The Strangers: Prey at Night (15)
It’s been 10 years since Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman were terrorised by a trio of masked psychopaths in surprise box-office hit The Strangers.
Talk of a sequel began almost as soon as the credits rolled on the original but after a decade is there really any great desire to revisit this stalk-and-slash horror?
We’ll get to that later, but Prey at Night is a follow-up almost totally devoid of any production connection to its predecessor; only writer, and first film director, Bryan Bertino and murderous characters Dollface, Man in the Mask and Pin-Up Girl – all played by different actors – return.
This time the masked trio target couple Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and Mike (Martin Henderson) and their children Kinsey (Bailee Madison) and Luke (Lewis Pullman) in a secluded mobile home park.
New helmer Johannes Roberts has a background in ropy, little-seen horror (Storage 24, The Other Side of the Door), so the only way was up for the Cambridge-born director.
In fairness, though, he does a pretty good job with Prey at Night by embracing what worked well in the original – slow-burn tension, relentless killers with no apparent motivation – while upping the violence.
Ben Ketai (The Forest) and Bertino are both given screenplay credits and they do their best to make us care about the targeted family’s fate.