Newly released on Blu-Ray by Second Sight, The Strangers is undoubtedly one of the most influential horror films of this millennium. Now, the French film Ils (Them) might have come first, but in the Anglosphere The Strangers seemed pretty fresh in 2008. Actually, I’ve long believed that The Strangers was conceptualised as an official remake of Ils, but the negotiations fell through or something and so Hollywood gussied it up and called it an original concept. That’s my pet conspiracy theory, and I think it’s a harmless one as these things go. I also think, regardless, it was inevitable that some American film or other would appear and create the home-invasion fad. Its time had come, as one of the many threads of a horror boom in the 2000s-early 10s. There were the found-footage films, the torture flicks, the remakes of 70s-80s classics, the Insidious/Conjuring demon movies – what are our major horror trends now? The Pope’s Exorcist? A trickle of Conjurings that no-one really cares about? A failed name-recognition Exorcist reboot? A new Strangers trilogy – oh, we’ve come full circle. Hello again!
So how does The Strangers hold up – hard to believe it’s already sixteen years old and counting. Well, we meet our central characters straight out the gate. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman immediately strike us as incredibly awkward, unlikeable, stiff and not altogether human characters. The reasoning is that Liv turned down Scott’s proposal, which is pretty awkward when you’re already cohabiting but eh – the heart wants what it wants. This plot element is designed to lend some emotional torque to our central couple, though really I feel that more drama would be wrung from a truly in-love couple going through the Hell the screenwriters plotted out. Or perhaps it’s just an acting failure; after all, Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman aren’t exactly Bogart and Bacall, are they? Perhaps more pertinently – they aren’t Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, who spent Don’t Look Now as a couple visibly falling apart, but they were both people you wanted to like, you wanted to root for. After half an hour with Liv and Scott, you feel that a vigilante home invasion might be justified. Pop up at the window, say “Boo!”, and tell them to, for God’s sake, put the ice cream back in the freezer. Do you want ants?
Mind you, that’s a minor infraction. Less forgiveable is Scott’s flat-out refusal to believe anything, absolutely anything, his would-be fiancée says. These characters – husbands, boyfriends, fathers – who attribute everything their female loved ones say to hysteria are pretty irritating in the ghost or demonic possession subgenres. But at least there they have something of an excuse. If you don’t believe in ghosties or Hellhounds, it’s obviously going to take a lot to convince you otherwise. But there’s no supernatural element in The Strangers. Scott is such an incredible misogynist that his response to his clearly terrified partner clutching a knife and telling him she’s been threatened is instant doubt; and even once he’s seen his car windows smashed out, experienced a minor assault, and just generally witnessed that yes, there are masked freaks on his property – his natural instinct is to distrust Liv. I don’t know about you, but in that scenario it seems believable to me that the evil bad guys stole and destroyed Liv’s phone. But Scott really, really hates women a lot.
And that makes him difficult to care about, and in any film of this genre it does usually help if you have some level of affection for the protagonist. You don’t have to love them; Janet Leigh in Psycho is a thief, Bruce Campbell in The Evil Dead is a moron, Marilyn Burns in Texas Chain Saw is a hippy, but these are easy enough sins to forgive, because the characters are easy to like, identify with, and root for.
As for the titular Strangers, they’re only intermittently compelling as horror villains. There are three of them, a man and two women, and all of them keep masks on throughout the ordeal, which is a good touch – like Michael Myers, these are embodiments of malevolence more so than human beings. The mask that the man wears is horrifying, a classic piece of horror design that belongs up there with Ghostface and Leatherface. It’s just frightening, purely as an image. The two women’s masks don’t reach this level, and every time you see them the film starts to feel pretty silly. They’re both cutesy “Babydoll” masks, and they really don’t spell malevolence to me. The brunette Stranger brings to mind Clara Bow or Betty Boop more so than, oh, Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer.
But if Michael Myers can be scary in a William Shatner mask, Fred Krueger can be scary in a Christmas jumper and Jason Vorhees can be scary as a hockey goalie, then I reckon any get-up, no matter how silly, is potentially scary. The main problem with these Strangers is that they seem more like prankster teenagers than anything else. For more than half of the runtime, their menace extends mostly to doing things like knocking on the door and running away, writing “Hello” in lipstick on a window, and putting on an old country record. It’s true, a lot of people really hate country music, so maybe that last one could count as an act of terrorism – but did the Strangers bring their own Merle Haggard LP with them, hoping Liv was hipster enough to own a turntable in 2008? Or is it one of her own records? Did they flip through her collection looking for something they liked? I haven’t put on my copy of In the Court of the Crimson King in a while, but I daresay that if a home invader stuck it on, at least part of me would appreciate their taste. We who are about to die salute you!
Eventually, these cats get real, and move on to actually wanting to kill Liv and Scott. What this entails is a lot of silly running around where the plot isn’t advanced at all. Now they’ve chased Liv outside – now she’s back inside – now she’s outside again – back indoors. The impression is that, beyond “it’s a home invasion” and “this mask is creepy”, there isn’t a story. Granted, the entire subgenre isn’t heavy on plot and doesn’t need to be, but when we see Ethan Hawke in The Purge, or Laurie Strode in Halloween‘s final act, there is some level of meaningful cat-and-mouse going on. Not so here, where the bad guys can slip into your house noiselessly, extensively redecorate in seconds, tap you on the shoulder only to be gone when you turn around – at this point, why bother making a home-invasion thriller and not a haunted-house movie? Knowing that ghosts can apparate and disapparate at will, you’re spared the mental image of these terrifying Strangers pitter-pattering away at high speed, undoubtedly giggling to themselves, after their latest mischief.
The script, by Bryan Bertino who also directed, is lazy in this regard, and its disinclination to make its villains truly sadistic really undermines the scary visuals that Bertino actually handles very well, especially early on where he allows his villains to slip, casually, into frame where less subtle filmmakers would punctuate their appearances with a scare chord and maybe a snap zoom. It is a good-looking film, and makes good use of its limited space. In some ways, it’s unsurprising that it became so influential. It’s got a story so simple that any hack could rewrite it in a few hours, a single shooting location to keep costs down, a universally scary premise, and a cast of only about six people. It’s practically designed to please horror crowds and Hollywood accountants alike, and that demonstrates skill on Bertino’s part, but watching it 15+ years later that’s all that emerges.
Still, to be clear: Bertino is no hack. He makes this excessively clear in his hour-long interview on the disc, “Because You Were Home”, name-dropping everything from A Woman Under the Influence to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Liv Tyler, in “The Fighter”, also professes her horror fandom, even mentioning Oliver Stone’s obscure early effort The Hand as a formative influence; Laura Margolis, in “The Pin Up Girl”, is less of a gorehound, yet her modesty respecting acting is wholesome. More informative is “Cutting Moments”, in which editor Kevin Greutert goes over his career as an editor and director, from Disney live-action pictures such as George of the Jungle 2, to working on every Saw film, whether in an editorial, directing or producing capacity, and goes into some detail on the editing challenges of The Strangers, including several scenes you might never have given a second thought to the logic of. “The Element of Terror” and “Strangers at the Door” both feature short clips from various cast and crew interviews, but probably the best reason for enthusiasts to pick up this disc is the presence of the original theatrical cut as well as an extended version. Finally to round things out, there are two inconsequential deleted scenes and the inevitable trailer (actually, the trailer’s more effective than the feature film).