12/25/2022 0 Comments The strangers prey at night true story![]() ![]() The film’s lead family is as thin as wallpaper, giving talented actors like Hendricks and Henderson precious little to do besides play concerned mom and dad to their more resourceful moppets. From the get, director Johannes Roberts ( 47 Meters Down) abandons all pretense of heightening his horror film with dramatic subtexts and characters with more than one dimension – this is midnight movie fare through and through. Simply put, Prey at Night sacrifices its own identity to drench horror audiences in throwback familiarity.īut on the other hand, there’s something admirable about the back to basics approach affected by Prey at Night. Visual comparisons to Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are abundant and unapologetic: characters use cell phones, but the zooms, split diopters and grainy filmic feel of the cinematography crib heartily from retro horror aesthetics. The first Strangers affected the generic templates of ’70s slasher flicks, but Prey at Night leans on them like a crutch. Their solution? Saturate everything in winking ’70s-’80s style pastiche, complete with Stephen King-esque title cards, droning synth from composer Adrian Johnston, and audaciously on-the-nose use of ’80s pop ballads (“Kids in America” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” are two such needle-drops of which the filmmakers are particularly proud). With Prey at Night, one gets the impression that Bertino (returning to co-write the film with Ben Ketai) knew that the Strangers’ novelty was difficult to replicate the second time. Once they arrive, however, they find the fog-enshrouded locale completely devoid of people, save a group of attackers decked out in kitschy masks and burlap sacks, who proceed to chase, smash and slash the unsuspecting family unit with wild, grindhouse abandon. Hoping to take their minds off their troubles, the family sets out on a road trip to spend the weekend with Cindy’s aunt and uncle in their isolated, lakeside trailer park. In the film’s opening minutes, we learn everything we need to know about the family: Kinsey, with her ripped Ramones T-shirt and love of cigarettes, is a nebulously rebellious teen who’s about to be sent off to boarding school, much to her family’s consternation. This time around, the Strangers’ targets are a family of four – concerned parents Cindy ( Christina Hendricks) and Mike ( Martin Henderson), and their two kids, Kinsey ( Bailee Madison) and Luke ( Lewis Pullman). Like the first, Prey at Night claims to be “based on true events,” and its premise is as stripped-down as could be. Nearly a decade later, along comes the film’s sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, a straightforward slasher that retains the sense of competent horror craft, but ditches virtually everything else that made the first film interesting. With The Strangers, first-time director Bryan Bertino crafted a work that was at once deeply indebted to exploitation flicks of the 1970s and harrowingly current. Nonetheless, it proved not only a financial success, but an interesting artifact of post-9/11 horror: there’s no deliberate motive with The Strangers, no sad backstory, just the unpredictability of their choice of victims, and the horror of their their gruesome business. On the surface, 2008’s The Strangers was a relatively unremarkable slasher, the tale of an unsuspecting normal couple ravaged by mysterious, masked attackers in their home.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |