THE STRANGERS

Breaks-ins of one kind or another have been part of cinema from the beginning and are obviously a staple of the psycho, horror, slasher, exploitation film in particular. But the shocking thing about the above movies are how seriously they take their central premise. These aren’t just thrill rides with subtext, they offer a far more haunting portrait of the world we lock our doors from at night and its ability to disrupt even destroy our lives on a whim. One late night, or even sunny afternoon, you hear a knock at the door, and….

There’s no doubt that The Strangers is somewhat of a mainstream answer to the recent spate of home invasion thrillers that have been too obscure to find a mass audience stateside even when the films have been brilliant. Besides the films already mentioned the French have become the new darlings of Horror via home invasion films like High Tension and the more recent Inside. Even dreck like Vacancy, P2, and other films depending on the stalking concept seem to signal an increased identification with the dread of simple motiveless/irrational violence. Paranoid? Aren’t we all more afraid of losing our homes to the bank than being killed by some psycho? Actually the home invasion scenario simply echoes the concerns of the rest of the horror genre. Like the zombie film or apocalyptic fare like Cloverfield these home invasion movies place the central characters in stories that are increasingly less interested in showing us their monsters than in showcasing the victims terror and highlighting the simple struggle to survive. Whether our world is torn apart at the whim of a giant monster of indeterminate origin, a terrorist, a disgruntled coworker or former lover, or just some guy that got it into his head that torturing us and our kids might be a good way to pass another date-less Saturday night, seems beside the point. Like the zombie film or apocalyptic fare like Cloverfield these home invasion movies place the central characters in stories that are increasingly less interested in their monsters than in the simple struggle to survive as the universe denies the establishing of a safe haven from the breakdown of human society. It’s about psychic weight as much as historic reality. Why is the world this way? Why am I subject to it? Where is goodness?

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman do well in roles that could have been throwaway playing a troubled couple ultimately forced to share one of lifes most intimate experiences at the hands of three masked, seemingly omnipresent strangers who stalk and capture them refusing to reveal anything about themselves or their motives for the attack. Original? Not especially. But the genius of The Strangers is the way that it never softens up. Though you always have the feeling that the scares are little too cinematic, the strangers moving in and out of the frame and making choices exactly the way we expect them to in a horror movie, the effect is still unsettling, the ending still, disturbingly, light years ahead of the simple jumps attempted by wretched remakes like Prom Night that have formed the bulk of mainstream US horror for awhile now. It’s as if after boldly entertaining us with our worst nightmares, The Strangers simply stops, just as boldly, no longer interested in being a simple movie.The thrills stop coming the entertainment level dissipates, leaving us with a jarring reminder that what can pass as good cinema is often just a fantasy used to shield us from the dread that weighs us down as we make our way outside the theater, thru the darkened parking lot, down the familiar driveway, into the last place on earth you’d expect to find a stranger with a knife.