The Strangers (2008)

 

The Strangers (2008)

 

The attraction to the Home Invasion Thriller by filmmakers and audiences is obvious: You are supposed to feel safe in your own home, so if this is violated, the terror is visceral. It is also something that happens in the real-world, making the artificial terrors of fiction that much more potent. It appears in some of the oldest cinema, maybe the very first being D.W. Griffith’s, “The Lonely Villa” (1909), and most of Griffith’s best films that followed had some scenes designed the exploit the same fears, though in the later ones would treat the Home Invasion as a small part in a larger narrative.

 

A purer Home Invasion Thriller treats the invaded house is the primary, sometimes only, setting; the invasion itself is the whole of the plot; and the timeframe of the story is narrow, usually less than eight hours. The conceit works, but problem is, everyone knows that, so it’s done a lot, and therefore over-done. Given the narrowness of the conceit, and the economy of telling is required, becomes a huge obstacle to any originality in storytelling. To demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of the core conceit, please allow me a short digression:

 

Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas” (1974) and John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978) are two of the original Slashers movies, and like many (most?) Slashers they were also Home Invasion Thrillers. These two have so much thematic and plot overlap that it was nothing but Carpenter’s supreme artistry that saved his film from embarrassing charges of being a rip-off of Clark’s.

 

Carpenter’s version of the story, and maybe even Clark’s, grew out of then-common Folklore about a threatened Babysitter, but Carpenter was likely unaware that the Folklore was inspired by the true, and still unsolved, murder of 13-year-old Babysitter Janett Christman in 1950. Neither movie was the true first film interpretation of the Folklore though, that odd honor falls upon the now-forgotten “Foster's Release” (1971) that once was widely shown in schools throughout the USA to unsuspecting children.

 

By 1980 the Slasher sub-genre was creatively exhausted, but the popularity was increasing; that was forty-years ago, and Slashers have finally started to peter-out because of their repetitiveness, and those that still arrived were super-self-aware and ironic in tone. Meanwhile, purer Home Invasion Thrillers remain a steady-stream, and are generally presented with the up-most seriousness.

 

This brings me to the critical divide regarding “The Strangers” which is mostly along the lines of those who appreciated how well it was made, and those annoyed because they had seen it before, and more than once. I respect the position of those annoyed but am siding with the fans.

 

In the film, Steadicams are employed more than pure-Hand-Held, Dollies or Cranes, allowing a smooth continuum between long-shots and close-ups, POV shots and Eye-of-God compositions. We see the world through the character’s eyes, but we also see things they don't; we know the Strangers are in the house long before the intended victims, because the Strangers like to stand silently behind our protagonists, doing nothing, while our protagonists are becoming increasingly anxious, but have no idea how much trouble they are really in. It features some of Cinematographer Peter Sova’s best work, and among the last films he completed before his death in 2002. The Sound Mixing, by Jeffree Bloomer, is also exceptionally good, with heightened knocks, panicked breathing, and a skipping LP record. The Strangers have no names, very little dialogue, and wear cheap Halloween masks (a reference to Carpenter’s classic Slasher). When they remove the masks, Bertino doesn’t allow us to see their faces.

 

In its misleading opening title-cards, “The Strangers” claims to be inspired by true events. Though most of the paragraph you read is a fiction, the “inspired by true” part is, in fact, correct. As a child, Writer/Director Bryan Bertino was apparently quite scared by a series of home break-ins in his neighborhood, and as an adult, composing this tale, he combined his childhood memories with the notorious Tate–LaBianca murders committed by the Manson “Family” in 1969. In grim piece of trivia worth noting is that because critics who didn’t know that they felt the need to speculate about which True-Crime incident was the basis of this film and came up with a list of real-life massacres that Bertino had never heard of, but never-the-less bore striking resemblances to his fictional storyline.

 

A good Home Invasion Thriller is usually a slow-burn, and this one certainly is. After the introduction that warns you that this movie is gonna get ugly, and everyone one is gonna die, it deftly presents a surprisingly romantic story of a couple who love each other but are at odds about what to do next.

 

Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) have just returned from a friend’s wedding. Both are unhappy. At the party James asked Kristen to marry him and she said “No.” Now they are stuck together for the night in James’ family’s isolated vacation home, both miserable. Kristen wanders the house, looking at all the romantic decorations (candles, rose petals, etc.) that James laid out earlier on the assumption that she’s take the ring, and she feels totally awful.

 

Kristen: It’s really nice, everything you did. It’s beautiful.

 

James, not meeting her eyes: Yeah. [After a pause, he puts the rejected ring-box on the table between them.] Here. I can’t keep it. I can’t take it back. [Pause.] Please. Just take it, please.

 

Kristen takes a drink straight out of the bottle and caresses the box with the ring: I wanna wear this. You know, I only get to wear it tonight. It makes me feel pretty.

 

If James wasn’t so damned hurt, he’d realize she was about to say “Yes.” Instead, confused about what he should do, leaves, saying she can have the big house and he’ll go to a motel, because maybe that’s what a gentleman is supposed to do (there’s a little more to this, but not worth detailing here).

 

Had this not been a Horror film, this story would’ve had a happy ending. But this is a Horror film, and there’re Psycho Killers prowling the woods outside.

 

The film is less-than one-and-half hours, and the threat is presented full-on at about the twenty-minute mark, but there’s no violence until about forty-five minutes in. But even before twenty-minutes mark, the creepiness has already descended: During Kristen and James strained conversation, there’s a mysterious knock on the door. It’s a deliciously suggestive scene drawn from Bertino’s childhood memories:

 

“As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it. At the door were some people asking for somebody who didn't live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses.”

 

Bertino recreated that here, but after this first, ambiguous encounter, the Stranger(s) seem to disappear. They don’t return until after James has left. At first, they make their presence known to Kristen, but do not attack. Panicked Kristen calls James. Honorable James returns. Welcome to hell.

 

One of the frustrating things in many Horror films, most notable in both the Home Invasion and the over-lapping sub-Genre of the Slasher, is what we call SHTs (Stupid Human Tricks), basically, the victim’s idiotic actions set them up to be killed, so maybe they deserve to die. Blessedly, they’re not much in evidence here. Kristen and James show repeated poor judgement, but entirely believable poor judgement, against an unknown and mostly invisible enemy, so their behavior no dumber than what you might expect from yourself, which makes it all that much scarier.

 

Notably, the house, which is obviously decades old, doesn’t have a landline anymore (common enough in the Real World) and since the couple doesn’t know they are being surveilled, they aren’t as disciplined as they should’ve been about where they’ve left their cell phones. So, when things get really serious, they don’t have their cell phones, the bad guys do.

 

Home Invasions certainly happen in poor neighborhood both in real life and cinema, but cinema clearly prefers them in the best neighborhoods. There’s a faux-practical reason for this, it’s harder to scream for help in a single-family, unattached, house than a crowded apartment building. But that also class-ist, because filmmakers seem to fail to realize the in the rural USA, poor and working-class class families mostly live-in single family, unattached houses; filmmakers are usually city-folk and seem to think only rich people live lives of physical isolation.  Philip Simpson noted that Home Invasion is often presented as an inversion of assumptions about urban violence, "’The Strangers,’ as many horror films do ... undermines the conventional notion of rural society as a simpler, crime-free place. One might call the narrative sensibility … 'pastoral paranoia', in that danger lurks among the rough folk of the country rather than the suburbs and cities.” Or, in terms of the economic consequences on my home city (New York City) inflicted by the financial catastrophe of the 1970s, Home Invasion is the worst possible Karma for White Flight.

 

Notably, Kristen and James don’t live or really belong in this vacation house, it’s owned by James’ family. They are visitors, while the Strangers clearly know the lay-of-the-land better. This raises a whole host of issues of class resentment, central in many Home Invasion Thrillers, but deliberately obscured here, because Bertino wanted to keep the Strangers faceless:

 

“I was thinking about the Tate murders and realizing that these detailed descriptions had painted a story of what it was like in the house with the victims. But none of the victims knew about the Manson family or why it was happening to them. So, I got really fascinated with telling the victims' tale. And not filling it in with an FBI profile and not filling it in with finding out that somebody's grandmother beat them and now they want to kill everybody. You read obituaries every day where someone is killed for a random reason. Yes, we may eventually find out why, but sometimes they don't.”

 

Except at the very end where there are some hints are dropped and these do suggest that the class resentments underlined the real-world Tate–LaBianca murders were just as central to the Strangers’ motives here. To put a sharper point on it, even though Bertino tried to avoid it, the story still falls into the pattern of what Simpson insisted was "the divide between the underprivileged and privileged classes," in most Hollywood Horror. Most Home Invasion Thrillers could be subtitled, “Eat the Rich.”

 

Kevin Wetmore noted a difference between 1980s Slasher films and a purer Home Invasion Thriller, “Unlike in eighties slasher horror, for example, where engaging in negative behavior such as drinking, doing drugs, having premarital sex are often forerunners to being killed by the killer(s); [here], death is random and unrelated to one's behavior."

 

Wetmore seems to suggest that the resurgence of the purer Home Invasion Thriller reflected post-9/11 anxieties of wholly capricious terroristic, violence. I would reject that, only because there’s nothing new in the idea. I say the real change is that the audience of those ‘80s Slashers are now older, now mostly own their own homes, and what they are scared of is different in 2008 than 1978 because in 2008bthey have more bills to pay.

 

The movie’s nostalgia for older Horror is obvious, and notably more for the ‘70s than the ‘80s (interesting because Bertino was barely passed thirty when this film was made). These ‘70s references are hugely appealing visually. Low-light photography is mostly (entirely?) actually that, not digitally tinted in post-production as in films like “The Others” (2001); this adds greatly to the suspense, even more so because Cinematographer Peter Sova had the benefit of better film and camera technology than Director Clark did back in the day. (Director Carpenter mostly avoided low light till the 1980s, instead employing other tricks to make his settings look darker than the really were).

 

Also, Production Designer John D. Kretschmer gave us spacious, well-appointed house, that looked like it was designed by Mike Brady (the widowed architect and central character from TV sitcom “The Brady Bunch” (1969 - 1974) played by Robert Reed). The best prop was an old 33-rpm turntable that seems to play nothing but decades-old Country and Western music.

 

Special praise most also be noted for the best performance, coming from Tyler, who was returning to cinema after a six-year-break related to her new motherhood. She clearly responded to her character, the film’s best written, strongly enough to ignore much of the rest of the script was under-developed. (Actor Speedman is also quite good but was granted far less to work with).

 

Also, at the end of the film, there’s a chilling dialogue exchange that made it into the trailer:

Kristen: "Why are you doing this to us?"

One of the Strangers (Gemma Ward): "Because you were home."

 

I’ve noticed that Horror films that deliberately constrain the timeframe of their storylines are often made more potent when the end with the dawn (right now I’m thinking of “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) and “The Purge” (2013), and how similar they are tonally to this movie). I can’t tell you why I find power in that, but many Critics are annoyed with how often they’ve seen it. As Roger Ebert wrote:

 

“At the beginning of my review of ‘The Strangers,’ I typed my star rating instinctively: ‘One star.’ I was outraged. I wrote: ‘What a waste of a perfectly good first act! And what a maddening, nihilistic, infuriating ending!’ I was just getting warmed up.”

 

He’s not wrong. Bertino’s conscious choice of plot-minimalism left him with not enough story to get through the film’s last forty minutes. We Horror fans tend to forgive that (like fans of Conspiracy Thrillers tend to forgive the plot descending into incoherence in the final reel), but maybe we shouldn’t. Two years before “The Strangers” was released there was a near identical French-Romanian Home Invasion Thriller “Them,” (2006) and one year before was the almost-Home Invasion Thriller “Vacancy” (2007) which also begged comparison. In all three, the most original and humanistic content is in their first half, while the second halves were virtually identical (“Vacancy,” did slyly combine the above-referenced Class Prejudices with Surveillance Culture Paranoia, so it’s probably the most distinctive of the trio, but also the sloppiest made).

 

But I don't want to suddenly turn negative on this film, so I need to re-address that the only differences of import between “Black Christmas” and “Halloween” were that Directors Clark’s and Carpenter’s craftmanship were equally flawless, but stylistically radically removed. Returning to Ebert:

 

“I think a lot of audience members will walk out really angry at the ending, although it has a certain truthfulness and doesn't cheat on the situation that has been building up. The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story … Bertino shows the instincts of a good director; I hope he gets worthier material.”

 

Even Elizabeth Weitman, who disliked the film almost as much as Ebert, had the praise its creepiness, “Put another way, I've never been happier to have so many locks on my front door.”

 

Trailer:

The Strangers (2008) - Official Trailer (HD) - YouTube