The Strangers – Chapter 2 is hitting theaters soon, continuing the story from the 2024 reboot. The trailer hints at a hospital stalking tale in the vein of 1982’s Halloween II. But it’s hard to imagine any Strangers take ever topping the 2008 original, a brutal slice of home-invasion agony that suggests even the most ruthless evil can be as simple as it is random.
Written and directed by Bryan Bertino, The Strangers is the kind of very-low-budget, high-yield horror flick that studio heads dream about. It also boasts a pretty dreamy cast: Liv Tyler, just a few years past Lord of the Rings, and Scott Speedman, ditto Felicity and Underworld. They’re both excellent in what’s essentially a two-person story—with three masked antagonists chasing them around, of course.
The Strangers opens with a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style announcement that “what you are about to see was inspired by true events.” We get a brief riff on violent crime in America, a quick stage-setting to introduce the main couple, and a warning that “the brutal events that took place are still not entirely known.” Then, we hear a panicked 911 call from one of the kids who discovers the blood-soaked aftermath of what we’re about to see.
Something dreadful is coming. That much is certain. But The Strangers nudges our thoughts away from that as we settle in with James (Speedman) and Kristen (Tyler), driving in awkward silence. They’ve just left a formal event and you can tell something uncomfortable has happened between them.
At first, it feels like a breakup, but we soon learn—as they pull into an isolated vacation home that belongs to James’ family—that James has proposed marriage and been rejected (“I’m just not ready yet,” Kristen explains). The cabin has been pre-decorated for a celebration that isn’t going to happen. The mood is full of raw sadness, though there are still feelings there, evidenced by a romantic interlude that’s turning steamy just as there’s a very unexpected, very unwelcome knock on the door.
This visitor—who says she’s looking for someone named “Tamara,” then flits off with a faintly ominous “See you later”—is the first turning point in The Strangers. At just under 90 minutes, the movie is expertly paced, dropping that scary exposition at the start, followed by a melancholy sequence that’s slowly chipped away by the mounting distress that comes as Kristen—left alone when James dutifully drives off to buy her cigarettes—starts to realize she’s in real trouble. This isn’t a prank. It’s life or death.
The Strangers is set mostly within and around a single dwelling, and the house proves easy for the invaders to penetrate. But they take their time, and the movie carefully draws out the feeling that safety is slipping away, making especially effective use of sound design as a scare tactic.
The sound of a door closing in a supposedly empty house has rarely been so nerve-jangling, but there’s also eerie ambient noise to spare. Is that a twig snapping under a stalker’s foot? Are those wind chimes blowing in the breeze or being manipulated by human hands? The sounds get more jarring: a piercing smoke detector goes off, and the intruders escalate from polite knocking to frantically banging on the doors and walls, terrorizing Kristen and James as well as the audience.
Music is also used quite well to heighten the tension. The score helps tighten the screws, as does a record player in the house that’s used to bring the mournful sounds of Joanna Newsom and Gillian Welch into the story—as well as, later in the film, a particularly well-placed Merle Haggard needle drop.
The Strangers’ most searing visual comes courtesy of the masks worn by the intruders: the Man in the Mask (Kip Weeks), the Pin-Up Girl (Laura Margolis), and Dollface (Gemma Ward). They’re all equally creepy, with the man’s shapeless, sack-like disguise contrasting with the women’s artificially glamorous get-ups.
But while you might think of the masks first when calling The Strangers to mind, re-watching the movie reminds you that the masks aren’t at all the most important takeaway from the film. (Neither is the surprising cameo by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Glenn Howerton, but that’s a fun thing to look out for.)
The Strangers has become a cult favorite because it’s genuinely scary, maximizing the worst-case scenario of being targeted by ruthless killers, but doing it in a stripped-down way that makes it so much more alarming. And the strangers of the title aren’t just killers—they’re intent on playing with their prey, like a cat with a mouse, before delivering the gory climax that’s promised in the movie’s opening moments.
The trailer for The Strangers unfortunately revealed what’s probably its most chilling moment, which is when Kristen and James finally get an answer for the question they’ve been asking the whole time: “Why are you doing this?” The response, of course: “Because you were home.”
The Strangers fiends need no other reason, and it’s implied this is just the latest notch on their belts, as one of the women tells the other, “It’ll be easier next time.” That’s the only glimpse of humanity we get from the trio, and it happens as they drive off from the crime scene, presumably on their way to find some fresh victims. You can see why a sequel (released in 2018) and the reboot series happened; The Strangers leaves a juicy and open-ended premise in its wake.
But you kind of wish it’d stayed in that lonely house on that empty back road. As a standalone nightmare that explains away something completely vicious with “Why?/Because!”—infused with realism that makes you think it could really happen like that—The Strangers has left its lasting mark on the slasher genre.
The Strangers is streaming on Prime Video.
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