THE STRANGERS 2008
48%
Written and directed by Bryan Bertino
Starring Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman, Gemma Ward, Kip Weeks, Laura Margolis
Synopsis
A young couple staying in an isolated home find themselves under siege after a random knock at the door. Over the course of a night, they must try to outwit a trio of masked assailants determined to kill them—for no particular reason.
Why We Love It
Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers was dismissed as a nasty little exercise in sadism when first released in 2008. While some critics paid grudging respect to the filmmaking craft, and many gave their due to Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler’s lead performances, most wondered what any of it was in service of. It was a movie that was, apparently, about nothing. And on top of being empty, it was cheap. And schlocky. And twisted. And vile.
Cut to eleven years and one sequel later, and some folks—critics among them—talk about the film as the slasher classic of the 2000s. We think they’re onto something.
Many of the critical reassessments of The Strangers cast an academic eye over the film, often reading it as a comment on post-9/11 America. Where once upon a time, slasher victims “invited” their demises by indulging in sex and booze and any of the other horror-movie “don’ts” that Randy Meeks lays out in Wes Craven’s Scream, the two victims here are attacked by a masked trio of quiet psychopaths simply, and now famously, “because you were home.” The violence is purposeless, untargeted—the exact kind of random attack that Americans as a collective had experienced just a handful of years before and now feared they would experience again.
We will leave that kind of dissection to the classroom. We love The Strangers because it succeeds so well as a horror film—that is to say, it’s scary as hell. The movie is often compared to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, but it’s true cousin, if you ask us, is John Carpenter’s Halloween. (Folks forget, in the haze of lore-building sequels, that Laurie Strode was originally just a random and unrelated babysitter who, like Tyler and Speedman’s couple in The Strangers, happened to be home.)
It’s not just the cheap store-bought masks that both movies’ killers wear, nor the knives they choose to use. Like Halloween, The Strangers is incredibly pared-back, a machine designed purely to terrorize. From the exquisitely framed “behind you!” reveals of the first half—so reminiscent of Michael Myers’s slow materialization in the darkened doorway during Halloween’s climax—to the dread-heavy cat-and-mouse chase that fills out the second, the movie succeeds in its mission. And yes, Speedman and, particularly, Tyler are excellent.
A recent sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, is a worthy follow-up, switching out some of the original’s moodiness for a fun, deliberately retro eighties slasher flair (complete with boppy soundtrack). The critics hated it, of course, but give them ten years and they may come around.