Nothing We’re Strangers to: Reviewing “The Strangers”
By Matt Nathanson | June 13, 2008
Category: The Wasteland
Want to see a movie this weekend? Matt Nathanson reviews The Strangers, starring Liv Tyler, and offers some thoughts on the horror genre.
Insomuch that horror movies are centrally occupied by some interrogative – some WhoWhatWhereWhenHow? – The Strangers is essentially a movie that asks WHY. It is a question repeatedly posed by Liv Tyler, borrowing a few tricks from the book written by Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween: why…why….why is this happening?
Now Why-Horror, as we’ll call it, must contend with (and more often than not fails before) the challenge of providing a reason or motive that sufficiently defuses or explains the brutality of the action. We are talking about, of course, exactly what made the dénouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho so morbidly unsatisfying. After one of cinema’s greatest reveals –Norman Bates-is-Mother (Finkle is Einhorn! Einhorn’s a man!)—we are treated to a final scene where a professional must explain the events we just witnessed and provide pat psychological explanations for the behavior of the killer (where terms like schizoid and dissociation and the, not actually extant, multiple personality disorder are inevitably thrown around). What we get is a softball version of psychotic madness, a blunted horror, and so the film ultimately falls apart before its own explanatory inclinations.
How-Horror or(The Silence of the Lambs), Who-Horror (Scream), or What-Horror (anything Shymalanian) all have a somewhat less onerous responsibility. The citadel of Who-Horror, the Scream trilogy and its umpteen imitators, all pose a very straightforward question: who among these very good looking people is the killer? And a question like that at the center of a horror script is one that is easily answered. Why, it’s the Mother-Of-the-Killer-In-The-First-Film…and she’s working with the Guy-We-All-Thought-Was-Dead! Whether or not these reveals are satisfying is less important than the fact that they satisfyingly respond to the demands of the script. We need a killer; here’s a killer. In fact, here are two. Thanks for the eleven dollars, you can go home now.
But in a movie like The Strangers, a movie that asks WHY, revealing who’s under the mask doesn’t cathartically respond to the scopophilic needs of the audience. The most successful Why-Horror film of all time, Kubrick’s The Shining, provides a reason for murder so perseveringly juvenile and regressive that it scares the shit out of everyone who sees the film. All work and no play makes Jack a Dull boy. It’s the simplicity, the purity of motive (or lack thereof), that makes it so gratifyingly scary. Now, while The Strangers cannot and does not provide a raison with such aplomb, I’d argue that it sort of cleverly side-steps the issue entirely. “Why are you doing this to us?” Liv Tyler’s character asks again before she is finally fatally stabbed. A ghostly voice behind the mask at last pipes up: Because you were home.
So I’m not saying this is a particularly good movie or that it is something you should run out and see right now, but I do contest that this reason – they are dying simply because they are there – is sufficiently anti-intellectual , vehemently nonpsychological, and ultimately redemptive of a slasher flick that is otherwise mediocre in almost every way. We don’t have to be insulted with technical jargon or confused by meandering and sputtering rationalization. A motiveless crime is scarier than even the most twisted perversion. Because isn’t it exactly that - -the meaninglessness – that frightens us most?
I also think it’s worth discussing the killers’ use of the word home. They are killing the happy couple because they were home. But isn’t HOME supposed to be safe, the place we can run to and lock the doors, the place where our parents are sleeping—happily and undisturbed—upstairs? Scream (and perhaps Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street before it) may have begun to play with this fertile source of the uncanny, but I feel like there’s a lot of mining left to be done. In The Strangers, the character played by Liv Tyler is visiting the childhood vacation home of her would-be fiancée (she said no) on a cold and eerie night in the middle of the woods. This isn’t a deserted cabin and it isn’t an unfamiliar locale. It is a home – chock full o’ Polaroids and peeling seventies wallpaper – and in its very familiarity we are lured into a wonderfully false sense of security.
The most rudimentary horror film education almost certainly begins with Sigmund Freud’s paper The Uncanny , a treatise on what gives gooseb umps and, more pertinently here, exactly why they do. This linguistic analysis goes quite deeply into the very language behind fear but without a major dive into this seminal paper the basic premise is that what is truly uncanny is not the unfamiliar but the familiar – the vague sense that you somewhere deep down know the nature of the beast lurking in the shadows. Freud would go on to describe it as the “Return of the Repressed” that is, all the psychological shit that we manage to bury in our unconscious through the apparatus of society and law (and here’s where the Oedipal Complex and all those little gems of adolescence come into play). In The Strangers perhaps the most frightening detail is when Liv Tyler finds markings on a doorframe indicating a child’s growing height – something you’d find at any vacation home, even perhaps at yours or mine. The fact that these murderous events are playing out at home is what I found most disturbing of all. In fact, I wish the script did a better job of tying Scott Speedman’s character to the house itself. Hell, I wouldn’t have even minded some flashbacks or stories about the house itself and the memories he has there, because that would have at least provided a little more of the abject pleasure of corruption. Home is where the heart stops beating.
So while it addresses horror’s lust for motive in its postmodern refusal to give a satisfactory one, the script does little else we haven’t seen before. Red writing on walls, eerily skipping records, strangers in shadows , and one final (pointless) scare – we know the signs and we know where they’re pointing. So while I admit to jumping a bit at each little jolt of the film’s soundtrack, I didn’t go home and check the shower for lurking killers. After all, I’m no stranger to these kinds of scares. And what could get me at home?
3/5 units of awesomeness