silence. Yes, of course, the ‘night people’ want you dead, simply “because you’re home”, and time’s not on your side in this remarkably modern twist on typical haunted-house narratives. When daylight eventually comes, it doesn’t bring a welcome return to clarity or sanity. Only further torture awaits. Murders of madness remain.
Sequel movie The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018) is a family affair, although they are a quite dysfunctional group to start with, while leaving the suburbs for a lakeside getaway, where routine stalk ‘n’ slash events play out without any of the previous picture’s rather claustrophobic shocks. Only a few jumpy scares distinguish this from the 1980s’ cycle of subgenre horrors. Whereas Bertino’s original showcased iconic playing of Merle Haggard’s song Mama Tried, this follow-up has a couple of Kim Wilde’s hits as ineffective, bemusing counterpoints, while its main synth score is blatantly inspired by John Carpenter’s creepy tunes, and then it goes on to steal climactic imagery from Carpenter’s Christine (1983), and Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). There’s not much sense that sequel director Johannes Roberts opens up The Strangers’ limited set-pieces to a wider scenario, he just unapologetically recycles, almost randomly-chosen, action-horror stuff.
Blu-ray disc extras:
- The cinema version (85 mins.), plus an extended cut (87 mins.)
- New interviews with director Bertino, editor Kevin Greutert, and star Liv Tyler
- Deleted scenes and trailer
