Here in the UK, up until a year or so ago we had a long-running TV show called Crimewatch UK. The premise of the show was that it would show reconstructions and appeals of unsolved crimes from all over the country that the police needed help to solve, and people would call in with any information they had. The hosts of the show would end each episode with a comment to the audience: "Don't have nightmares; sleep well," which was often a bit of a lofty request after watching an hour's worth of armed robberies, rapes and murder reconstructions happening to people just like you. Certainly, the show both terrified and fascinated me in equal measure. It's also why I think an alternate title for The Strangers could easily be Crimewatch UK: The Movie.
James and Kristen have returned home from a wedding reception in the early hours of the morning. There's an awkward silence between them - we learn that James proposed to Kristen that evening but she turned him down; as a result of this James calls his friend Mike to ask him to come and pick him up from the holiday home the couple are staying at. This awkwardness soon proves to be the least of their problems, however, as after a strange girl comes knocking on their door at 4 am and asking for "Tamara", the couple find themselves being terrorised by a trio of masked strangers - two female and one male - who stalk them inside and outside the house, blocking their attempts to escape or call for help and gradually growing more violent. Who are these masked strangers and what do they want with James and Kristen?
The fear of a "face at the window", especially at night, is a more common fear than people probably realise, even if there's not an actual phobia term for it (the closest term is scopophobia, a fear of being watched in general). I myself have suffered from it for most of my life - which made going to bed in my teenage years an interesting experience, as I had to walk past large windows in the dark to get to my bedroom - and so I think that might have influenced my feelings on The Strangers somewhat, because I find the film really, really unnerving. It's like someone made a movie of one of my long-standing fears that wasn't Arachnophobia. The very idea of people terrorising you in your isolated home, in the middle of the night, for no discernable reason - regardless of the levels of violence or lack thereof - strikes a chord with me and, I suspect, many others, and so for the sheer creeping-out factor The Strangers succeeds as a scary movie. The poster image above, of Kristen standing alone in a room, unaware of the masked assailant there with her, is a prime example of dramatic irony done right, as we can easily imagine ourselves in her position (and most of us probably have at some point, in fact), and so the tension is increased without anyone actually having to do anything.
I appear to be on a mini-run of "based on a true story" movies at the moment, as The Strangers is yet another movie to claim that. According to the director Bryan Bertino, when he was a child a stranger came to his door asking for someone who didn't live there and then left. Afterwards, the family learned that there had been break-ins in the neighbourhood that night. There's also been some speculation that the film was loosely based on the Keddie murders of 1981 and/or that the film is a remake of the 2006 French film Them (Ils), but there's no real evidence for either of those connections beyond plot similarities.
The Strangers is also a relatively bloodless movie, aside from the final act and one other moment in the film which I shan't discuss because of SPOILERS. It relies almost entirely on the tension and psychological horror of the home invasion to get its message across and keep its audience enthralled, and I personally think it succeeds in this pretty well. It's got a minimal cast and the majority of the film takes place in the house, which combine to make sure we feel the claustrophobia and isolation that James and Kristen feel as they're terrorised by this mysterious trio. There's a sequel out now (or it will be coming out next month for those of us in the UK), and I'm interested to see if the filmmakers are able to capture the lightning in a bottle that this first film did, or whether making a sequel to a film such as this only dilutes the terror it caused in up the first time around.
Don't have nightmares; sleep well.
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