Nowhere to hide from horror cliches
“The Strangers: Prey at Night” is a nihilistic slasher movie, and a subtle criticism of society’s destabilizing family unit. But mostly it serves as a comprehensive manual of bad places to hide from a masked killer.
Forget escaping in the working automobile outside. Why not retreat to that drainage pipe with only one entrance, behind that see-through lattice fence, or in the trailer park bathroom with no windows? A guy is chasing you with an ax? Just jump in the swimming pool! No way he’ll follow you in there …
The first “Strangers” was an effective, if thoroughly depressing, exercise in horror. The couple being stalked by a freaky trio of murderers seemed completely undeserving, making their victimization seem random, and thus more relatable to the audience. In the sequel, the family of four is so inept and unsympathetic that it’s hard not to root for the killers. Somebody stop this quartet of numbskulls before they pass their lack of selfpreservation down to another generation!
“Prey at Night” begins with two parents (Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson), driving their wayward teen daughter (Bailee Madison) to a boarding school, as an older teen son (Lewis Pullman) tags along. All seem to be, to varying degrees, jerks with severe communication problems. They stop at an all-but-abandoned backwoods resort where the killers have already arrived.
By the time the hooded man and two doll-faced women close in on the foursome, the victims are so insufferable that a trimming of the herd seems like a welcome relief. The action ramps up toward the end, followed by some supernatural aspects that subvert the foundation of realism that made the first film so frightening and memorable.
New director Johannes Roberts has a nice sense of timing, using shadows and sound to heighten what are mostly straightforward jump scares. The killers, with their smileyfaced masks, unnerving lack of a conscience, and unexplained preference for 1980s music when they start stabbing people, are sufficiently creepy.
But this “Strangers” sequel seems outright lazy when compared to superior horror movies such as “Get Out” or “It Follows,” where every decision by the victims makes sense by the screenwriter-established rules. The actions of the family in “Prey at Night” rarely acknowledge logic, and often seem to be deliberately mocking common sense. The audience at the critics screening I attended was literally shouting instructions at the screen (“Shoot her! Just shoot her!”), before giving up in frustration.
The constant darkness also becomes a liability. The woodsy setting is unrelentingly dim, to the point where the sense of geography is often lost. If there’s a third movie in the series, we vote for “The Strangers: Prey in Broad Daylight.”
After mostly bad news for our dumb heroes, there are a few crowd-pleasing moments of violent action in the third act. But even those feel like a cheat, contradicting the tone of the last movie and the first half of this one. For a movie that seems to aspire to some deeper thought, the writers have underestimated the intelligence of their audience.