The Strangers: Prey at Night *** ½ / *****
Directed by: Johannes Roberts.
Written by: Ben Ketai based on the screenplay by Bryan Bertino.
Starring: Christina Hendricks (Cindy), Bailee Madison (Kinsey), Martin Henderson (Mike), Lewis Pullman (Luke), Emma Bellomy (Dollface), Damian Maffei (Man in the Mask), Lea Enslin (Pin-Up Girl).
It felt rather lonely in 2008 thinking that Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers was one of the scariest films I had seen in years – most reviews dismissed it as another cheap horror movie, but it was a film that creeped me out to no end. To be fair, home invasion movies do that me more than most horror films do (I rarely get all that scared by movies featuring ghosts for example) – and having kids has only heightened that anxiety. Re-watching The Strangers in the lead up to the long awaited sequel, I was even more impressed by it now than I was then (and seeing how I hadn’t watched it in 10 years, the scares worked again). I’m glad that the film has become a new horror classic in that time. The Strangers: Prey at Night is now here – why it took 10 years to make it, I’ll never know (especially since it as announced right after the original was released), and while it isn’t quite as good as the original, it’s pretty damn close. For horror sequels, it’s tough to do better.
The original film was about a couple, who were already frayed when the film opened – thanks to a proposal gone awry – but for the sequel, the filmmakers have decided to expand that to a family, but has kept the fraying part. After a brief prologue that re-establishes the trio of masked killers – the film sketches this film in strokes that seem broad, but still get to the heart of who they are. Cindy and Mike (Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) are concerned about their teenage daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) – and have decided to ship her off to boarding school (her exact “crimes” are not spoken, but she wears a Ramones t-shirt, and smokes cigarettes). Kinsey is angry at her parents for sending her away, and resentful of her older brother Luke (Lewis Pullman), who she thinks her parents see as the golden child. The family is headed to a trailer park run by an older, drunk uncle for the night before dropping Kinsey off at boarding school. It’s off season, so no one else is going to be around. If you’ve seen the original film you know what will happen next – a knock on the door late at night, a young woman, faced obscured by darkness and long blonde hair asking for “Tamara”, and then escalating terror as that woman is joined by two others, another woman and a man – all wearing fake cheery masks, as they torment the family.
The Strangers: Prey at Night is smart enough to know that it cannot repeat everything from the first film. The original eventually does build to a bloody, bleak climax, but it takes almost its entire runtime to get there, so that for most of the runtime you don’t really know what the masked stranger’s intentions are – they could just be really committed to pulling off a perverse prank. You cannot get away with that twice, so this film doesn’t hide what those intentions are, and while the result is a fairly standard structure of the family members getting picked off one at a time, it also means that once the terror starts, it never really lets up.
Bertino is back as a screenwriter, but not as a director – that falling to Johannes Roberts this time, but improves greatly from last year’s surprise hit 47 Meters Down, starring Mandy Moore and Claire Holt as a pair of sisters, trapped underwater, with diminishing oxygen, as sharks circle above them (that film was effective, but not this effective). Roberts in many ways takes his cues from what Bertino did in the original film (at least when he’s not cribbing from John Carpenter – especially Christine) – there are a lot of shots of the potential horror in the background – we can see them, the characters cannot. Roberts makes great use of the confined spaces inside the trailers – but perhaps even better use of the dark fields around them – providing just enough light to see what’s happening. Sure, he may too heavily on the ironic use of 1980s pop songs against the killings – but that’s a cliché he fully embraces, and works wonderfully.
The result is another horror film that has haunted me for days since seeing it – a truly scary film that may not be original, and may not have quite the impact of the first film, which was one of a number at that time turning horror clichés on its head – but is ruthlessly effective at what it’s doing.
