READERS' CHOICE #47: THE STRANGERS (2008)

 

THRILL SCALE 1-10

9

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Yes

BEST SEQUENCE

The scene shown in the poster - before Liv Tyler is even aware that a home invasion has begun, she stands by herself in an empty room and we see a masked figure step out behind her, observe her for a moment, and then conceal himself again without taking any immediate action

BEST LINE

"Hi. Is Tamara here?"

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

48%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"The Strangers has a handful of genuinely scary moments, but they're not enough to elevate the end results above standard slasher fare."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"A young couple staying in an isolated vacation home are terrorized by three unknown assailants."

THOUGHTS

• Well, Rotten Tomatoes, we're going to have to agree to disagree
• It may not be surprising to learn that I enjoy reading movie reviews, considering I've started writing my own. Usually I do so after the fact, once I've formed my own opinion, and I feel like I tend to line up with most movie critics. If I'm in a self-congratulatory mood I just take this as proof that I have good taste as opposed to someone whose opinion is overly influenced by others (although that thought has crossed my mind too), but then there are times when our verdicts differ. It's happened a few times already in this blog; I mostly chalk that up to older movies which were revered and influential at the time but just didn't hold up (The Day the Earth Stood Still, I'm coming at you once more)
• The Strangers, on the the other hand, a lot of critics didn't like, especially when it first came out (it's gained a bit of a cult following since). As we see from the Rotten Tomatoes consensus above, it was seen as a middling slasher with little to set it apart. But you know what? I've seen a lot of what I would consider slashers, including multiple movies in the Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream series, and I think The Strangers is scarier than almost all of them (the original Halloween and Nightmare are both pretty fantastic). In fact, I don't even think The Strangers is a slasher, if for no other reason than the focus is on increasing the tension as opposed to increasing the body count
• A lot of jump scares. I said my piece on jump scares in my review of REC, and I still find them effective in this movie as well. The fact that this movie had a trio of killers instead of just one made the jump scares even more fair in a way that other movies can't pull off. The villain doesn't need to defy logic to pop up in a surprising place because there are three of them all over the house, stalking the protagonists in tandem
• In ranking this movie and REC so highly I somewhat worry that I'm not leaving much room for the more restrained, artful movies we have coming up like, for example, The Babadook or Let the Right One In, but I can't deny the visceral reaction I had
• I almost gave The Strangers a higher score, even toying with the idea of giving it 10/10, but there are aspects of it that just don't work as well as I wanted and make the movie drag a little (but not enough for me to consider it a bad movie). The protagonists accidentally kill their friend, and there's not much actually done with that, and there's an extended sequence in which Liv Tyler tries to get to a radio transmitter in a barn which, at that point, just felt like padding
• The ending is chilling, in part because it happens with sunlight streaming through the window. So often in horror movies it feels like dawn will bring safety (sometimes in a practical way, like if we're dealing with vampires). If the heroes can just survive until the sun rises, surely they'll be safe. No such luck here, and the final scene exposes the harsh reality of the events of this movie. There was no hidden meaning, no twist ending, no ulterior motive. This was just pure, inhuman sadism and cruelty, as evidenced by what I almost chose as the best line:
• "Why are you doing this to us?" "Because you were home"
• Despite my earlier assertion that this isn't a slasher, we definitely see some slasher influence, especially in the male killer who has the hulking physicality of Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. Incidentally, according to the movie's credits the male killer is called Man in Mask, which we can all agree is a bad name. From now on I'm going to call him Mr. Sack, a name I chose before Googling it and finding this delightful Charlie Brown action figure:

• If that's not an origin story I don't know what is

Up next: Spelunking gets spelooky in The Descent which, continuing the trend, contains one of my favourite jump scares of all time