Refamiliarise yourself with the strangers

Ten years after The Strangers, an intense home-invasion torture-horror, we finally get the sloppy seconds. The director of the first film, Bryan Bertino, returns as a writer, but The Strangers: Prey By Night is helmed by Johannes Roberts.

On a trip to see relatives, a family of four find themselves set upon by three masked murderers. We’re along for the ride with a moody teenage girl who is due to be shipped off to a boarding school because of her bad behaviour, but those plans are soon scuppered in a holiday home park in off-season.

If you enjoyed the first film, don’t expect the same kind of horror this time around. It’s a glaring misstep by the writers; they’ve gone from preying on our fear of strangers getting into our homes and the violence between the parties, to a straight-to-DVD slasher. Kept is the element of an eerie beginning, with one of the strangers knocking and asking for a friend, her face shrouded in darkness, before walking off into the barren, misty night. But that’s it, from there it is hard to care.

In removing the “trapped-in-the-house” element, they’ve undone the power of the strangers. The first film wasn’t solely set in doors, but you felt like the home was violated. Now, running around a listless landscape, it’s simply a series of escalating chase scenes (and not good ones, as we have no bearings in this landscape of similar looking static homes). One notably enjoyable section is set by the park pool, with gaudy, neon illuminations in the dark night and Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ blaring out while violent atrocities occur.

‘It’s the sign of a cheap horror film if it implements jump-scares rather than creating tension and atmosphere’

The lack of sympathy for these events is not only derived from the dull location – no one cares about a holiday park – but also from the fact that the family are so two-dimensional. You might recognise Christina Hendricks as the mum, from her Mad Men days, but even she is a poorly realised screen mother.

Possible spoiler in this next paragraph, so if you plan on seeing it, skip ahead.

Let’s talk about horror tropes here, and in a way I’m probably going to spoil the movie by highlighting the big one: the final girl. ‘The final girl’ is the battler and survivor, sometimes virtuous but this time someone who is deemed to deserve the punishment; it is a weak and flimsy play to make in this day and age without adding anything new. I’ll have to leave that there, because the more I say, the more of the plot I’d have to reveal.

Jump-scares. You want ‘em? Come and get ‘em. It’s the sign of a cheap horror film if it implements jump-scares rather than creating tension and atmosphere. It’s not like there is a lot for gore fans to enjoy either, as I think the first film was probably more brutal. In fairness, the soundtrack is an attempt to mix things up, but seems oddly lumped in when the first film didn’t rely on this. Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids In America’ is used early on, and could be a clever statement about the violence on, and perpetrated by, kids in America, but that all goes out of the windows in favour of using an array of cheesy 80s pop songs.

The trio of strangers themselves are given less time to be foreboding, and become almost magical in this film. They appear in all sorts of places, covering vast distances, seemingly able to predict where the family will hide in a holiday home full of locations – Dollface even appears suddenly in tunnel where she clearly wasn’t in the previous shot. This takes the reality away from the film, and thus dilutes the consequences therein.

Aside from that one pool scene, the film doesn’t present anything interesting, cinematically or narratively,  which makes you wonder how this got the go-ahead for cinematic release. At best it would be something you could “stick on” via a streaming service when you’re not going out on a saturday night, and that’s being kind.