by Justin Query

***

Scream Factory’s 4K UHD Collector’s Edition of ‘The Strangers’ (2008) will invade homes on September 10th — sooner than some will have hoped, if they’ve never seen the inimitable home invasion thriller about two lovers terrorized by a trio of nihilistic killers. Now is the perfect time to reflect upon this deceptively terrifying slasher film about the murder of romantic bliss.

***

“Why are you doing this?” Kristen asks the three masked home invaders in the final moments of writer-director Bryan Bertino’s heart-stopping 2008 thriller The Strangers. The response she receives is more terrifying than any moment of suspense or violence illustrated throughout the film. “Because you were home,” she is told. And it’s simply as brutal and primal as that. There is no other explanation except that we are most vulnerable where we sometimes think we are most invulnerable, at home.

Of all the places you’ve ever known, your home should be that singular location where you feel safe from the dangers that threaten you in the outside world. But cinema has toyed with that assumption to wondrous effect over time. Among others, in 1951, the Black Lagoon was invaded by scientists who thereby turned the tragic Creature into the film’s apparent – and apparent, here, means tragic – monster, defending himself and his home. A suburban home, meanwhile, became a battleground in 1990 when Kevin McAllister had to creatively defend his house from burglars. Lastly, in 2002, a divorced mother was forced to protect her new home from the inside of a claustrophobic and impenetrable panic room. Sometimes, the home is the last battleground where you protect yourself, representing that Last Stand, where the war will ultimately be lost or won. Unfortunately, a fateful, losing battle in the home is what Bertino allegorizes in his slasher-home invasion hybrid thriller, telling the story of a couple once in love and now rendered asunder, the hosts of a narrative of the death of romance. The film is not simply the story of psychotic home invaders but of a couple’s love coming to a sudden and inevitable end for no other reason but that it was time that it ended.

Simply because they were home for it.

Sometimes, that’s the way love goes.

The Strangers is the story of Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman), who have just spent the evening at a friend’s wedding as the film begins. It’s clear that James used the opportunity to propose marriage to Kristen while at the reception. What is also apparent is that Kristen isn’t ready for their relationship to make that leap. While the audience doesn’t see it, she rebukes his proposal. Now, spending the evening in the Hoyt family home – ornamented with rose petals and champagne and a flowing nightgown for the bride-to-be – in an uncomfortably irrecoverable silence, the couple are at first harassed and then inexplicably terrorized by a trio of masked assailants intent on taking their lives for no reason whatsoever.

As much as the masked villains of slasher films have made helpless coeds the targets of their sharpened and blunt objects, the films themselves have generated a reputation for being little more than violence cloaked in unnecessary nudity and even less character development. When the faceless killer wasn’t hounding its victims according to unwritten rules of morality – don’t have sex, don’t have drugs, don’t have notions that you’ll survive, etc. – they were entertaining the audience with more and more gruesome acts of violence. In this way, slasher films have never been championed as saying something artful about the genre, let alone saying something intelligent about the world. If horror is capable of saying anything profound about the real world, the slasher film has consistently remained the last place one would look for social commentary, at least, according to critics.

But Bertino’s film attempts to dispel that myth from the outset. Some of the first images the audience sees are of the innocuous facades of neighborhood homes, each home front seemingly as harmless as the next. In locations such as these, no terror can play out here. In locations such as these, we can anticipate no horror. But behind these masks of comfort hide an opportunity for invasion, a means by which the comfort of home will be destroyed by an invader that we never expected. What we always imagined in our relationships to be a safe space possesses the power to become the most terrifying No Man’s Land in a war to preserve something that will inevitably be lost. In The Strangers, it is love that will be lost.

A heart-shaped shotgun blast through a car window quietly and slowly yet immediately introduces the viewer as the film begins to the notion that we’re not so much about to witness the death of living people as we’re about to witness the death of romance, the death of a relationship. If there is a heart to this film, it’s a shattered heart when the film begins. The motion picture lets you know precisely how this terror will conclude. The Strangers essentially begins at the end, as the film then rolls over upon itself so that we see the couple attending a wedding reception and presumably see the wedding proposal rejection. When the couple returns to the Hoyt family home for what should be a late night of revelry and lovemaking, Kristen lingers on the doorstep as she extinguishes her cigarette. Her behavior is symbolic of her reluctance to enter a home that she ultimately can not inhabit. Despite the couple’s efforts to remind themselves of their love through James’ romantic ornamentation of the house, of the sex that they may have, the faceless assailants that invade their home are too much to be ignored. Kristen may be momentarily attracted to the idea of marriage and the happily ever after – as she tests the engagement ring by putting it on her finger only to discover that she can’t comfortably remove it – but she suddenly finds that she’s trapped by a notion that she fully cannot support. As she struggles to remove this symbol of commitment from her finger, the home’s phone lines are cut off by her anonymous assailants. Now, the couple’s last possibility of communication has been severed. Now, the metaphorical decimation of their affair is complete.

In this way, slasher films have never been championed as saying something artful about the genre, let alone saying something intelligent about the world. If horror is capable of saying anything profound about the real world, the slasher film has consistently remained the last place one would look for social commentary, at least, according to critics.

The Strangers is certainly not Bertino’s only foray into utilizing the recognizable horror tropes for a sociological message. Though The Strangers was his first film as writer-director, Bertino would return with The Monster (2016), a film that transforms the lurking, demonic specter of alcoholism into a physical monster that terrorizes a mother and daughter stranded on an isolated roadside. Here, the specter of addiction is given form in order to terrorize a mother and daughter who desperately hope to survive its assault. He would later write about the inevitable return of the three masked home invaders of The Strangers for a sequel – entitled, Prey At Night (2018) – which would escalate the horror of Bertino’s original film and not stop at the murder of the romantic lovers. The sequel does not simply recreate the destruction of two lovers. Instead, it dismantles the nuclear family entirely, setting sights on a father, mother, older brother, and younger sister. And, finally, in 2020, Bertino wrote and directed The Dark and the Wicked, in which a family comes together to await the death of their elderly patriarch. But the natural mourning that should come soon after his death takes a sinister turn when it appears that their grief was not the final destination here. Far from it – their journey into the monstrous is just beginning. Bertino has remained consistently curious about the relationship between horror and the real world that his films can somehow replicate. The connections that he makes are astute, although perhaps a bit uncomfortable, too close to home.

But too close to home is where horror operates at its best.

What we always imagined in our relationships to be a safe space possesses the power to become the most terrifying No Man’s Land in a war to preserve something that will inevitably be lost. In ‘The Strangers,’ it is love that will be lost.

That’s where Bertino’s film delivers the lethal blow: at the heart of the home, where the viewer is most vulnerable – in fact, closer to the center of the chest than one would imagine – and the reason why is simple. It’s the driving tension that tears this beautiful couple apart in The Strangers, even when it’s disguised as a traditional slasher movie or home invasion film. Like the picture’s villains themselves, the production arrives, masked, and you never saw it coming. Helpless, it’s where you were when the film started, captured in the image of the heart-shaped shotgun blast through a car window. And it’s where you were when the film ended as well. As difficult as it may be to accept, it was always “because you were home.” 

You were always there, and you were likely never going to make it out alive.

Love has the potential to destroy you like that.

The Strangers is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Hulu, Max, and other platforms.

Scream Factory’s 4K UHD release can be ordered here.

***

This piece — written by Justin Howard Query and after some additional editing here — was originally published by another source.