The Strangers writer-director Brian Bertino struggles to get scares out of this poorly paced and increasingly incoherent disappointment
Every now and then, Hollywood comes across a hit that can’t be neatly replicated, a one-off success story that should be praised, noted and promptly left well alone. The Strangers wasn’t supposed to do all that much back in 2008, released almost two years after it was made on the cheap, pushed around the schedule like it was toxic waste. But it was a surprise summer sleeper, making almost 10 times its budget and quickly entering the horror iconography hall of fame, with its nightmarishly mismatched masked villains and the chillingly hollow “Because you were home” non-explanation.
A tortured decade of stop-start attempts to make a follow-up finally resulted in 2018’s underwhelming remix The Strangers: Prey at Night, a sequel entirely devoid of the clammy tension that made the original so unbearably effective. That really should have been the last hurrah but, inevitably it was not, a three-part reboot kicking off last year with The Strangers: Chapter 1, a rubbishy Slovakia-filmed do-over only outdone for head-smashing pointlessness by its sequel, which flopped in and out of cinemas last month (I would expect the third to go straight to streaming). All of this started with writer-director Bryan Bertino, whose post-Strangers career has been similarly awkward, with projects scrapped (including a Sam Raimi-produced horror called The Man) and non-entities like Mockingbird and The Monster failing to register with even the most devoted of horror fans. He had a little bit more luck with 2020’s grim rural horror The Dark and the Wicked but it hasn’t been the ascent of a bold new voice in the genre that many had expected and his latest is a disappointing reminder of exactly what’s been lost since 2008.
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