The Strangers

Went to see The Strangers by myself last night. Didn't go to the cinema myself as 'the guys' came along too, but they all wanted to see Hellboy 2 and I'd already seen that (the fact that I haven't reviewed it here is down to the fact that I neither loved it nor hated it enough to say much beyond 'it was alright' or 'visually stunning, just not very gripping'). The general consensus was that The Strangers would be rubbish - but then as my erstwhile colleagues spent a good part of the pre-film get-together singing the praises of The Clone Wars cartoon (I'm sorry, but Lucas is not getting another penny from me after the prequels), and then went on to applaud Van Helsing (which must have been on TV the other night, and again I had little time for - what a waste of those wonderful old Universal monsters), I'm not sure we've all been to the same movie appreciation classes anyway.

Louise didn't want to see The Strangers either as she doesn't like 'realistic' horror films. That is, she loves vampires and zombies and monsters and aliens, but finds the kind of horror films that could actually happen a little too disturbing. She came to this conclusion after seeing the French flick, They ('Ils') which shares an almost identical premise to The Strangers: a young couple in a remote farmhouse being terrorised by largely unseen assailants who turn out to be motiveless young people / kids. It's becoming a bit of a genre at the moment - a British movie in the same vein, Eden Lake, opens in the UK this weekend.

Horror films have always drawn on society's fears, which is why the space age / atomic era / Cold War 50's gave us so many UFO / mutant monster / invasion flicks... why stalk-and-slash came to prominence in the 80's in the wake of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy... and why Cloverfield played so successfully on post-9/11 paranoia. But this new recurring theme of being terrorised by psychotic teens plays directly to our fears over the (perceived? media-fuelled?) growth in youth crime and violence, and even (as Peter Bradshaw explains in his review of Eden Lake) the grown-up fear of out-of-control youth. We're most scared by the unknown - and the unexplainable is just another facet of that. When asked by a desperate Liv Tyler "why are you doing this?", the faceless strangers here simply answer, "because you were in". There's no logic, no motive - you can't argue with common sense or human decency or even the threat of consequence. And what could be more frightening than that?

The other way that The Strangers scores the scares is in its "you're not even safe in your home" message. This isn't a gang of youths met on a street corner or outside a pub, it's a gang that specifically target - and quite easily gain entry to - the home of their victims. We all like to believe that when we lock the door at night, we lock the nastiness outside. But unless you live in a fort, or you've got your own built-in panic room - if somebody really wants to get in, they will. Yeah, you can fight back... but violence can so easily backfire (as illustrated in the film's sole disappointingly predictable moment) and what are you left with then?

The Strangers is a masterclass in building suspense using the best of the old-fashioned horror movie tool box. No graphic violence or gore, no special effects - for the majority of the film, it's all about the threat. Obviously there has to be a pay-off to that threat at the climax, but even then artful editing means that we only ever 'see' the violence in our minds. For the most part, the scares come from bumps in the night, objects being moved, and the appearance of a masked face. Masks are probably the scariest device the filmmakers employ (and to an extent, they always have been - see Jason or Michael Myers or even the Scream killer) and amazingly, the film's biggest jump comes from a moment that had already been shown in the trailer - hell, it's even visible in the poster above if you squint - as Tyler moves through the empty house, thinking herself safe inside, unaware that a masked intruder is watching her silently from the shadows. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the whole cinema went "Shit!", it's just a beautiful piece of audience manipulation. And the fact that we never see the faces of the evil-doers - even when the masks do eventually come off - is probably the smartest move made.

The Strangers isn't flawless. The voice-over at the start is completely unnecessary and the tension does flag in the final act, though first-time writer/director Bryan Bertino wisely keeps the running time to an absolute minimum (just over an hour and a quarter) - any more and he'd strain both credibility and his audience's patience. He does keep a couple of nice little moments till the end, including an amusing postscript in which the amoral Strangers come face-to-face with their exact opposites, a pair of door-to-door preaching kids. There's more than enough here to mark Bertino out as a filmmaker to watch - if watching horror films is your thing.

Next week, I might just have to check out Eden Lake in comparison.