“Why are they doing this to us?”
I was followed once. I was taking a nighttime walk right on the border of Burbank and North Hollywood, CA, not going anywhere in particular, just ambling to clear my head. As I walked up and down Clybourne Avenue, I noticed what looked like a car I had seen before. I didn’t like how it felt, so I took a right. The car did too. I took a left. Same story. Eventually I made my way to a park, where I hid behind the restroom. I saw the car circle the park twice, even once saw the beam of a flashlight from the back seat. I guess they got bored, because after a few minutes of looking for me, they left.
I’m not comparing my (admittedly tame) anecdote to the experience of anyone in a horror film, let alone The Strangers: Prey at Night. But there’s something universal about the fear of being followed, the idea that you’re only alone until someone decides that you’re not. It’s at that point that you lose agency, and that is what fear is made of. Both Strangers films play upon this fear, and each, while uneven, do so in a mostly satisfactory way. While Bryan Bertino’s original film was more of a slasher flick, Johannes Roberts’ Prey at Night aims for Grand Guignol spectacle, and is far more stylish and imaginative than its predecessor.
Kinsey (Bailee Madison) is headed to boarding school. She’s flippant and rebellious, and really resents being carted off. But off she goes, in the company of her parents, Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and Mike (Martin Henderson). They drag her brother, Luke (Lewis Pullman) along, in what is frankly a major plot contrivance. They plan to stay the night at the lakeside trailer of some relatives. It isn’t tourist season, so the place is deserted. And in the middle of nowhere. You can see where this is going.
At first, things just seem…off. Things start to seem amiss when Mike notices leftovers in the refrigerator (this isn’t followed up on, but it’s still eerie). Soon a woman is knocking at the door, shrouded in shadow, asking if Tamara is home. One of the pleasures of the Strangers films is that they traffic in the realm of urban legend. Roberts has a hard needle to thread here, as the characters have to both conform to and subvert horror movie tropes. Meaning, it’s hard to believably separate characters, but Prey at Night does a decent job of it, with Luke going out to talk to a distraught Kinsey, leaving Cindy and Mike to wonder what’s going on in their lives. Hendricks and Henderson are good together; beyond seeming like a couple, they also seem like friends. Hendricks outshines Henderson, but frankly that isn’t hard – Hendricks is an actress of uncommon charisma, while Henderson is the picture of blandness.
That being said, the performances across the board are solid. Madison and Pullman do especially nice work. They’re believable as teenagers, and Madison does a good job selling Kinsey as someone who uses a tough, aloof facade as a way to mask her pain and fear. Pullman isn’t afraid to show Luke being scared, and he adds considerable emotional weight to the film just by turning to Mike and saying “Dad, I’m scared.” Henderson, as mentioned, can’t rise to Hendricks’ level, but he gets in a solid death scene. He doesn’t go quickly or quietly, and the scene verges on the edge of genuinely upsetting.
The Strangers movies aren’t about gore. They’re not even about terror – they’re about dread. Neither Mike nor Cindy make it out of the film alive, and what’s so dreadful isn’t the manner in which they’re dispatched, but the fact that they’re so trapped when it happens. There’s a grim inevitability to their deaths, and the fact that they both die saving their children doesn’t make it any easier to watch.
The killers – Dollface, Pinup, and the Masked Man – are some clever inventions. They’re mostly nonverbal (only Dollface gets any dialogue) so their physicality has to work for the movie. The Masked Man is the most frightening, with his iconic sackcloth mask and its playful half smile, and when he gets in Mike’s car, calmly changing the radio station until he finds a song suitable to kill Mike to, we get a sense of just how inconsequential all of this is to them.
More than any other horror films in recent memory (save for maybe Brightburn), the Strangers movies capture the terror of nihilism. This family did nothing to wrong the killers; they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This could have happened to anyone. Prey at Night is akin to Funny Games in that sense (but without that film’s indictment of the audience); we feel like this is mundane to the killers.
In many ways, Prey at Night is more stylish and accomplished than its predecessor. Roberts has a bigger sandbox to play in, and some of his set pieces are terrific. There are some nice homages here (the flaming pickup truck is a clear reference to John Carpenter’s Christine), and the swimming pool fight between Luke and the Masked Man is, in my opinion at least, instantly iconic, with its blaring ’80s music and neon palm trees. (“Total Eclipse of the Heart” plays during this sequence, like some Nicolas Winding Refn fever dream.) The seemingly incongruous marriage of music and imagery works to the film’s benefit, and recalls David Fincher’s use of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” in the beginning of Zodiac.
The film isn’t perfect. It ends on an unnecessary cliffhanger, but it asks the question: how much danger are we imagining? Bailee Madison does a great job of playing someone who will be traumatized for the rest of her life. And that was arguably the killers’ intent. The true terror of The Strangers: Prey at Night, and films like it, is not in the execution. It’s in the implication. What if everyone around you wanted to hurt you? Sure, statistically, that’s not the case. Strangers on the street don’t want to hurt or kill people for the sheer fun of it.
But what if they did?
10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation
10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter
10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
10/5: Kill List / A Field in England
10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep
10/9: Cube / Creep 2
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual
10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan
10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond
10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow
10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem
10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster
10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound
10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed
10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy
10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void
10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon
10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie
10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder
10/28: High Tension / You’re Next
10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug
10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires
10/31: Saw / Saw II
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