Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Renny Harlin
Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez, Rachel Shenton, Ema Horvath, Gabe Basso
It wasn't until 1986's Platoon that mainstream Hollywood
began deconstructing America's role in the Vietnam war, daring to ask
"Were we the bad guys?" During the conflict Hollywood largely avoided
broaching the war, and when it was tackled it was through gung-ho
propaganda like John Wayne's infamous 1968 film
The Green Berets. The US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s didn't result
in any propaganda movies from Hollywood, which by that time was far too
liberal and self aware to engage in such rhetoric. For commentary on
America's place in the world post-911 you had to look to the subtext of
the horror movies that emerged from the US in the years following that
tragic event. A wave of horror movies reductively labelled "Torture Porn"
saw Americans brutalised, often by foreigners in far-off lands, or remote
corners of America that stood in for such places. The American
protagonists of such films were wide-eyed and innocent, and couldn't
understand why anyone would want to target them. At the tail-end of this
cycle came 2008's The Strangers, in which a couple with relationship issues are menaced in a remote
rental home by three masked home invaders. We never learn the motivation
for the aggressors' actions, and when asked why they chose their targets
they simply reply "Cause you're here."
That answer is repeated once again in
The Strangers: Chapter 1, director Renny Harlin's unexpected and arguably uncalled for
prequel, but it lands very differently in 2024. Unlike the immediate
post-911 years, even the most flag-waving American now has enough
self-awareness to refrain from thinking any aggressor would pick them as a
random target. Harlin and screenwriters Alan R Cohen and
Alan Freedland use their pointless prequel to subversively
deconstruct the 2008 original's place in post-911 horror cinema. The
suggestion is made here that the couple at its centre may not have been
randomly targeted, but might have brought it on themselves through their
treatment of others. If the 2008 original was like watching 911 on NBC,
this is like watching the World Trade Center collapse on Iranian state
TV.
As with the first film, Chapter 1 sees a young couple book
a stay at a secluded rental home. The difference here is that rather than
being at the end of their relationship, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and
Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) are head over heels in love, and their stay
is accidental rather than planned. The couple are on a road trip to mark
their fifth anniversary when their car breaks down in rural Oregon,
forcing them to spend the night at a rental home in the middle of some
dark woods. As with the original, the film contrives to leave the female
lead alone, at which point she is terrorised by the titular trio of masked
home invaders.
But as they say, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, and by
the point the antagonists show up here you might well be willing them on.
Ryan is one of the most unlikeable protagonists to lead a horror movie in
some time. He's a condescending, snobbish city slicker who clearly feels
he's above the rural locals, and he treats them with contempt in the
film's early scenes. Harlin subverts the old backwoods horror cliche of
the locals stopping to stare at the newcomers when Ryan and Maya stop off
at a local diner. Here it turns out the hicks are simply genuinely curious
to meet some newcomers, and they're all perfectly friendly, despite how
obnoxious Ryan is towards them. We never learn who is behind the masks,
but there are as many candidates as there would be if the US suffered
another major attack on its soil, and we can understand their grievances
if not condone their response. That said, I was fully onboard with the
potential of seeing Ryan get what's coming to him.
Harlin's film is a kindred spirit of Alexandre Aja's 2006
Hills Have Eyes remake in that it's another case of a
European genre filmmaker using an unnecessary reboot of a respected
American horror movie to criticise aspects of the US. Unlike Wes Craven's
original, Aja's remake gave us an explicit explanation for its
cannibalistic villains, the result of America's atomic testing on its own
land. Along with forcing American viewers to recontextualise what "Cause
you're here" means, Harlin's film opens with some text outlining just what
a violent society the US is; a couple of minutes in said text points out
how many violent crimes have been committed since you began watching the
movie.
Here's the thing though: a subtextually interesting horror movie is great
if you write about movies and spend a lot of your time overthinking them
and picking them apart, but it still has to work as a horror movie, and
The Strangers: Chapter 1 simply doesn't. Harlin's career has
been divided between smaller budgeted horror movies and mega-budget action
flicks, and I don't think anyone would argue his strength lies in the
former. He's completely out of depth here, unable to effectively forge the
required atmosphere of impending doom from this material. Everything is
rushed, and the patient build-up that defined the original is absent here
as Harlin relies on cheap, repetitive jump scares, constantly repeating
the same trick of a figure appearing behind an unsuspecting protagonist
when they move to the other side of the frame. In one scene that's almost
Godardian in its postmodernism, Harlin literally points out the mechanics
of this shot by having Ryan explain it to Maya. It's as though Harlin is
admitting that he thinks horror movies are easy to construct, that they
rely solely on a bag of tricks. But he's wrong; that's how bad horror
movies are made. Good horror filmmakers come up with their own tricks.
Take for example 2018's superior sequel
The Strangers: Prey at Night, which suffers from wooden writing but boasts some very clever direction
by Johannes Roberts. In that movie Roberts uses the camera in a way that
suggests its operator is as oblivious to what's about to happen at any
moment as the film's protagonists. This means the scares aren't
predictable, as the camera reacts to the action rather than telegraphs it
for the audience. There's nothing so clever in Harlin's film, which is
constructed in a manner that will have jaded horror fans knowing exactly
what's coming next at any given moment. Harlin's direction is so
uninspired that you can almost predict the exact sequence of shots he's
about to unspool in every scene.
As it wasn't screened for the press (never a good sign), I saw
Chapter 1 with a public audience, which rapidly diminished
from a sizeable initial crowd to a mere handful by the closing credits.
What this means for the continuation of this trilogy is unclear, but I
really can't see where it can go from here. Everything interesting about
Chapter 1 is subtextual, and will only be picked up on by
genre obsessives. Like Rob Zombie before him with his "What if Michael
Myers was a product of a white trash upbringing?" take on
Halloween, what Harlin fails to understand here is how the ambiguity of this
series is its main selling point. Recontextualising the meaning of "Cause
you're here" is all very clever in a socio-political context, but I prefer
my horror villains to be abstract representations of evil, motivated by
indefinable concepts rather than personal grudges. The scariest villains
are those you can't understand.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is in
cinemas from May 17th.
