The Twenty-Second Night of Halloween: The Strangers

ON THE TWENTY-SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Strangers (2008), by Bryan Bertino. In this minimalist home invasion picture, Liv Tyler plays a young woman who is put in the awkward situation of having to spend the night at her boyfriend’s cabin after turning down his marriage proposal (presumably because, as we are deftly shown, he is a petulant and controlling jerk). Their make-up sex is interrupted by some rude visitors pounding on their door. These visitors are the kind that wear masks and like to play tricks, more and more alarming tricks.

This is an expertly stripped down work of terror cinema. Once the invasion kicks off at the twenty minute mark, the entire next hour—until the bloody concluding button—is occupied with an unrelenting cat-and-mouse ordeal. The trio of enigmatically masked cats here seem to have no purpose other than to provoke, sustain, and elevate the couple’s abject fear. These three make up a kind of family, consisting of a tall man, a mature woman, and a teenage girl. So, in addition to cats toying with trapped mice, we are put in mind of the three bears and Goldilocks, and the wolf pounding on the little pig's door as well. These allusions to children’s fairy tales of course contrast with The Strangers’ brutal horror, but they also reflect the deliberate simplicity of the characters. Like the filmmakers themselves, the masked invaders have fixed their focus completely on orchestrating scares for a captive audience. In this way, The Strangers is a better successor to Carpenter’s original Halloween than any of the actual Halloween sequels, reboots, or legacy retcons. The strangers resemble Michael Myers in that they are empty shapes serving a pure narrative function. Only one of the strangers speaks and then only in disaffected monosyllables; when the couple asks why they are doing this to them, the reply is, “You were home.”

Bertino has said that he based The Strangers in part on the Manson family murders. And it opens with a chyron explaining, “What you are about to see is inspired by true events.” I usually like this sort of prologue. Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s opening text works particularly well at supplying further verisimilitude to its palpably grimy realism. And my favorite instance pokes fun at itself: Return of the Living Dead, a movie in which a taxidermized dog comes to life and the US military nukes a midwestern town, begins with the lines, “The events portrayed in this film are all true. The names are real names of real people and real organizations.” (However, I totally bought this the first time I saw it at age eight with my uncle and cousin at the drive-in; for months afterward, I was convinced that every pedestrian over 60 was a brain-eating ghoul.) Here though, I think it’s a misstep, since the story as told has such mythic generality. Maybe it would have worked better if the chyron had been moved to the end or had been replaced with relevant true crime headlines running under the end credits. Regardless, like the original Halloween, we are left shaken by the sense that this sort of thing has happened and could happen again, anywhere, anytime—perhaps tonight, in your house.