They delight in toying with their eventual victims, leaving marks of their presence, such as words scrawled on a window or cellphones smashed to bits, without actually being seen. But they’re nothing compared to the strangers themselves, who, even though we never see their faces, read as viciously conscienceless young adults. Kinsey is on her way to boarding school, a last-ditch measure by her financially strapped family to keep her out of trouble, and Luke resents her soaking up all of their parents’ attention (as well as their spare cash). Prey at Night’s kids, to borrow another classic-rock turn of phrase, are not all right. Where the first movie, which begins with Tyler’s character rejecting Speedman’s proposal of marriage, subtly positions the masked strangers as a warped reflection of a nuclear family-a man in a suit, a sexualized “pinup girl,” and a cherub-faced baby doll- Prey at Night scores its first killings with Kim Wilde’s “ Kids in America,” the equivalent of having Bugs Bunny lean into the frame with an arrow-shaped sign reading, “Get it?” No rib-nudging musical cue is spared, no ominous push-in goes unpushed. But director Johannes Roberts ( 47 Meters Down) doesn’t take long to indicate that he’s as determined to lean into well-worn horror-movie tropes as the original film was to invert them.
The strangers prey at night cast series#
The script, credited to Bertino and Ben Katai, resets the action in a deserted trailer park, essentially a series of tin cans surrounded by rural nothingness, and increases the besieged cast to a family of four: Mom (Christina Hendricks), Dad (Martin Henderson), and their two teenage kids, sullen Kinsey (Bailee Madison) and jockish Luke (Lewis Pullman). The Strangers’ pared-down style makes it particularly unsuited for the sequel treatment: Absent some Aliens-style conceptual twist, the best a 10-years-later follow-up could hope to do is ably copy the original, and it doesn’t take long for the new film to indicate it’s incapable of doing even that.
The strangers prey at night cast movie#
Apart from the soft pad of her feet on the carpet, the scene is nearly silent, with no orchestral sting underlining the looming threat, and when she turns around, he’s vanished, but the movie has succeeded in making us afraid of empty spaces and the human monsters that might at any moment step into them. Its most frightening moment is an unbroken shot lasting almost one minute in which Tyler’s character smokes a cigarette and gets herself a glass of water, unaware that a man in a crude sackcloth mask is watching her from the far side of the screen. Stranding Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman in a remote single-story house menaced by three masked figures, the movie unwinds with a slow, sick certainty, like a nightmare you can’t manage to wake up from. That’s not entirely a backhanded compliment: The Strangers is a minimalist horror masterpiece, a bottled-up experiment in terror that gains much of its strength from what it doesn’t do.
The best thing you can say about The Strangers: Prey at Night, the sequel to writer-director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home-invasion creeper, is that it reminds you the original exists.
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