Our series on the past, present and future of the horror genre continues. This week we look at the preponderance of terrible, terrible horror movies — by analyzing, in detail, a well-received horror movie from this year, why it is almost objectively terrible, and what basic rules of horror cinema it breaks.

[This month, we bring you a special four-part series examining the past, present and future of the horror genre, with a new article to be posted each week. Part 1 asked the question, “What Ever Happened To Rosemary’s Baby?” We decided there are two aspects to the decline of modern horror: the absence of great directorial talent (which we covered in Part 2) and the preponderance of terrible, terrible horror movies. Part III: Darkness Falls will discuss the latter aspect, specifically by analyzing, in detail, a well-received horror movie from this year, why it is almost objectively terrible, and what basic rules of horror cinema it breaks.]

I guess in the end what suckered me into seeing The Strangers in the theater was that several people I know, read, and/or respect called it the scariest thing they’d ever seen.  I had seen the trailer, which is pretty inarguably great, and that tipped me over the edge into watching this terrible, terrible movie in the theaters.

As a quick refresher from Part 1, Rule #3 reads: “Horror films after 2004 are so different from what preceded them that you can quickly label the former New Horror, and the latter Old Horror.”  A better description might be Pre-Saw and Post-Saw.  When contemplating which film to vivisect, eviscerate, and destroy to fully showcase the flaws of modern horror cinema, I had an array of potential targets.  But I knew, I knew I had to do The Strangers.  The reason is that it’s cocky enough to break every basic rule of horror it has the opportunity to, but as opposed to the creative risks taken by superior writer/directors, not a single one pays off.  Each one instead detracts from the movie.  Shit, by 2:49 in, it breaks four of the commandments, which might be a cinematic record.  So now, we’re gonna look at The Strangers scene by scene to highlight each of the rules it breaks, giving examples of how it does that, and why it doesn’t work.

Rule #4: Horror movie sequels are usually a terrible idea, but they’ve got nothing on remakes.

Why?  Why?  Why?  Why does every movie warrant a remake?  Remaking a bad movie is usually a recipe for disaster because the core components are so weak; remaking a classic rarely rewards the hubris you had in trying to accentuate something that was already great.  I can think of dozens of short stories, novellas, novels, and non-fiction works that should be movies and aren’t.  So why are we wasting limited resources to recreate movies we’ve already seen?

“Wait a second,” you’re saying at this point.  “What’s all this talk about remakes?  The Strangers isn’t a remake.”

The Strangers is definitely a remake.  In fact, it’s the second remake of a movie that’s less than 10 years old.  The Strangers is an entirely unoriginal, nearly exactly replicated version of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.  Bryan Bertino, who wrote and directed The Strangers, studied cinematography at the University of Texas at Austin.  I’m not sure if I’m getting into libelous territory here, and that’s not my intent, but I’m just saying that Funny Games was made in 1997 and had a strong cult following, meaning that as a student, or as someone passionate about movies, Mr. Bertino probably had seen it at some point before he made The Strangers.

For those that haven’t, Funny Games is an Austrian analysis of American violence in films.  More a conceptual art piece than a movie, the film’s premise involves two Leopold and Loeb-type youths who arbitrarily invade the home of a vacationing family, and then subject them to various psychological and physical tortures.  The basic thesis is to remind the audience of their desire for gore and violence and sensitize them to it, while simultaneously satirizing it and making them complicit in the violence, just by the act of watching it.  Whether or not you actually enjoy it, Funny Games is a wildly original and innovative film that attempts to push both the boundaries of the medium of film and the audience’s buttons.  Funny Games is also a very bitter film, and an instance of truly dark satire within the medium.  However, it was original, in the sense that it was criticizing a type of film, as opposed to a specific movie.

At least, that’s what it did until The Strangers was created.  What’s interesting is that Funny Games is one of the few works of art that now qualifies as precognitive satire.  By this, I mean it basically said, “Wouldn’t it be stupid if a movie with this concept actually existed?” in order to criticize the worst aspects of similar films, but then someone less intelligent went, “Radical!”, stole that idea, and then made that exact movie in deadly, dumbly earnest.  It’s the equivalent of an alternate universe where Mel Brooks created Spaceballs in 1972 and then five years later George Lucas was like, “You know, I should really play that whole thing straight and make a movie called Star Wars…”  Except in this other universe, Star Wars is not Star Wars, but is instead a piece of shit.

Despite not officially being a remake of Funny Games, it’s undeniable that everything about The Strangers is identical to a point far beyond coincidence.  But as opposed to improving upon its predecessor, it just stripped it of its artistry, intellectualism, and entire point, in favor of constantly cheaply startling the audience.  Directors of America: stop remaking movies, please stop remaking new movies, really stop remaking relatively new foreign movies, and definitely stop making remakes dumber than the original source material.

Rule #5:  Unless your movie is actually based on a true story, don’t say that it’s based on a true story.  If veracity matters that much, you probably should have made a documentary.

“What you are about to see is inspired by true events.  According to the FBI, there are an estimated 1.4 million violent crimes in America each year.  On the night of February 11, 2005, Kristen McKay and James Hoyt left a friend’s wedding reception and returned to the Hoyt family’s summer home.  The brutal events that took place there are still not entirely known.”

This voiceover and onscreen text begins the movie, and with that, we descend into complete, obvious bullshit.  First of all, would the McKay and Hoyt families really accept a major studio making a movie that’s basically their children getting tortured and murdered for an hour and a half, made a year after their murders took place?  On such a short schedule and with standard pre-production, that would pretty much mean Brian Bertino was there the night of the murders, hiding in the bushes and frantically typing everything he witnessed into Final Draft.

I mean, even if one could make a good movie about a recent murder, which seems like terrible policy, would any studio have the balls to finance it?  Axl Rose recorded a cover of Charles Manson’s “Look At Your Game, Girl” twenty-something years after the fact, slapped it on “The Spaghetti Incident” as a hidden track, and the public and critics still don’t hesitate to blast him on it (speaking of which, The Manson Family is the actual “supposed true story” that Bertino claims he used as his source for this movie, but there’s really no connection).  Let me repeat that: even at the height of his inconceivable and unjust popularity, they called the rather stubborn Mr. Rose out until even he conceded, and demanded it be removed from future pressings of the album.  No studio is going to expose its shareholders to that kind of risk.

So, I’m obviously being a little flip about this, but that’s the problem.  When I see a man with a burned-up face and a glove with knives on it chasing kids through their dreams to cut them down, I buy into it.  Not as reality, but within the interior logic of the movie.  But when you tell me something took place in actual reality, and it’s obviously fake, it doesn’t add to the mystique: the irrationality of it just pisses me off and pulls me out of my viewing experience.

Although false veracity in film has been around for a while, its recent overuse within the horror genre began with The Blair Witch Project, whose $100M+ gross every studio hopes their cheapie horror film will match or surpass.  I’m not a fan of the movie, and I entirely credit its success to the consummate skill and inventiveness that went into its hoax, because that showmanship and sensation is what drew attention and audiences.  It was the depth of the Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds”, or  Barnum-esque display of hucksterism that made it a must-see sensation, as opposed to the rather forgettable actual film.

Here we are, not even 10 years out from its release; I contend that if you visit a marketing course at a university, and you visit a film course, you are more likely to hear about The Blair Witch Project in the marketing class.  But that’s the problem with inventiveness: you can only reap the benefits from it as many times as you genuinely exercise it.   Claiming your obviously fake story is true and hoping for that to amplify the movie experience for your audience will not work; in fact, it will just make people remember the long-forgotten Blair Witch.

In fact, if you really did stumble upon a terrifying true story, why fictionalize it when you could make a documentary?  Whether in the theaters or on A&E and Discovery Channel, there are tons of well-made, chilling documentaries about actual murders and murderers, and they’re inevitably far more intriguing than those that take place in the realm of fiction.  Check out Serial Killers: Profiling The Criminal Mind, the Charles Ng and Leonard Lake episode of Biography,  or The Staircase for some haunting true stories.

In short, with so many legitimate true stories being documented and broadcast so accessibly, don’t take something obviously fake and claim it’s real.  We’ve seen enough to know the difference.

Rule #6: Tell your story in order.  Cutting out of order only reveals what’s going to happen and eliminates suspense.

Real quick, I want you to go back to the start of this article and look at what I did with the first two paragraphs.  It would have made more sense to put the first paragraph after the second.  Instead, I inverted their order, which started a narrative, and then I had to go to back before that to explain what happened, ruining the flow.  Then I did a similar thing right here.

You didn’t gain anything from that.  In fact, it was kind of fucking annoying.  You can do that if you know what you’re doing and have a point.  But if you screw it up, your entire artistic work can be ruined.

By and large, few movies are truly creative.  Most instead play to the audience’s expectations.  So, if your plot is so well-worn that the only way to make it interesting is to screw with the temporal structure of the narrative, might I suggest instead creating a different plot?  Using foreshadowing by showing the end of the movie is lazy and it tells a viewer who possesses any reasoning and applies basic logic exactly what is going to happen.

For example, immediately following the introductory voice-over, The Strangers has a segment that it repeats (shot-for-shot, which is always good to see) at the very end.  Cheesy strobe shots of a rural American town cut to two missionary kids surveying the aftermath of a home invasion, while a 9-1-1 call plays.  In the call, one of the kids describes the scene, while still-type images are shown: a car window shattered by an object that’s been thrown through it, an open door to the house, a ring holder with rose petals around it, and a blood spatter on the wall.  In case you can’t keep up with the imagery, the kid, named Jordan, helpfully describes to you exactly what you are seeing.

“Okay,” I thought when I saw this in the theater.  “That’s the whole movie.  That’s all I need to see.  They’ve literally shown me everything.  A guy proposed to his girlfriend and at some point they will be chased to their car, chased out of their car, chased back into their house, and then killed.  The next day, some kids will find them.  I wonder how they’re going to twist this to subvert my expectations, because otherwise, they have literally shown me the entire movie in the first 2 minutes.”

Of course, there really isn’t anything else to The Strangers.  It’s a lazy, lazy film and it did nothing to throw any surprise into the mix.  But if it hadn’t shown this introductory scene, it would have been a better movie, because I wouldn’t have been able to clearly identify every major plot point in the film.  In fact, there would have been a great deal more suspense, because we wouldn’t have known whether the couple that’s being terrorized gets away, which seems to me to be one of the key components of suspense.  If you know they’re going to get killed, you’re just slowly watching someone get killed.  No need to get emotionally involved.

If foreshadowing was really necessary for this film, and it probably wasn’t, why not open with the villains terrorizing and killing another couple, a la Scream?   The real answer is that, ever since Pulp Fiction came out, a lot of filmmakers that don’t have Quentin Tarantino’s talent feel the need to show the end of the movie at the beginning.  Well, unless your movie is the new Pulp Fiction, or you’re actually the slightest bit clever, please stick to telling your story in order, because otherwise you’re just pissing off your audience.

So, we haven’t even passed the opening credits, and if you count that this movie represents everything that sucks about New Horror (Rule #3), we’ve broken four of the Horror Movie 10 Commandments before we’ve even started the narrative flow.  The Strangers begins with a couple in a car on a drive home at night.  The woman has tears on her cheeks, the man is totally angry; they get home and there are rose petals strewn everywhere.  The couple bickers, the guy calls his friend for a ride, etc.  Also, remember we saw the little standard box that all wedding rings come in earlier, okay?  So it’s obvious he proposed and she said no.  Even if you haven’t seen the movie, based on my sentences, you could have figured that out.

Instead, the movie breaks Rule #6 AGAIN and jumps out of its own narrative again to go back to earlier in that night, to show him proposing.  Which slows things down, and is a waste of time.  In fact, the only interesting thing about it is 8 minutes in, where, for no discernible reason, Scott Speedman picks up Liv Tyler and carries her around.  Who does that?

When we cut back to the present, Scott Speedman’s character, James, throws the little wedding ring box on the table.  So again, if for some reason you hadn’t figured it all out and they hadn’t shown the flashback, if they’d just shown that, anyone would have put “the story thus far” together in a much more natural way.

They drink a little bit, and then, like it always seems to go down when a woman like Liv Tyler’s character, Kristen, rejects your marriage proposal, they begin to have sex.  The natural, zesty kind of sex that everybody has in PG-13 movies, meaning that both parties breathe heavily and remain fully clothed.  They are interrupted mid-coitus  by some banging on the door.  They open it to find…[Reminder of Rule #2:  Pick an archetype and run with it]…an attractive girl who seems drunk and has the wrong house.  If seemingly-drunk girls are the new face of horror, then surely a videotape of Myrtle Beach at Spring Break will be our generation’s Dead Alive.

I can’t restate how irrational this is strongly enough: attractive people signify all kinds of things, but the only kind of terror they can instill is, possibly, social anxiety.  Additionally, the only way that someone evil who is beautiful will work in a horror movie is if they also have a well-mannered façade, which they gradually break down to reveal that they are psychotic (see The Glass House 2: The Good Mother for an underrated example of this).  But, at its core, having an attractive girl, who is one of the three real-life professional models that constitute the Terrible Trio that serve as the antagonists, chase me is about the least scary thing I can imagine.

The girl walks off and they come back in and James lights a fire.  I mention this only because, at 17:00 in, after we’ve seen it happen, Kristen says, “Thanks for lighting me a fire.”  What an odd phrase to say.  Especially “a fire” versus “the fire”.  And having “me” in there was weird, too.  If I had written this movie, Liv Tyler would have said, “Thanks for lighting the fire.”  That’s because that’s how people actually talk.

James leaves to pick up Kristen some cigs, and his parent’s old cabin has only a new Lisa Simpson record for her to bump while he’s gone (it’s actually Joanna Newsom, but same difference).  She sits around moping for a long two to three minutes, and then we hit another one of those odd directorial milestones that make this film such a train wreck.  The diegetic music within the film sings, “Should we go outside?” at the same moment someone knocks on the door, which is such an absurd coincidence that the music should probably be extra-diegetic.  I mean, it is literally so dumb, that if that happened to you in real life, you would be intrigued not by the knock on the door, but rather by the awesome old record player  from the Twilight Zone that can independently predict the present.

Making the wrong choice, she answers the door and it’s Seemingly Drunk Girl from before, doing the same thing as before.  This movie has a tendency to frequently lap itself and show you something you’ve already seen, with little discernible value or nuance.  Kristen notifies her that the person she’s asking for does not live at that house and then she walks away.  At this point, Kristen could have accidentally put her left foot in a bucket, slipped on a cartoon banana peel, and then made a “boink” noise when she fell on the ground.  Instead, Bertino went for the marginally less clichéd alternative of having the flue closed so the fire makes smoke, and then the smoke alarm goes off, and then Kristen has to disable the smoke alarm.

During this time, there’s more knocking, Kristen gets scared, and she calls James and tells him to come home.  Now, remember this for later: if your girlfriend was scared, and you had already witnessed a bizarre incident at 4 AM earlier in the night, wouldn’t you treat what she was saying seriously when you returned?

Anyway, at 24:38, the highlight of the movie happens, which is, a dude with a bag on his head slides into focus inside the house as Kristen is going about her domestic duties.  I’m watching The Strangers on a bootleg DVD from NY, and I have to say, this is probably the only impressive thing about the movie.  The audience goes apeshit!  I hate this movie, but I love having an audience tape of this reaction.  For 30 seconds after the fact, they’re clapping, whispering, screaming, swearing…it’s probably the one redeeming thing about whatever my brother spent on this fucking DVD.

So anyways, with that, your startle hymen has been broken.  Now The Strangers settles into its sole purpose: to constantly startle you for the next hour.   Leading us to the next commandment:

Rule #7:  Arbitrary is not scary.

The random is not scary.  It can be funny.  But it’s rarely scary.  I watch this commandment constantly violated in a hoary old trope I’ve dubbed the Serial Killer Doll Cliché.  Whenever a movie has a serial killer and they show a) his childhood home, b) his attic, or c) his lair, it will have old, broken dolls in it.  Yes, it’s cool imagery, but if serial killers were actually happy with dolls, they would just play with dolls, instead of murdering people, which is what they actually do.  Stop portraying serial killers as antique doll collectors.

Anyway, one of the hallmarks of New Horror is the arbitrary.  Take, for example, the scene in Saw in which there’s the clown-type guy who abducts people.  Why is he wearing a clown mask?  That would draw more attention than a shirt that says, “I’m a Serial Killer” on it.  The clown mask aspect is never explained.  It doesn’t need to be.  It’s supposedly scary.

Unfortunately, however, the arbitrary is not scary.  At first, we’re intrigued, trying to figure out what the mystery is.  But the moment we come to the realization that there is no mystery, we lose all interest in it.  It’s just dumb.  The Strangers is full of this; whether it’s the masks that the models wear as they chase their victims, or the tomandandy soundtrack, which appears to have been composed by letting some cats run around an old junkyard, or even the dashed together plot and central motivation of the antagonists, which is utterly meaningless.  As soon as we see that there’s nothing behind any of it other than that it vaguely seems cool, it loses all potential to scare.

Returning to the movie, Kristen starts getting pursued and toyed with by the antagonists, who she is now aware have broken into the house, and we have a previously mentioned violation of Rule #7 at 29:00, when she opens the front door and sees a girl in a Betty Boop-type mask.  Meanwhile the antagonists are making random noises and breaking random objects while Kristen hides upstairs and tries to find a weapon.  Finally, some footsteps start coming up the stairs, and it’s…James.

James comes in and finds Kristen holding a knife, cowering in the corner, sobbing and on the verge of hysteria.  But the thing about Our Jimmy is, when he hits a crisis, he plays it cool.  So despite the fact that he’s been gone for a half hour, when Kristen tells him the truth about how she’s been pursued and chased by people in masks, and he has every reason to believe this is the case, he confidently assures her that nobody’s out there.  In fact, as she tries to warn him about leaving the barricaded room, he angrily yells at her to “Stop.”  Then, after the most cursory examination possible, he informs her that she is ignorant, he was right, and nobody’s out there.  I can’t tell you how much of a douchebag James acts like, and how improbable something like this actually occurring in a story even tenuously related to true events is.  Even if a stranger I suspected was insane started trying to get me worked up over something like this, I’d at least extend the common courtesy of treating it a little seriously.

They head downstairs to the basement and see that the girl is still out there, right about where James said she wouldn’t be.  By 33:50, James has finally gotten outside to find that “nobody and nothing to worry about” have totally vandalized his car.  The logical response, especially since his girlfriend’s earlier claims have now all been validated: jumping in the car without checking the backseat to make sure there are no murderers lurking in it.  So, of course, within 10 minutes of having started, the Startle Factor is way overdone, and at 34:45 in, a spooooooky hand reaches from the backseat to lightly tap James on the neck.

I just want to note that, when I saw this in the theater, at this exact point my friend Josh turned to me and said, “They should have called this movie, ‘Behind You’.”  That’s probably the best single-sentence criticism of this movie you’re going to find.

James gets out of the car, stands around, and then Seemingly Drunk Girl is standing in the road, unarmed.  Instead of chasing her down and getting some information out of her, James spends a long time looking at Kristen and ordering her inside.  By the time she goes in, Seemingly Drunk Girl has vanished.  James goes back inside, grabs Kristen, and they regroup to get in the car to try to leave.  Which seems more logical than ordering her back inside.  They try to leave but find that the Betty Boop Killer is blocking their way and getting ready to ram their car.  They stop and that’s when they see Paper Bag Head directly in front of their car.  Why they don’t run him over is beyond me, but they just act scared until Betty Boop slams their car with her truck.  Why they don’t chase her down, pull her out of the car, and kill her is beyond me, but they again act scared and run inside.

James finds a gun, and they experience more arbitrary startles (i.e. the windows having “Hello” painted on them) until the killers start trying to break the door down with an ax.  In my mind, a gun beats an ax, and they should just let them come in and start shooting them down, but alas, that is not the approach they take.

Skipping ahead, James’ friend Mike shows up, and despite seeing bullet holes, carnage, and wrecked cars and receiving no response to his calls and yells, he doesn’t call the police, but instead goes inside.  Mike’s about to be killed by Paper Bag Head who is ever so behind him, but then James accidentally pops with his shotgun Mike instead.  Despite the fact that they’re in a War Zone, this leads to a bunch of guilt, whining, remorse, etc. and prompts James to try to get to another cliché: the old radio in the shed.  Of course, he has a gun, so it will be much safer if they split up and Kristen stays unarmed and defenseless back at the cabin.  51:40 in, James has Betty Boop in his gun sights outside, but doesn’t fire, which leads to him getting captured by Paper Bag Head.  As you listen to how these sentences read, don’t you see why it’s better not to have arbitrary masks, but instead create something actually scary?

Kristen eventually goes through some more startles and makes her way to the shed, where she gets on the old radio.  Betty Boop destroys the radio with an ax, startles ensue, the old car is set on fire, and Kristen reenacts that old chestnut: The Scene Where The Heroine Hides In A Closet And The Killer Is Right There.  This being The Strangers, one of the most repetitive and boring horror movies ever, that scene lasts for over TWO minutes, and culminates with a startle as Seemingly Drunk Girl starts shaking the closet.  Kristen finally comes out, James oddly appears in the middle of the room from out of nowhere, and then the professional models let Kristen run away again.  Finally, she comes out of her room and Paper Bag Head drags her to the living room, where they tie her and James up and wait for daylight.

The end begins when James and Kristen wake up, just in time to rebreak Rule #4 (“Why are you doing this to us?”  “Because you were home.”).  The movie then rebreaks Rule #2 as the killers pull their masks off and you realize there’s no central archetype unifying the movie’s themes, but just some bored models.  Finally, the movie begins to break some new ground:

Rule #8:  Violence and gore are encouraged, to an extent.  There is a point of diminishing returns, at which showing torture reduces not only the suspense, but the quality of the film.   Stay on the other side of that line.

With Saw, a new horror subgenre dubbed “torture porn” was created.  It basically exists to ask the age-old question: how much pain can people be shown in before my movie gets an NC-17 rating?  The answer is, apparently, a lot.  Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen people’s heads smashed in bear traps, eyes melted out of their sockets and then clipped off with scissors, a guy get killed and then have a giant fish tail attached to him, and a woman fall into a bed of hypodermic needles.  In short, we’ve seen shit so dark and crazy that even the Spartans would tell the directors that maybe life’s not so bad and they can take it down a notch.

And yet, it was never entertaining, impressive, or anything other than just plain shocking.  And it wasn’t even shocking with a capital-P Purpose behind it; it was just the sort of mild shock of, “Oh, you can show that in a movie?”  Followed by the second question, “Why would you?”

In short, as the rule states, excessive violence and gore are fun (especially gore), but when you cross over to showing drawn-out and excruciating torture, you better handle it with care if you still want your movie to be watchable.  In the hands of a director like Greg McLean in Wolf Creek, I thought it worked, but more often than not, people tell me that it didn’t for them.  So of course, it doesn’t work in the culmination of the The Strangers, which is basically a tied-up James getting stabbed a whole bunch while the camera close-ups on his face as he makes “Oof!  I’m getting stabbed!” noises.

The film laps itself again as the killers drive off and see the missionaries from the first slow-shutter scene in the movie.  Seemingly Drunk Girl babbles with the missionaries for a second, and then they give her a pamphlet.  She hops in the car and Betty Boop tells her “it will be easier next time”, opening up the door for them to break Rule #4 again, if this initial installment has high enough box office returns.  We loop again onto the exact same scene from the beginning, shot-for-shot, where the missionaries stumble through and see the carnage from the previous evening.  They go up to Liv Tyler’s corpse…and…she is suddenly alive and screams, for one final, blessed startle.

And with that, the nightmare is over.

Read other articles in this series:
Part I: Whatever Happened to Rosemary’s Baby?
Part II: The Lost Boys
Part III: Darkness Falls
Part IV: The Shining