What you are about to see is inspired by true events, the film’s opening warns, accompanied by a hysterical (but faked) 911 call. It’s harrowing, it’s somber, and it’s reality, man. It’s a reminder that stuff like brutal stabbings are not made up by movies. Of course, The Strangers isn’t really based on any actual events, just the fact that home invasions happen. How do I know this? Because none of the events that happen in the movie are out of the ordinary; none that would require a strange case for inspiration. It’s brilliant marketing, you see. It’s like making a movie about a man going to the corner store to buy potato chips and boasting “Based on a real midnight munchies run” on the poster. But I digress.
The Strangers keeps its premise very simple. James and Kristen (Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler), a couple rocked by a marriage proposal that ended badly, return from a friend’s wedding reception to—where else?—a remote cabin in the woods. At 4 AM, as they desperately try to pick up the pieces of their relationship, their home is suddenly attacked, for no apparent reason, by Batman Begins’ Scarecrow and his two masked female goons. The couple is armed and indoors, but they didn’t count on the attackers being experts at guerrilla warfare, able to appear and disappear unnoticed, while keeping track of their targets at all times.
I often argue against the need for horror movies to be graphic in order to successfully impart fear on the audience, as grotesqueness is not a scare in itself. The Strangers can’t be lumped together with Hostel or its kind, as it opts to build up to the moment of gore rather than indulge in it. If you ever find yourself asking how a PG-13 horror movie can ever be effective, The Strangers (though rated R) employs some choice examples how. One eerily quiet scene has a character creep slowly down a hallway, with the out-of-focus Scarecrow tailing behind him axe-in-hand, poised to chop the back of the poor man’s gourd. When the camera switches to a POV shot, staring at the back of the victim’s head, director Bryan Bertino chose to stretch the moment to its unbearable—and, frankly, brilliant—tension, fully teasing that geyser of blood money shot we’ve come to expect from the genre. It’s an effective tool and Bertino shows a more sophisticated approach than most of what passes as a horror movie these days by using fragments of visual information to tell his story (the rejected marriage proposal, for example, was never explicitly stated, but suggested by the couple driving silently with puffy eyes and later clutching each other’s hands desperately).
Unfortunately, the film’s Achilles heel proves to be not just a weakness but a downfall of the entire movie. After suspenseful teasing for the first half hour, we quickly realize that the film is limited to this setting, with these handful of characters, and totally unwilling to provide any context or motivation to the psychological torture being displayed. It’s a single scene stretched to 90 minutes. Most of it are the usual claptrap of slasher cliches—the weird noises outside, the sudden jump at the window, and even the old “now you see me, now you don’t” device from Halloween—done with the excuse that the strangers are just playing games.
If movies like the Saw series are being called “torture porn,” then The Strangers must be the amateur internet sex tape. It hides under the pretext that it has a vague connection to reality, thus not needing any background information for its titillation. The only reason given for the invasion—”Because you’re home”—is supposed to resonate as a wake-up call that real-life murders are random, mindless, and end on sour notes. That’s what it set out to do: to show people a bleak portrait of our world, one with real murders that defy logic and reject redemption (a scene at the end, involving young Christian missionaries, groaningly demonstrates this). Well, thank goodness for that. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable with all these goddamn sunshines and strawberry-flavored rainbows that fill up my morning paper.
Unlike the equally tedious Funny Games, which argued against movie violence by attempting to show the real effects of violence, The Strangers is a complete 180 in that it rides on the reality of its context-less violence to offer cinematic rush. Where’s the inventiveness? The mythic quality? Or, dare I say, the fun of the scares? If the horror genre is only made up of semi-realistic cheap thrills, then what a boring genre it is. And what a boring waste of time The Strangers is.
"The Strangers" opens May 30, 2008 and is rated R. Horror, Thriller. Written by Bryan Bertino.
