The ’50s had monster movies, the ’80s had slasher movies. So far, the 21st century hasn’t quite generated its own clearly defined subgenre of horror films (the “torture porn” category seems to have been thankfully short-lived). But at least we’re starting to see the lineage of what might be the scary zeitgeist of the ’aughts. It began with the ghostly J-Horror films of Asia (The Ring, The Grudge). It migrated to Europe next, where directors like David Moreau and Javier Palud (Them) and Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) continued the trend of slow-building, dare we say “old-fashioned,” dread. Now, its DNA crops up in America courtesy of Bryan Bertino’s atmospheric horror-thriller, The Strangers.
 Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler get spooked and armed in the eerily minimal horror flick The Strangers. |
The Strangers is minimalist almost in the extreme. It uses one set, five characters and almost no dialogue. This one is all about the ambience of fear, not the excess of bloody special effects. The film begins by introducing us to James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler), two feuding lovers who arrive at his parents’ rural vacation home for an unsuccessful night of romance. Seems they’ve just come from a wedding reception where James took the opportunity to propose to Kristen and, for reasons we’re never privy to, things didn’t turn out quite the way he was expecting. Angry and tight-lipped, the couple work out details for cutting their vacation short.
First-time writer-director Bertino has got his battle plan well laid-out. Already it’s uncomfortable being in this house. The voyeurism of watching this inscrutably unhappy man and woman is almost too much, thanks in large part to Bertino’s sharp attention to intimate details (clenched hands, dried tears, a mournful country LP). Things go from bad to worse, though, when the sleepless duo find themselves inexplicably menaced by a trio of strangers in creepy masks. Why are they here? What do they want?
| Trailer for The Strangers. |
Over the course of the short film, Bertino builds up a gut-wrenching level of tension. Phone lines are cut, tires are slashed and faceless stalkers materialize in and out of the darkness like ghosts. Bertino’s smart enough to tap into a multitude of universal fears—ghastly characters, home invasions and all manner of things that go bump in the night. The film isn’t as brutal as Michael Haneke’s savagely manipulative home invasion thriller, Funny Games, or as filled with psychological torment as Moreau and Palud’s Them (two films that The Strangers very, very closely resembles). But it will supply you with 90-plus minutes of dry mouth and sweaty hands.
Scary as it is at times, however, it’s almost a better experiment in atmosphere than it is a cohesive film. By morphing the “stalk-and-slash” genre of the ’80s into an endless “stalk-and-stalk” formula, The Strangers becomes like a porn film with no sex—all tease and little pay-off. In the end, the film’s best asset—its starkness—works against it. There are no plot twists or surprise endings, no clear character motivation, no actual explanation as to what’s happening and why. After enduring an hour and a half of deftly staged mortal fear, many viewers may greet the just-as-expected climax with a “That was it, huh?” shrug. With The Strangers, the American horror movie has been successfully stripped bare. Now, perhaps, it’s time to build it back up.
