Talking Shit About Movies - The Strangers
Have you ever tried eating popcorn with a numb hand? Of course I made the inevitable jokes prior to watching The Strangers, how you’d have to sit on your left hand until it became numb and feed yourself popcorn so it felt like someone else was doing it, but this movie startled my wife so frequently in the first half hour that I really couldn’t feel my left hand due to her GI Joe kung fu grip. And don’t just write that off as her being a fraidy cat, either. The Strangers is fucking scary.
I have to admit; the movie poster and trailer didn’t do too much to sway me to watch this movie. Oh boy, I thought, another stupid horror movie. That guy has a bag on his head… Oooh, scary. And Liv Tyler. That would’ve been awesome. Ten years ago. Okay, that’s a bit extreme. She’s still pretty hot.
I’ve tried to see what the kids see in these new horror movies, really I have, but there just hasn’t been much there for me. At least in the eighties, when horror movies were really bad there was gratuitous nudity to distract you. Not so with the latest crop of Japanese remakes or eighties slasher rehashers, which substitute the original movies’ grittiness or camp for pretty faces to market and cheap scares. So you’ll understand why I wasn’t too jazzed for another horror movie with another pretty face.
My prejudgment couldn’t have been more wrong. The Strangers scared the shit out of me. Like looking out the windows and double-checking that all the doors are locked before I went to bed scared the shit out of me. It didn’t give me bad dreams, and I was back to my devil-may-care single checking that doors are locked the next night, but it scared me like few horror movies ever have, and probably ever will.
The funny thing is the opening shots of the movie pretty much show you the ending. Some people may be put off by this apparent spoiler in the beginning, but it adds an even greater dread throughout the film. You know what’s coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it but see how it plays out, every agonizing moment of it. The film is deliberately paced and almost excruciating in the cat and mouse game played between our protagonists and their tormentors.
The Strangers starts with couple James and Kristen, played by Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler, on their way out to the country on an awkwardly silent drive. James’ plans for a nice romantic night after a friend’s wedding have been dashed by his own failed marriage proposal to Kristen. This provides its own level of tension as James and Kristen have to make the best of their situation while isolated, forcing them to confront the three-hundred pound gorilla in the room. All of the sudden their insular bubble of awkwardness is shattered by a knock on the door. A girl whose face is cloaked in shadow asks for someone who isn’t there, and as quickly as she comes she leaves. Kind of an odd visit for four in the morning, no?
James leaves to get Kristen a pack of cigarettes and we see her alone in the living room when a man in a crude mask made out of a sack appears from out of the shadows, giving the viewers their first jolt. And just as quickly he retreats back into the shadows. Thus starts the game, innocently enough at first: the smoke detector that Kristen knocks to the floor ends up neatly on a chair. Then things get progressively more sinister.
I’ll leave the shocks and scares for the cinema, but first time filmmaker Brian Bertino really hits it out of the park on his debut. Cheap scares are foregone (for the most part) for the slow, deliberate building and sudden releasing of tension. Filmed more or less from the perspective of the young couple, the movie puts the audience in the same boat as them. We’re living through every minute at the same time they are, so the shocks are more genuine. It’s one of those movies where you feel uneasy and shift and squirm in your seat while the characters are being chased or trapped or stalked.
The Strangers is one of the most satisfying movies I’ve seen all year. Even with slightly heightened expectations from a positive review I read, the movie exceeded any preconceived notions I may have had. Bertino set the bar rather high for himself, perhaps carrying the torch in the twenty-first century for the return of the Hitchcockian thriller, leading those of us looking for a horror movie that you don’t have to be fourteen to enjoy through the forest of CGI laden shit. Or maybe this blind pig found a truffle. Either way, The Strangers was thoroughly enjoyable, as enjoyable as something like this can be, and I look forward to more movies like it.