Johannes Roberts’ The Strangers: Prey at Night is a travesty for anyone who watched and loved the outstanding 2008 film, The Strangers, directed by Bryan Bertino. I discuss Bertino’s Strangers here. It’s a brilliant horror film in the pure, enigmatic malevolence of the “strangers,” the simplicity of the plot, and the absolute terror induced by the way the strangers emerge silently into the frame, inside the home they shouldn’t be in. Strangers: Prey at Night is the opposite of all that. Which isn’t to say that, as a film in its own right, it doesn’t have some redeeming qualities.
Strangers: Prey at Night centers on a family heading to spend the night at a deserted trailer park, run by “Uncle Marv,” on their way to drop off wayward teen daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) at boarding school. Parents Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and Mike (Martin Henderson) feel they’ve done as much as they can to prevent their daughter going down her self-destructive path and are sending her away, which leads to a ferocious increase in anger on Kinsey’s part, directed not only against her parents but also against her “perfect” all-American baseball-playing older brother Luke (Lewis Pullman). After they settle into their trailer and turn in their respective phones so they can have a family card game (an endeavor that’s clearly doomed from the start), and after Kinsey storms off and Cindy and Mike send Luke to try and talk to her, a stranger knocks on the door asking “Is Tamara there?”—a call back to Bertino’s Strangers.
From then on, the plot is what you’d expect as the three strangers stalk the unlucky family. In the first film, one of the victims asks the strangers, “Why are you doing this to us?”—the question that hangs over both of these films. In The Strangers, one of the girls answers “Because you were home.” The same question gets asked in Prey at Night, and the answer this time is “Why not?” The randomness of the attacks in The Strangers’ films is indeed their hallmark—and Prey at Night stays true to this important and terrifying core.
Emma Bellomy as one of the strangers
Prey at Night is marred, though, by the absolute stupidity of the characters. And this is too bad because the actors do a good job (especially Christina Hendricks and Bailee Madison) and the characters are generally likable. Now, I know characters in horror movies always make bad choices, but this convention tipped over into distracting in this film—so much so that I took out my phone and started writing them down. The stupidity begins when Kinsey and Luke find a dead body and run back to tell their parents. Instead of calling the police or getting in their car and driving away, Mike sends Cindy and Kinsey back to their trailer while he tells Luke to show him the body (Why?? Doesn’t he believe him??). This is only the first of multiple times when the characters split up, appear suddenly unable to drive down a deserted road without losing control of the vehicle and ploughing into a trailer, fail to shoot one of the murderous marauders when anyone in their right mind would blast away and consider the morality of it all (much) later, and run straight down the middle of the road when someone in a truck is chasing them. Yeah, beyond dumb.
More seriously, though, the quiet dread of Strangers is completely stripped from this film, which is loud and obvious and includes exploding trucks, fire, flashing lights, and loud 80s music (OK, the 80s music wasn’t so bad . . . ) Especially at the end, when the fiery explosions began, Prey at Night felt like Bertino’s Strangers + Michael Bay. Not good.
There was a really cool homage to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) near the end, which also suggests the way in which Prey at Night veers from the creeping dread of the original Strangers toward the more obvious scares of the slasher genre.
As I said, Prey at Night is certainly not without its good points, which I think would have come more starkly into view if it didn’t pretend to be a sequel to The Strangers. The mise-en-scène of the trailer park—and one swimming pool scene—is great, and this review on RogerEbert.com accurately points out the technical effectiveness of the work of director Johannes Roberts and cinematographer Ryan Samul.
And, finally, I do want to praise Bailee Madison in particular. I loved her in the excellent 2-part “Really You” (2010) episode of R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour. (She was also in “Scarecrow” and “The Girl in the Painting.) It’s great to see her graduate to a more serious horror role, and she did a superb job of conveying the transformation of all-consuming teen anger at her family to terror and grief.
You can get Strangers: Prey at Night on Blu-ray and DVD:
You can catch Bailee Madison in “Really You” on DVD and can also stream individual episodes on Amazon.
And here’s the brilliant The Strangers, which you can stream on Amazon in either the unrated or theatrical versions:
I thought it was a real fun movie. Yes it wasn’t as scary as the original but it also wasn’t as grim and depressing as the original was either lending it to more rewatches.