‘The Strangers: Prey at Night’ Would Be a Good Movie If It Weren’t a Sequel

The events of the plot of The Strangers: Prey at Night aren’t too terribly different from a lot of horror movies. A family of four — mom (Christina Hendricks), Dad (Martin Henderson), brother Luke (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill) and rebellious, Ramones-t-shirt-wearing daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) — stops to spend the night at an aunt and uncle’s trailer home at isolated Gatlin Lake en route to taking Kinsey to boarding school. While there, in the spooky, deserted vacation community, they’re menaced by masked intruders who mean to kill them. The attacks are vicious and bloody and not everybody survives. The kills are creative and cruel. The audience is well and truly scared. You’re really rooting for the good guys by the end. The movie pushes all the buttons that an effective (if not actually great) horror movie should do. It does what Angela Bassett’s character in Mission: Impossible – Fallout would call The Job.

This would all be fine and good and fully recommendable if this were anything but a cash-grab sequel to The Strangers, maybe the best horror movie of this century and among the best horror movies ever made. Since all the actors we recognized from the first movie got killed by the end (uh, spoiler, but you’ve had a decade to get right), the connective tissue is essentially the three masks that the killers wear: Pudgy Baby Face, Ceramic Doll Face, and Burlap Sack. They are the iconic imagery of the Strangers “series” (such as it is). Which should, ideally, but it in the same territory as other franchises that essentially used masks as their through-line: Halloween, Friday the 13th, even Scream. The difference, of course, is that Halloween has Michael Meyers, and Friday the 13th has Jason, two of cinema’s most iconic monsters. Ghostface, with his (her?) changing identities, is less of an iconic killer, but that’s why the Scream movies actually built themselves around the characters of Sydney Prescott, Gale Weathers, and Deputy Dewey.

The Strangers‘ villains by design don’t have personalities or motivations. Why did they go on their original killing spree at Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler’s vacation house? “Because you were home.” It’s a chillingly iconic line — one that gets a perfunctory follow-up in the sequel — because it defines the entire film as both random and endlessly repeatable. It could happen to anybody. Which is ironically why it should NEVER have been repeated on film. Because the implicit threat at the end of The Strangers (this could happen to you) gets undercut by seeing it happen to another family. Especially when it happens to another family in a movie that looks very much like a movie: polished, deliberately lit, full of eerie locations that make for visually dazzling kills. The Strangers looked grainy and a little rough, like we had happened on these people on the worst day of their lives. It gave the events of that night the air of spontaneity. Nothing that happened felt prepared for. Prey at Night definitely had time to spruce up for company.

In many ways, The Strangers: Prey at Night makes great use of this spruced-up quality. Rather than repeat the beats of the original — though they repeat many, from the iconic “Is Tamara home?” opening salvo to jump-scares with masked faces at the window, to a window having the word “hello” scrawled all over it — Prey at Night takes the action well outside the house. Great use is made of the pool location in particular. And then there’s the music …

Okay, this deserves its own paragraph. The music in The Strangers was limited to the couple instances where Liv Tyler put on a record to calm her nerves, and later when the Strangers put on a record to jangle those nerves. The song choices were decidedly hipster in nature, appropriate to the characters and also suuuuuuper unsettling when they’re played on a warped, repeating record. Just listen to Joanna Newsom’s “Sprout and the Bean” some time and tell me you’re not expecting something masked to jump out and murder you. Prey at Night goes for a wholly different vibe, with an aggressively ’80s playlist that includes Kim Wilde (“Kids in America” kicks off the movie with dark irony; “Cambodia” shows up later), Bonnie Tyler, and, in the film’s most climactic moment, Air Supply. I always knew the crescendo of “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” would make for a dynamite soundtrack to horror scene, and I was right. The focus on the ’80s seems so random that — combined with Kinsey’s Ramones t-shirt — I started to wonder if this was going to turn out to be a prequel instead (then I remembered there were cell phones in an earlier scene). So what does it mean that these killers like pumping ’80s tunes before they get to murdering? …Kind of nothing?

Again, this is the problem with Prey at Night as a Strangers sequel. None of the choices feel very Strangers-y. Not when the masked killers seemingly resurrect at will. Not when the film looks this slick. As a regular old horror flick, it would be a decent scare with an odd penchant for power ballads. As a film attempting to take the torch from one of the most uniquely unsettling horror movies in recent memory? Tamara definitely isn’t home.

Where to stream The Strangers: Prey at Night