Screenhead

I have to admit, starting from the very moment I caught the trailers for The Strangers, I was downright engrossed.  A movie that revolved around a home invasion in the middle of nowhere, possibly based on a true story??  The very idea had me double-checking the locks on my house doors at night.  After all, I TOO live in the middle of nowhere, and once this kind of terror comes to the middle of nowhere, well, no one’s safe.

The plot, which as I mentioned was based on a true story (to what extent is difficult to say and even harder to prove–I went rummaging around the internet for days after I first heard about it and frankly, I found nothing but a fat lot of nothing), centers on a couple in deep relationship trouble who’ve gone out to a small vacation home to settle their hash and possibly break up.  This agenda is interrupted by the gradually building appearance of three random lunatics who want to kill the couple.

Why?  Well, I’ll tell you that part in a minute.  It may well be the scariest part of the whole movie and I want to spring it on you at the end. Just like they did.

When I actually managed to see The Strangers, it surpassed my every expectation.  Managing to be both claustrophobic and expansive, I still had a hard time believing that this kind of horror could be wrought from such a minimalist design, despite the fact that I’d literally JUST seen it going on in front of my very eyes.  I mean, come on–we’ve got basically five characters.  Everyone else involved in this is essentially a nonperson who’s only got a couple minutes of screen time.  We’ve got one real set–the house and its immediate environs like a barn and a small chunk of woods and a street near the house.  All of this happens in approximately five, maybe six hours of real time (from late night to sunrise that same morning) and the result is a white-hot terror experience unlike literally anything before it.

Seriously–can you find a parallel here?  Anything I could come up with for a parallel on this fell horribly short.  I tried comparing it to early Craven, and came up a complete loss.  I tried Romero, and it wasn’t a good match there either.  A series of titles and directors passed through my mind, and nothing stuck.  If there IS a parallel for The Strangers, man, I wish somebody’d fill me in, because I want to see it.  Especially if it’s anywhere NEAR as good as what I just got done watching.

Oh…and the ending.  Yes, the ending may well be the scariest part of the whole affair.  You see, just before the evil killer types finally catch up with our heroic couple, the female half of the heroic couple makes the mistake of asking her tormentors, why?  Why have they come to kill them?  Surely they haven’t WRONGED these lunatic monsters in some way!

The answer you’ll get out of these wackjobs is easily the single scariest four words I’ve heard in a movie in some time.

For those of you who haven’t seen it–and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do–don’t read the last line.  Because that’s the answer to our heroic couple’s question, and it’s a spoiler:

“Because you were home.”

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