Josh Bell
The Strangers should not be at Coachella. The mysterious masked killers from writer-director Bryan Bertino’s unsettling 2008 debut film are horrifying because they are unknowable, without motive or purpose in their brutal terrorization of a young couple. Making them into interchangeable pop-culture horror figures not only misses the point of Bertino’s film but also robs it of some of its disturbing power.
The Strangers showed up at Coachella (and other meme-friendly landmarks like the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign) as a promotion for Lionsgate’s prefab new The Strangers trilogy, which begins with the May 17 release of The Strangers: Chapter 1. The original movie was a passion project for Bertino, which turned into a surprise box-office hit and cult favorite after Universal Pictures postponed its release for nearly a year. It arrived as a stealth phenomenon, much like the Strangers themselves, inflicting the same kind of visceral terror on the audience as the trio of killers inflict on their victims.
From the opening title cards and stolid narration that recall The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Strangers evokes familiar horror traditions while making them feel immediate and unpredictable, right up to its final stinger. Those title cards claim that the movie is based on a true story, but as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the definition of “true” is flexible. “The brutal events that took place there are still not entirely known,” the dour narrator intones, setting up expectations for a movie that will deliberately provide no answers.
Bertino also provides only minimal information about his main characters, just enough to understand their emotional state before they are attacked in the seemingly cozy remote vacation home where they’ve arrived following a friend’s wedding. James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler) are introduced with their faces bathed in the red reflection of a stoplight, an obvious but evocative foreshadowing of the violence to come. They return to a house decked out with rose petals, candles, and champagne, the remnants of a now-futile romantic gesture that James planned to follow his marriage proposal.
While their relationship is now fractured following Kristen’s rejection of James’s proposal, The Strangers isn’t a movie about a couple coming back together in the face of terrible adversity. James is petulant and distant, although he tries to be tender, and it’s easy to see the seed of Kristen’s reluctance in the way he dismisses her initial fears about the home invaders who arrive when he’s out taking a drive to clear his head. Even after he sees one of the three masked intruders, he tries to downplay the danger, offering to talk to them and resolve the problem.
“They don’t want to talk,” Kristen tells him, which is all the explanation necessary for who they are and what they’re after. The Strangers have only a handful of lines of dialogue in the entire movie, beginning when the youngest, designated in the credits as Dollface (Gemma Ward), knocks on the couple’s door, inquiring, “Is Tamara home?” The odd specificity of her request makes it scarier, especially when she returns to ask a second time. “See you later,” she says when they first send her away, in the most offhand way of promising further harm.
James’ unwarranted bravado eventually evaporates in the face of the Strangers’ unrelenting assault, and part of what makes their invasion so scary is how banal it often is. Instead of delivering threats, they write “hello” in lipstick all over the house’s window. Many of their actions are indistinguishable from annoying but harmless teenage pranks, just making loud noises or standing motionless and staring.
Bertino derives maximum terror from the Strangers’ constant background presence, especially in the first appearance of the apparent leader, known as Man in Mask (Kip Weeks). He looms in the hallway behind Kristen as she looks out the window for the people she assumes are still outside her locked, secure house. The Strangers constantly destroys that sense of domestic security and peace, as the attackers intrude on even the couple’s most intimate moments.
They first arrive when James and Kristen are about to have what looks like make-up sex, and their assault reveals further fractures in the couple’s harmony. When James struggles to assemble and load the shotgun left behind by his father in the family home, Kristen is confused by his difficulty, since he told her that he often used to go hunting. The pointless lie he once told, perhaps to impress her when they started dating, now takes on life-or-death stakes.
That attention to detail, which extends to keeping track of Kristen’s leg injury after she falls while running away, is what makes The Strangers so immersive and so scary. The invaders’ eventual explanation for their actions (“Because you were home”) has become an iconic horror line for a reason, encapsulating everything terrifying about the chaos and cruelty of modern life. A trilogy that expands “the world of The Strangers” is anathema to everything Bertino achieved. An opening flash-forward shows the crime scene left shockingly as-is, and that’s how viewers should approach the movie, too.
“The Strangers’ Is streaming on Max.
